A Film Unfinished

[A Film Unfinished]

Directed by Yael Hersonski

Runtime: 89 min.

Proving that Third Reich Germany wanted to “document its own evil passionately, systematically like no other nation,” the makers of A Film Unfinished use leftover footage from a 1942 Nazi film project about the Warsaw Ghetto. Director Yael Hersonski compiles the fragments (some documentary, much of it staged by Nazi teams coercing the abused ghetto prisoners) yet doesn’t leave the appalling evidence to speak for itself. 

Despite good intentions, Hersonski rubs salt in the wounds of memory, subjecting several Holocaust survivors to screenings then recording their feedback. One woman’s response is instructive: “I can no longer watch this. Today I am human. Today I can cry.” Yet her individual reaction doesn’t complete the Nazi project's horror, it only indicates Hersonski’s insufficiency and lack of insight. Think what Hannah Arendt could have made of this footage? Typical of contemporary advocacy journalism, Hersonski doesn’t know what to do with this outrageous material except show it. 

Instead of inquiring into Nazi  methods of propaganda and possibly finding parallels to our mockumentary era’s fudging with truth and errant media bias--alerting us to the danger of cinematic fabrication and the political ideology behind it--Hersonski teaches nothing.  When Loretta the Young viewed Nazi atrocity footage in Orson Welles’ 1946 The Stranger, her mortification expressed the global moment. Nearly 70 years later, Hersonski’s under conceived meta-doc cannot provide the same enlightenment. A montage of ghetto prisoners standing side by side in old/young, rich/poor, hungry/fed juxtapositions is devastating. But all Hersonski can do is fall back on alarm. There’s no sadder example of contemporary documentary futility than this.