Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de)
"Shtikat Haarchion" or "Geheimsache Ghettofilm" or "A Film Unfinished" is a co-production between Germany and Israel from 2010 that resulted in this 85-minute documentary. Writer and director is Yael Hersonski and this is possibly his most known work. One reason for this may be that films about the years of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust usually attract enough viewers to keep a film from staying entirely unknown, even if you do not really deliver anything new to the subject. Of course, it's also not easy to do the latter as so many documentaries about this already exist. But luckily this one here does bring something new to the table, namely interesting information about a German propaganda film. That one was supposed to be made at the Warsaw ghetto and depict Jews as people living in the ghetto in order to convince Germans and audiences that even in the ghettos life isn't bad at all for them and maybe increase hate towards Jews even further. I am not entirely sure if this propaganda movie got made or still exists today (in fragments?), but thanks to this documentary we find out a bit about the backgrounds and circumstances of the production. I still believe it is really difficult to make a 90-minute film about a film of under an hour, so there were moments when I felt they could have been left out of this documentary piece. Anyway, it is still a good watch overall, mostly thanks to all the old footage that leaves a lasting impression and there are still some touching moments at times, even if I felt the film did not manage to make the emotional impact it tried to make, at least on me. Nonetheless, I am not surprised by all the awards recognition it received, also in the United States, even if it did not get nominated for an Oscar. I think it deserved awards recognition, but it was maybe a bit too much. If you are an English native speaker, you may want to get subtitles for this one here. Without being too enthusiastic about it (maybe also because of the subject), I recommend checking it out all in all.
Cinema_Fan
By the time Adolf Hitler (b. 1889) had written Mein Kampf (My Struggle) he had already surmised that at least half of Germany's problems during World War 1 were due to the lack of vision and skill to use and project propaganda, to give it its political tag, enlightenment. This, the method of control of the mind, body and soul to enhance its people to complete dominance, oppression and obedience of the Will through fear, hatred, paranoia, to the point of xenophobia. Hitler had learned his lesson with extreme interest and with the onslaught of his uprising to the days of his decline he had used the medium of the moment; film.Dr. (Paul) Joseph Goebbels (b. 1897), Hitler's appointed minister for Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, had total control over all mediums, and film and cinema were to be his greatest ally. (Worthy of note here is the David Welch book "Propaganda and the German Cinema; 1933-1945" that delves into the mind and machine that is both Goebbels and his highly controlled medium which analyses major German propaganda film and documentaries of that era). Here, with reel one, with A Film Unfinished, we see the birth of an idea that bears fruition but is never completed; the title of this film, within this documentary that is being examined is, simply, called The Ghetto. With no dialogue, no sound but simply a moment caught in time, it is, on first viewing, an account of life within the Ghetto of Warsaw: good, bad or indifferent. It is with this in mind that we are given an account of several interwoven worlds; we are shown the rich, the poor, the destitute and those with, seemingly, influence all congesting in one tiny mass of land, three square miles, committing to weddings, parties, funerals, a circumcision and life, all 400,000. What A Film Unfinished tries to dispel here is the fact that with the finding of a second reel, later, the whole process before now looks very much tainted and dubious, Ms. Yael Hersonski has uncovered a conspiracy of fear and total obedience within the Warsaw Ghetto, conducted by the Nazi propaganda machine. Breaking the myth that what we have witnessed beforehand has been nothing more than a fabricated, constructed and manipulated tool to express how the Nazi regime and in particular, the Jewish community here, were living life happily, freely and independently. This valid point of photo manipulation begs the question "What can we believe?", if this second reel had never been found would we still, with extreme caution perhaps, take the whole scenario for granted? What Ms. Hersonski has done is to discharge the myth of life, not so much as in the Ghetto, but the Nazis' point of view of life within its streets, with the account of first hand witnesses' and to have, too, an account from one of the Nazi camera crew. All making their point very well, an elaborate hoax. What cannot be covered up with lies here is the squalor, deprivation and hunger that conflicts with the affluent rich that coincide with this open prison, this, just may have been the image that the Nazi propaganda machine wanted to project, a polar opposite of a community living side-by-side. To steer both resentment and disgust for these people by portraying them as weak and at the same time a selfish race. The scene in which children caught with food under their clothing and forced to empty their pockets, seeing the food spill out onto the street, is both heartbreaking and at the same time untrustworthy, again, one has to be careful in judging what we see, as we have now become aware that not all we see is accountably factual. This is the power of the medium of film and this, too, ironically, is the power of Ms. Hersonski work here. Raising questions that need to be asked, has the documentary film ever been so poorly placed, so exposed to the point of questionable doubt. Can we truly believe in what we are seeing, even with today's medium playing its role in contemporary societies? There is only one possible simple answer, one possible simple solution, trust not in what you see on the screen but trust more in what one has to say, to hear and to experience. This is where the true documentary lies.
classicsoncall
A single film cannister simply labeled 'The Ghetto', found many years following the end of World War II, sheds light on the Nazi propaganda machine and it's attempt to manipulate public opinion by revealing how 'wealthy' Jews seemingly lived alongside those of lesser means without regard for their squalid conditions. I was fascinated by the frequent use of the term 'rich' Jews, as today, the clothes they wore and the parties they attended under staged conditions resembled what would be considered moderately middle class. In actuality, I couldn't relate to terms like 'luxury' and 'paradise' as portrayed in the documentary, although one might consider that luxury would have described any possibility of escaping the torment and misery depicted here.If one's only perception of living conditions for the mass of Jewish humanity under the Nazi regime is pictures like "Schindler's List", then this footage offers the real deal. It's impossible to imagine hundreds of thousands of people cramped into a three square mile area of a ravaged city, starving and malnourished, tossing garbage out the windows of their tenements because they're too weak to dispose of it properly. Gaunt, expressionless children rummaging through piles of garbage looking for a useful bit of food scrap. The dead brought out to sidewalks and left to be rounded up in mass graves because they couldn't be buried properly. The conditions presented in this film are almost impossible to conceive in one's imagination, so horrid are the images that citizens of the Warsaw Ghetto had to endure as part of their daily life.Much of the film commentary is gleaned from the written documentation provided by Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Jewish council placed in charge of the Ghetto by the Nazi regime. There's also the recollections of cameraman Willy Wist who recorded much of the atrocity, one of the few such photographers who's name can be connected to the visual history of this era. By the end of his tenure, Czerniakow obviously concluded that his job in The Ghetto was that of a manager of a holding pen for Jewish natives and refugees on their way to a Nazi final solution, the Treblinka Death Camp. Two months after being ordered to draw up lists of Jews for relocation to Treblinka, he committed suicide with a cyanide capsule.As a historical document, this film is unscathing in it's portrayal of Nazi atrocity and the dehumanization of life on a grand scale. The reactions of now elderly survivors of the era who witnessed the conditions portrayed when they were children lends further testimony to how fortunate they were to finally escape. For historians and anyone interested in World War II, this is an unflinching look at how Man's inhumanity to Man can achieve indescribable proportions.
