The questions that remain

‘A Film Unfinished’ challenges prevailing images of the Warsaw Ghetto, in part by exposing how the Nazis staged scenes while making the film in 1942.

By BERNARD DICHEK
Nazi Proganda (photo credit: STILL A STILL FROM “ A FILM UNFINISHED")
Nazi Proganda
(photo credit: STILL A STILL FROM “ A FILM UNFINISHED")
“THEY [THE JEWS] PREOCCUPIED MY thoughts for many years to come,” says Willy Wist, a German cameraman, testifying about his work on a Nazi propaganda film about the Warsaw Ghetto.
Wist’s testimony is one of the most intriguing aspects of “A Film Unfinished,” a documentary that exposes how the Nazis staged scenes while making the film in 1942.
Not that Wist is the main focus of the hour and a half feature-length film; he’s not. The film uses a variety of sources to show how archival footage about the Warsaw Ghetto is not really what audiences until now thought it to be. The archival footage in question is an hour-long reel of partially edited film produced by the Nazis called “Das Ghetto” that was discovered in an East Berlin bunker in 1954. Images of life in the ghetto taken from this reel have been excerpted into many documentaries.
But as filmmaker Yael Hersonski reveals for the first time in “A Film Unfinished,” another short reel of film, unearthed 45 years later, containing outtakes of footage not used in the edited film, clearly shows that many of the situations were staged. The German crew forcibly directed the participants, with repeated takes of the same actions.
This knowledge, she suggests, casts a different light on how we perceive images such as those of ghetto residents passing by corpses lying on the street without paying attention to their dead brethren.
Mystery surrounds the making of “Das Ghetto,” since there is no record of why the Nazis made the film, who was in charge of it, or how it is that the film survived the Nazis’ attempt to destroy all of their documentation during the last months of the war.
In “An Unfinished Film,” Hersonski, 34, an Israeli film director and TV editor, presents insights into the making of “Das Ghetto” from several different angles. These include readings from the diaries of Adam Czerniakow, the head of the ghetto’s Jewish Council and from the notes of another ghetto resident, historian Emmanuel Ringlebaum.
Czerniakow’s remarks are particularly relevant, because he was the only Jew among the ghetto’s 500,000 residents who was allowed to keep his private apartment. As he mentions in his writings, the Nazis often used his apartment to stage scenes in which well-dressed Jews are shown to be ostensibly enjoying a life of luxury, sipping brandy and enjoying sumptuous meals, callously indifferent – the film implies – to their starving and emaciated fellow Jews in the crowded streets outside.
Hersonski also presents on-camera interviews with ghetto survivors, five Israelis now in their eighties, who were children at the time and who recall seeing the Nazi film crews at work while they struggled to stay alive.
In addition, Hersonski’s detective-like research in German archives led her to an entry permit given to the German cameraman Willy Wist, who was allowed to enter the Ghetto in 1942. Wist died in 1979, but Hersonski did manage to track down documented testimony that he offered about the filming when he was interrogated in the post-war trial of the ghetto’s Nazi commander. There is nothing eye-catching in the contents of Wist’s comments.
During his interrogation he adopts an ‘I was just following orders’ type of stance. He confirms details about his involvement in the film, as for instance, when he is asked if he filmed naked women in a mikve (Jewish ritual bath). This too can only have been staged under duress, given the abject invasion of privacy.
“I remember there was one old lady among several well-fed younger women,” he states. Sure enough, that is what the footage shows. He laconically adds that he recalls the difficult technical difficulties encountered in filming “in the low-light conditions of the ritual baths.”
And he denies knowing anything about the fate that awaited his camera’s subjects: “I never thought they would be systematically murdered,” he says. The closest he comes to being introspective is when he comments about being ‘preoccupied’ with thinking about the Jews.
YET IRONICALLY, OF ALL THE PEOPLE WE MEET IN the film, Wist is the most riveting character. Partly because of the stylized visual way in which his testimony is re-enacted; partly because Hersonski refrains from directly commenting about him, leaving it to viewers to draw their own conclusions; and partly because of the acting prowess of the actor playing the role, Wist emerges as a nuanced, multi-faceted person.
Hersonski had not intended to put the spotlight on Wist.
“To my great surprise, many people, especially in the United States, were convinced they were seeing a real interrogation,” says Hersonski in an interview with The Report. She points out that she went out of her way to make sure that people would realize that they were seeing a dramatized re-enactment of the interrogation.
To do so, she framed the shots of Wist in a way that only shows fragments of his face “in order to disturb the viewer and tell him that he is seeing a representation.
I wanted the picture quality of those scenes to be different,” she explains. “There was no real set, just a table, two people, and a recording machine. It was meant to be very minimalistic, almost schematic, like a sketch.”
She was even more minimalistic in her directions to the actor, Rudiger Vogler. “I said to him, ‘just deliver the text in a communicative way’ and intentionally did not work with him on developing the character for the part.”
Vogler, for his part, was reluctant to take the role. Born in Biberach, Germany in 1942, the very year that the Jews were being fenced into the confines of the Warsaw ghetto and that the filming of “Das Ghetto” took place, he is one of Germany’s top actors, often considered to be the alter ego of leading German director Wim Wenders in whose films he frequently appears. “He was apprehensive about being identified with the role and was worried about what it would take for him to try to get into the personality of the character,” recalls Hersonski.
Yet despite Hersonki’s intentions, and possibly because of Vogler’s irrepressible talent, which inevitably gives a multidimensional quality to anyone he plays, Willy Wist upstages everyone else in the film.
“I didn’t want to support him or judge him. They [Wist as well as the ghetto diary writers] left testimony behind. I try to figure out how much we can know and not know from archives,” says Hersonski.
She acknowledges that the Wist character has drawn an inordinate amount of attention. Asked if she thinks she made the right decision in using an on-screen actor to play him, she implies that she is no longer completely certain. “Today yes, but ask me again in five years and I may answer differently.”
“AFILM UNFINISHED” IS THE FIRST FEATURElength documentary that Hersonski had made. She graduated seven years ago from Jerusalem’s Sam Spiegel School of Film and Television and, since then, she has worked as both a director and editor, including one season as an editor of the award-winning Israeli “B’Tipul” television series (adapted as “In Treatment” in the US).
The odyssey that would lead her to the making of “A Film Unfinished” began in 2006 when she read an article in which French filmmakers Claude Lanzmann (“Shoah”) and Jean-Luc Godard debated the ethical boundaries of using documentary footage about the horrors of the Holocaust. As she noted in a film proposal she drew up, she started to think about the “time when no witnesses will be left to remember, when the archives will remain our only source of understanding our history.”
She had become aware of the imminence of the post-survivor era when her grandmother passed away in 2005. Born in Warsaw as Kristina Mendelson, her grandmother was 19 when the Nazis invaded. She spent two and a half years in the Warsaw ghetto before escaping, only to be caught elsewhere and sent to Auschwitz. “My grandmother hardly ever talked about the Warsaw Ghetto and most of the time when we talked to her about her experiences, we tended to ask her about Auschwitz. So I know very little about what happened to her there.”
Hersonski spent two years researching archival materials in Israel and Germany, even learning to speak and read German. In a crowded, lunchtime Tel Aviv café, she speaks in an attentive, passionate way, undistracted by the noise around her, suggesting how totally immersed she is in the subject matter. She gestures animatedly as she describes small details that she came across.
“Czerniakow worked around the clock but wrote every day into his diary as if to say: these things happened,” she points out, while marking a napkin in front of her to show how he would divide each page into four quarters, each quarter dedicated to a different day.
“An Unfinished Film,” produced with a budget of 300,000 euros from Israeli (YES Docu) and several German television stations, has been both a critical and commercial success. The film won awards at the Sundance, Toronto Hot Docs and Jerusalem film festivals and, in a rare achievement for a documentary, gained movie theater distribution in several countries, including the US, where it played at more than 70 theaters.
A series of screenings at university campuses in the US is planned for the spring, during which time Hersonski will be teaching a film course as a guest lecturer at Tufts University in Boston.
She says that there is one particular message she plans to convey to her students, based on what she learned from making “A Film Unfinished.” That message has to do with how she now sees her own role as a documentary filmmaker.
“I’m concerned about filmmakers being merely curious about what they film and not doing enough for the people they are filming,” she concludes.