The rather poetic title of this documentary refers literally to a Nazi propaganda film that was shot in the Warsaw ghetto in May of 1942. The precise intent behind the filming is apparently lost to history, but clearly was propaganda. As it was, most of the residents were only a few months away from being “deported” into the Treblinka concentration camp. For 30 days, a film crew filmed the ghetto, crowded with the poor and the starving. There were, according to the film, as many as 500,000 Jews, some brought in from Germany, in a three-square-mile area, equivalent to less than 200 square feet per person. Footage of concentration camp survivors suggests that they were starved there, but clearly many of them would have already arrived that way. The Nazis filmed all of this, but also staged scenes involving the better-fed residents. Elaborate meals were served in restaurants with servers told to act cheery; performances were staged with conscripted audiences, and so on.
This is no great shakes as a documentary. There is some narration, plus extensive voiceovers that come from diaries of residents, or from the transcript of testimony by one of the filmmakers. Movingly, survivors of the ghetto, now in their late 70s or older, are shown watching the footage. This explains much of what we see, but doesn’t put it in a larger context. We are also told that the footage has been used in earlier documentaries about the Holocaust, but no examples are shown. Instead, the documentary draws its power simply from the force of the images themselves—corpses on streets, stick-thin bodies, piles of filth, etc. These may not quite match the horror of the concentration camps, but they are a less-familiar and equally potent reminder of how systematic was the brutality of the Nazis.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse [Landmark theaters screening] and reviewed 10/6/10
No comments:
Post a Comment