Yael Hersonski, dir. 2010. “A Film Unfinished” (Hebrew title: הארכיון שתיקת, transliterated as Shtikat haArkhion; German title: Geheimsache Ghettofilm), 90 minutes.

The Warsaw Ghetto was a walled-off portion of Warsaw where some 400,000 Jews and Romani were forced to live in a confined and segregated 1.3 square mile space from November 1940 until May 1943. At that point, all of its inhabitants were either dead or deported to the Treblinka extermination camp.

In May 1942, two months before deportations to the extermination camp began, a Nazi German film crew spent 30 days filming in the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1954, East German archivists discovered some 60 minutes of that film footage, prepared (under the Nazi regime) as an unfinished and silent “rough cut,” which had been left with the label “Das Ghetto” (or “The Ghetto”). In subsequent decades, excerpts of this footage were used both by historians and documentary filmmakers. In 1998, another 30-minutes of footage shot in the making of “Das Ghetto” was discovered.  

In her 2010 documentary A Film Unfinished, Hersonski includes (i) footage from “Das Ghetto” as it was found in 1954, (ii) footage from the additional thirty minutes found in 1988, (iii) records of and documents from the Warsaw Ghetto, (iv) records and documents about the persons in the Nazi German film crew, and finally (v) filmed interviews she conducted with survivors of the ghetto.

Questions

1. Consider the unfinished Nazi film, “The Ghetto”—based on that film’s footage as you see it by watching Hersonski’s film. What message or messages about Jews do you think “The Ghetto” conveyed? Explain and support your answer by referring to specific portions of “The Ghetto,” again, as you see it by watching Hersonski’s film.

2. Consider the “outtakes” that were produced in the process of filming the Nazi film “The Ghetto” and that you see while watching Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished. Do they offer messages about Jews that differ from the messages conveyed by “The Ghetto” (again, as you see its footage in Hersonski’s film)?  

3. A key point made in Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished is that “The Ghetto” included simulations of Jews and life in the Ghetto, which is to say simulations of reality.  Our question, though, is in what ways does A Film Unfinished itself use simulations of reality?  Identify and discuss specific examples of this.