No other time or place in history has been as well documented as America in the early 21st Century, at least in terms of number of keystrokes. But how much of it will survive the endless cycles of format obsolescence? Even if the Library of Congress still stands a thousand years from now, could future generations decipher our endless Tweeting? Would they want to – would we want them to? Whatever record do leave behind will paint a distorted, incomplete picture – and that’s with us living in a free society in the age of WordPress. Now shift the setting of this hypothetical exercise to a place where the government actively suppressed a group of people and attempted to rewrite their public narrative. Even once this regime was overthrown, its version of history became unwittingly perpetuated for decades.
These circumstances form the background of Yael Hersonski’s documentary, A Film Unfinished. In the early ’40s, the Nazi propaganda department sent a group of filmmakers to shoot footage in Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto. The intended film was never completed, for reasons still unknown. After the war, the Soviets discovered over an hour of the raw film (labeled “Ghetto”) in a Nazi vault. Historians and filmmakers seized on the footage, and clips turned up in Holocaust museums and documentaries as visual evidence of life in the Warsaw ghetto.
One problem: not everything in “Ghetto” was what it seemed. In 1998, two more reels of outtakes turned up that cast aspersion on the film’s validity. Some of the original footage captured genuine horrors of a society where death was ubiquitous and the luckiest residents ate a few crumbs a day. But the new footage also proved that much of “Ghetto” had been carefully stage-managed and choreographed. The outtakes reveal take after take of involuntary actors forced to repeat scenes until they got it “right.” Alternate angles show guns pointed at women to force them into a ritual bath, or fired in the air to incite a riot. Hersonski examines the film reel by reel, using the outtakes footage and historical documents to illuminate the inaccuracies. Hersonski then shows the footage to survivors of the Warsaw ghetto, who recoil at the blatant falsehoods onscreen. One survivor recalls the filmmakers bringing horsemeat into the ghetto to create the illusion of a plentiful food supply. Another scoffs at a floral centerpiece on a table, remarking, “We would have eaten the flowers.” In between these scenes, Hersonski includes a reenactment of an interview with German cameraman Willy Wist, the only person ever successfully identified as having worked on “Ghetto.” Wist admits the filmmakers’ deception, but claims not to have understood the purpose of the propaganda film, or to have known that the ghetto’s residents would be evacuated to the Treblinka extermination camp a few months later.
The message “Ghetto” intended to convey is not readily clear, which is likely why it was never finished. Staged scenes of well-dressed Jews at a dinner party are juxtaposed with beggars and corpses littering the sidewalks. Most likely it was meant to show the contempt that “better-off” Jews felt for their suffering counterparts – even though everyone in the ghetto struggled to meet their basic needs. Fortunately for the film, a few elderly survivors are still around to refute the footage. But what if the Holocaust weren’t in living memory, or what if the Nazis had triumphed in World War II? At its most basic, A Film Unfinished serves as further proof of the old adage “don’t believe everything you see.” More disturbingly, though, the film is also a dark reminder of how unstable our concept of “history” really is.
Look, Sally, Look 