Shtikat haarchion (2010) Reviews

• a powerful and moving indictment of a Nazi lie

  gregking42010-08-27

  After the end of WWII, four reels of film were discovered inside a vault in the German mountains. The film had no titles or credits, and was simply labeled The Ghetto. The unfinished silent film was an attempt by the German propaganda machine to paint an idyllic picture of life within the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, where some 440,000 Polish Jews were crowded into a three-mile area while they awaited deportation. Carefully stage-managed scenes showed Jewish families living a life of luxury. This was contrasted with scenes showing poorer Jewish families living in absolute squalor, in overcrowded and filthy slums. Emaciated bodies lay on the streets. Dead bodies were bulldozed into mass graves. The point behind it all seems to have been to show that the Jews were heartless and willing to turn on their own in order to survive. In this fascinating documentary, former television editor Yael Hersonski exposes the lie behind the film, and exposes how film can be cynically manipulated for specific purposes to fool an audience. Hersonski shows the edited footage to a handful of survivors from the Ghetto and captures their heart breaking emotional reactions. Most shake their head in disbelief at the blatantly false representation of life in the ghettos. A Film Unfinished is a powerful and moving indictment of this Nazi propaganda and its cruel lie.

• A heartbreaking look at Nazi inhumanity and manipulation

  CinemaFrostedBetty2011-05-16

  It was with great pleasure that I was able to attend a screening of Yael Hersonski's A Film Unfinished (2010) this past Sunday afternoon at the documentary film festival. However, this pleasure was followed up by immediate sadness, as this film is not exactly one to lift your spirits. This documentary exposes discovered footage of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 that was later found in a buried East German archive with a simple name attached, 'Ghetto'. The original implications of this lost footage are unclear as it captured the true disgust of the harsh, cramped living conditions, the unsanitary environment, and the famished people within it, while ambiguously presenting staged scenes of Jewish people enjoying a 'comfortable' life in the ghetto—dining in restaurants, wearing clean clothes and fine jewelry, enjoying the privacy of their spacious living facilities, sanitary circumcisions, and proper funerals. It almost seemed as if the Nazi filmmaker's original intent was to present a sort of social or cultural dichotomy within the ghetto. Perhaps a piece of propaganda meant to make people believe the ghettos were acceptable forms of alternative housing—a kind of paradise, but the Jews were the ones who made them unsatisfactory. I found the images within this film to be absolutely haunting. The piercing eyes of these victims as they break the fourth wall, and stare straight back at you will leave you with an unsettling feeling that will linger within you for hours, even after the film's end. Looking into the sorrowful eyes of these victims is a guaranteed way to make you feel extremely privileged. A Film Unfinished is a heartbreaking look at Nazi inhumanity and manipulation. It is a piece of evidence that will forever represent one of the most tragic events in history.

• Difficult to watch at times, but it is an important finished product

  meeza2011-06-05

  Holocaust movies have always reigned supreme by the Academy Awards and other film award delegations. However, one can always debate what was really real in those movies or how much was overblown for dramatic enhancements. I am not trying to degrade those films, because most of them were stellar; such as "Schindler's List", "Life is Beautiful", "The Pianist", just to name a few. However, the first film footage on the pre-Holocaust was filmed by none other than the Germans themselves back in 1942 in the Warsaw ghetto. The actors were real Jews who were not aware of their eventual fatal fate by later deportation and mass killings by the Germans. The film was simply titled "The Ghetto" and was discovered after the war. The unfinished work, with no soundtrack, quickly became a resource for historians seeking an authentic record, despite its elaborate propagandistic construction. It was later discovered that it was no more than an unauthentic Nazi film trying to depict that Jews were not treated harshly by the Germans, and actually showed footage of the Jews eating at decent restaurants and attending theatrical shows; even though it also revealed the atrocities of the malnourishment of the ghetto by showing dead corpses on the sidewalks among other "tough to stomach" real images. The intent was to show the differentiations of the Jewish classes in the ghetto. But the "reel" intent was to cinematically manipulate to demonstrate that the Germans treated the Jews fairly and were not responsible for their poverty & melancholy state. Obviously, we all know that is not the "reel" truth, especially when unseen footage was later found that proved that many of the scenes in "The Ghetto" film were staged and various scenes took many takes. Writer-Director Yael Hersonski meticulously crafts the documentary "A Film Unfinished" as an expository revelation on the German staged production of "The Ghetto". Not only does Hersonski presents most of the "The Ghetto" footage, but also of the recently discovered footage that authenticated the pseudo- realities of what ghetto life was like for the Jews. Moreover, in "A Film Unfinished", Holocaust survivors presenting their harsh experiences of the ghetto as a child which even more validate the falsity of the German production "The Ghetto". Hersonski even interviews one of "The Ghetto" cameramen who states that when he was filming, he was naïve of the primary intent of "The Ghetto" production, among other revealing atrocities behind the German carnage of the Jews. There are wide array of harsh truths that make "A Film Unfinished" difficult to finish. But it is documentary that people of all religions and classes should start and finish just for the sole reason to be reminded that an authoritative government serves no purpose, and always hurts a mass of innocent people; and those are the dictatorships that should always be finished. **** Good

• Title is appropriate: this footage is in search of a thesis

  mlwehle2011-05-08

  In publicity for this movie much is made of a truth to be revealed by footage in a newly discovered spool of film, however revelations to be had from the find seem profoundly limited to a single point: in a Nazi film of life in the Warsaw ghetto the scenes are staged. Footage of walking cadavers is certainly powerful, and emotional recollections of survivors is moving, but, heartless though it may sound, there is nothing new presented here. The only thesis articulated is really pretty uninteresting, and possible ancillary themes are never developed: Rüdiger Vogler reads the testimony of cameraman Willy Wist, who says what he witnessed in the ghetto haunted him long afterward, even despite some of the things he saw later. The narrators might have asked what Wist was referring to. What is the context into which Wist fits his memories of the ghetto? We're shown the Nazis repeatedly staged shots to stress contrasts between wealthy, well-fed Jews in the ghetto and the majority who were starving, but there is no exploration of the reality – a narrator simply recollects that a few dozen people were able to remain well fed. Rather than a coherent whole this is an hour and a half of staged footage of the May 1942 Warsaw ghetto interspersed with survivor commentary. The holocaust canon has more rewarding works.

• Film May Reveal Lies or Truth

  jayraskin12012-06-27

  There is a real aesthetic and ethical layer to this movie that makes it fascinating and well worth the time and effort to watch. It is a film which shows a certain irony. The Nazis were going to show the real suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto. They were going to show the truth in what was happening in the Ghetto. That is why they filmed real scenes of suffering. However, they also filmed staged scenes in order to blame the suffering on the Jews themselves. The Nazis did not deny the suffering, they simply blamed the victims and hid the real cause - the Nazis themselves. The film gives us enough information for us to understand that it was the the Nazis who were directly responsible for the inhuman conditions we see in the film. This film shows us the essence of propaganda. It is the ruling class convincing itself that their victims deserve their suffering and are responsible for it. The film exposes both the real situation and false propaganda the Nazis intended to create to fool people into believing that they were innocent of their crimes. It is a brilliant, transcendental film that all people should see and consider. Some of the scenes are pretty horrific, for example, corpses being collected and thrown into mass graves, and I did turn my eyes away from the screen briefly. However, there is also an ironical humor in seeing how the Nazis sought to shift the blame, but only ended up providing evidence of their inhuman and shocking crimes. The amazing viciousness of the Nazis is matched by the amazing stupidity of this master race. I saw the film on Netflix. I believe it will be opening in two months in August in theaters around the country. See it on Netflix or in the theaters. It is time well spent. We owe it not to the dead, but to ourselves to see it and remember.