History is written by the victors, the saying goes. But in the case of Nazi Germany, that has not been the case. History was not merely written by the Nazis, it was filmed. And long after the war, researchers continued to rely upon Nazi footage as historical record.
Yael Heronski’s A Film Unfinished tells the story of 60 minutes of raw film discovered in East Germany in 1954. The film was labeled simply “Ghetto” and shows scenes from life in the Warsaw Ghetto: A public bath house, a dinner party, a restaurant, a street performer.
For years, historians took the mysterious footage as an accurate representation of ghetto life. Then, in 1998 more footage was revealed. The new footage shows repeated outtakes, scenes staged, and even cameramen appearing in one another’s frames. What are the implications of the second discovery? And what to make of the initial footage itself?
A Film Unfinished is built upon the entirety of the silent Nazi propaganda footage. The spaces and silences are filled with readings of diary entries by ghetto residents, a reenactment of an interview with Willy Wist, the German cameraman who was the only person researchers could tie to the filming, and testimonies from Warsaw Ghetto survivors who remember the filming.
Often, Heronski allows the footage to speak for itself. At intervals throughout the film, the footage — some of it warped — is shown in silence, or accompanied only by soft music, evoking melancholy surrealism — a rarity in most Holocaust films and documentaries.
Far more surreal is the content of the footage itself. It is typically heartbreaking, filled with starved, typhus-ridden people nearing their end, corpses strewn on the sidewalks, and hopelessly overcrowded streetscapes. But it is also absurd. At one point, Wist complains he was unable to film as well as he would have liked because his superiors were insensitive to the lighting conditions needed by cameramen. And in many instances, the Jews of the Ghetto are more like props than actors in staged scenes.
Early in the film we see footage of Adam Czerniaków, head of the Warsaw Ghetto’s Jewish Council taking a meeting with bearded rabbis and other religious leaders. Above the footage we hear a reading from Czerniaków’s diary, explaining that the Nazis are filming and that the whole thing is staged: A lit candelabra is even placed on his desk for effect.
It becomes clear early on that a goal of the original footage was to present some Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto as wealthy, comfortable, even luxurious, and others as exactly what they were: Starved, living in squalor. Where this kind of film might fit into the greater machinations of the Nazi propaganda effort is left unanswered.
But propaganda or not, the filming itself was an act of cruelty. One scene shows a Jewish family in a sprawling, well-furnished apartment, chatting and eating. At that point, one of the survivors, viewing the footage alone in a darkened theater, notices flowers on a table.
“When did one ever see a flower?” she said. “We would have eaten the flower.”
In another Nazi set piece, a theater is filled with Jewish audience and performers who are forced to entertain despite the fact they are likely aware that the film will be used to further the destruction of their own people. The audience was left without food or facilities for eight hours, remembers a survivor, and was forced to laugh when the comedians came on.
“Woe to anyone who didn’t laugh properly,” the survivor said. “His fate was doomed. They laughed as never before.”
All this for a silent film.
What makes A Film Unfinished unique in its genre is the understated way it blends narrative — progressing through the four reels of original film and then the later-discovered outtakes — and serious meditation. The tragedy of Europe’s Jews is not the subject of, but rather the context for, a film that asks questions of how we document and fail to document our history, and the role that plays in collective memory.
The differences are subtle. The Nazi footage at the heart of the film shows staged singing and dancing but it also shows children skipping past crumpled bodies on the street, massive piles of feces and garbage, corpses being deposited by a slide into a mass grave. For 40 years, historians relied on the footage as authentic, unaware that it was often staged. What, then, are the implications of that newfound knowledge?
A scene in which torrents of panicked Jews are herded down a main ghetto thoroughfare by SS guards appears real — a cruel exercise or drill perhaps. The looks on the faces of the Jews reveal fear. Guns are fired in the air. Panic sweeps the ghetto.
And to a point, it is real. The Nazis did fire their guns in the air. They did scream and yell and induce chaos. The Jews on the screen — even aware that they are being filmed — are oblivious to the meaning of that which is happening around them and are legitimately concerned for their lives.
Where does filmmaking end and history begin?