A Film Unfinished
August 24th, 2010I just caught the trailer of “A Film Unfinished” on BoingBoing & I got goose bumps. I must see this film.
“…Yael Hersonski’s “A Film Unfinished” is about found footage from a Nazi documentary rough cut, produced by the Goebbels Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Goebbels had a two-fold urgency to his work: short-term use as war propaganda, but also long-term use as historical propaganda of a race of people he thought would soon be extinct. He sent crews out to film extensively before the Warsaw ghetto and others were liquidated. The vast majority of this footage was lost, and the footage in question was found in an East German archive in 1954.
Hersonski discovered through first-hand reports that alleged documentary scenes were heavily staged: hand-picking people for crowd scenes, and “casting” subjects who represented archetypes. One apparent goal of the film was to juxtapose archetypical wealthy Jews with impoverished and dying Jews in the street, to make them look parasitic, even of their own people. Hersonski told PBS News Hour: “I think that my hope is that in a way the viewer’s perception of footage of edited imagery [changes] — not only from the Holocaust, but the Holocaust as a case study.” ”
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