The more that long-hidden evidence is revealed, the more horror is found. "A Film Unfinished," which opens today, is true to its title. It never was finished. But what there is shows scenes of unspeakable cruelty that took place in Warsaw, in May, 1942. It's a German film, shot in the Ghetto, whose purpose was to show then world what a nice life the Jews were living under German occupation.
To that end, German cameraman were sent to Warsaw and ordered to stage scenes–scenes of parties, parades, concerts, theater pieces, even a lavish funeral.
Ghetto residents, starving and fearing their ultimate end, were ordered to bring out their party clothes, ill-fitting as they were, and to participate in these events, often stepping over dead bodies in the street as they did.
At the end of the war, three reels of film, labeled "Ghetto," was stored in a cave with thousands more reels of film. It was found and used as a research tool, and then a fourth reel was found and it began to make more sense. Men with cameras shoot a lot of film, and there's a lot of non-staged footage of people struggling to live, to eat, even to die. Dignity was stripped of these people, and watching scrawny, naked, dehumanized bodies pushed into a crude slide to end in a mass grave is unnerving.
Rudiger Vogler, one of the cameraman, is interviewed by Alexander Beyer, and tells stories of the experience, admitting that it affected him for years afterward. Writer-director Yael Hersenski has done remarkable work in putting this raw footage together, sometimes showing all the takes that the cameramen shot. The film never was finished, though the pictures, and Vogler's stories, demonstrate this piece of propaganda in the making, given the lie by all the people in the ghetto who were dying every day.
Not fun at all, but should be seen–and remembered.
A Film Unfinished opens today at the Plaza Frontenac
— Joe