|
|
THREE MINUTES: A LENGTHENING
Director: Bianca Stigter MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:09 Release Date: 8/19/22 (limited) |
|
Review by Mark Dujsik | August 18, 2022 In 1938, a man on a European vacation captured a bit more than three minutes' worth of film in the Polish town from where his family had emigrated. About 70 years later, that man's grandson would find the film reel and spend four years trying to identify the place and the people whose faces appear locked in this moment in time—only a few years before the majority of the members of the Jewish community in this town would be murdered. The grandchild is Glenn Kurtz, who wrote a book about his experience, and Bianca Stigter's Three Minutes: A Lengthening attempts to replicate his investigation. The unique technique here is that Stigter's film, much like those faces, remains within the frames of that three minutes or so of film, which had been restored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. There are questions, prompted by the filmmaker through Helena Bonham Carter's narration, and there are answers, offered by Kurtz, historians, and a lone survivor of the genocide, as well as family members of others who have since died. When those experts speak, we only hear their voices. The film doesn't leave that footage, save for one moment when Stigter offers a 3-D model of what the street featured in the film would have looked like at the time. The director almost immediately dismisses that image, because the street and buildings, which are still there in significantly altered forms, aren't what matter. Those faces, filled with joy over some community event and curiosity about the American tourist with a movie camera, do. Stigter's documentary starts with the film, recorded by David Kurtz and seemingly forgotten over those decades. When the grandson obtained it, he had no idea where the film was recorded, and he takes us step by step through the process of learning it's a town called Nasielsk. From there comes the difficult, seemingly impossible task of learning something—even just a name—of the almost 200 people who appear in his grandfather's footage. The result is fascinating, as Stigter freezes and zooms and loops and adjusts the visual tone of the footage—using editing trickery and image manipulation as a detective might (A sign above a shop could hold one name, but the film seems too deteriorated to make out the letters, resulting in a linguist making a puzzle of the vague shapes). It's equally haunting, too. Those faces in Three Minutes: A Lengthening look at us across the decades and through all of the horrors they will soon encounter (Two separate testimonies of how the Jewish population of the town were deported three years later are recited over a slow zoom on to the empty patch of the town square, until there's nothing but the absence of anything discernible). We can only look back at them and begin asking our own questions, which almost certainly will never be answered. The names we learn become memorials, but so, too, do those questions. Copyright © 2022 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
Buy Related Products
|
(for thematic material involving the Holocaust)
