A film unfinished

This is the story of a film that was never finished. A rough cut, stored in
Germany’s Federal Film Archive, is all that remains. It is the longest film that
the Nazi’s propaganda team ever filmed in the Warsaw ghetto. Filmed
shortly before the deportation of the ghetto’s inhabitants, it contains elaborately
dramatised scenes describing the allegedly luxurious lives of Jews in
the ghetto which are juxtaposed with shots of hunger, death and the suf-
fering of other inhabitants. It is not known why this propaganda film was
made, or who was meant to see it. Some of this film material turned up as
′archive footage′ after the war in documentaries about the Warsaw ghetto.

For her film, Yael Hersonski has conducted interviews with people who
remember the filming of this propaganda film; she has also sought, and
found, diaries written by ghetto inhabitants, and even discovered the
records of the film cameraman’s interrogation. All these testimonials provide
evidence of the cynicism with which the film was made. But they also
call into question the uncritical use of such images.

Yael Hersonski: "More
than other forms of witnessing such as oral testimony and written documents,
images, by nature, remain open to interpretation and are capable of
conveying much more than people are able or willing to see. Archival
footage of the Holocaust marks the beginning of the systematic cinematic
documentation of war crimes. After the world had visually witnessed something
of the catastrophe, the images were no longer what they had been
before. Something had changed, a certain human shield was removed, and
slowly, the veil of numbness that had obscured the inconceivable and concealed
its true horror was lifted."

Source: 60. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)