A Film Unfinished, an admirable film by Yael Hersonski

A Film Unfinished, documentary film by Yael Hersonski. We saw the film Saturday night, October 9, at the West Newton Cinema.

I admired Hersonski's work in this film. She managed to identify a historical series of events -- how German soldiers staged and filmed scenes in the Warsaw Ghetto of starving and dying Jews being ignored by more prosperous-looking Jews as a way of further vilifying Jews -- and we believe in her reconstruction of those events, using the Germans' own film footage, and the testimony of Willy Wist, the only cameraman ever connected with the project.

I think the agonizing scenes of the Ghetto are worth preserving and seeing. Starving, dying people, Jews forced to drag and bury the dead, and the very subject of the film itself, the making of Nazi propaganda and the manipulation of victims in their own humiliation, are not easy to see. It's fortunate that Hersonski is a good filmmaker and artist.

One of the survivors interviewed in the film remarked about how crowded Ghetto life was, and I was interested in this. Strangers, whole families, were forced closer and closer together, into smaller and smaller apartments. There were numerous similar revealing details.

A few points left me a little confused. I was not always sure whose narrative I was watching, and would have liked a little more help from the filmmaker. In a sequence of scenes, were we seeing the work of a Nazi editor, or of Hersonski? This is an important point, given that the film centers around the Nazis' manipulation and forced staging of scenes. Sometimes the film narrator helped us with the context, but I would have liked more.

There were a number of references by the film narrator to the German effort as amounting to a theatrical-cinematic level project, not unlike a Hollywood project. That would involve large film crews, sound engineers, lighting specialists, squads of laborers. But we don't really see evidence of that. Willy Wist, the cameraman, refers to himself and three "reporters" assigned to the project. They were definitely creating propaganda, but a handful of reporter-cameramen doesn't make this a large-scale theatrical project as claimed by the documentary. Was something left out, or did I not catch something?

And there was Wist himself. Was that him interviewed on camera, in a Nurembergs style setting? Was that an actor? I don't recall a clarification in the film on that point, or if there was, I missed it.

But none of this detracts from Hersonski's achievement in constructing a subtle film narrative that we believe. Her film deserves to be seen by all types of audiences, particularly in a time when we are saturated with imagery and video, much of it staged, edited, and manipulated, yet presented to us as a supposedly truthful record of events.