Nazi Irony: A Film Unfinished (2010), PBS, May 3, 2011
“Oh those fun-loving Nazis! Just give ‘em a camera and they’re happy! And look how well the Jews in Warsaw lived! How could anyone bad-mouth Hitler?”
Is that how the Nazi propagandists thought people would react when they produced a film called The Ghetto about Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto? This relic of insanity is the subject of an independent documentary by Yael Hersonski, A Film Unfinished. Crewmember memories of filming are interwoven with footage the Nazis assembled and the reactions and memories of Warsaw survivors who were children when the film was made. We are never quite sure of the purpose of The Ghetto because there is no narration presenting the Nazi line.
In its edited-yet-unfinished form, The Ghetto contrasts the lives of “affluent” Jews with Jews starving to death—people who are little more than skeletons, corpses of the starved on public sidewalks. It shows women in cocktail dresses and men in suits “enjoying” a party, and families having “fun” at the beach. Ah, what a good life it must have been in the ever-shrinking ghetto where a child could be shot for smuggling food and people—no more than stick figures—waited for death.
Hersonski includes a long-lost reel from The Ghetto, outtakes , and it is anything but a gag reel. Among the horrific images of suffering are scenes of the “affluent” being staged, sometimes reshooting a scene several times (such as well-dressed individuals walking down the street, avoiding the dead and near-dead, proving that it was the Jews who were persecuting Jews with their indifference—those with money wouldn’t spare a crumb for the starving).
Filled with disturbing images, A Film Unfinished is deeply affecting—a sad sampling of life in the Warsaw Ghetto—and an exposé of Nazi audacity. See it on Independent Lens (PBS), Tuesday, May 3, 2011, at 10:00 p.m. (check local listings). It is also available on DVD.
Follow Technorati