My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Saturday, March 19, 2011

A monumental documentary about the Nazi horrors - A Film Unfinished

It's hugely important that this movie and that others like it are made and shown - in the same spirit that it's a vital part of our culture and historical responsibility that we have a Holocaust Museum - but watching it, like visiting the museum, is painful, almost unbearable. The movie is "A Film Unfinished," a most unusual Holocaust documentary. Apparently the Nazis in their amazingly demented manner saved all kinds of film footage in an archival vault, and one of the discoveries in the vault was 4 reels of uncut film, apparently the raw footage for a propaganda feature never made or completed; the canisters are labeled "Ghetto," and film is of the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, before the deportations and killings. It's clear from the footage that the Nazis were developing a film that would show Jews living in luxury in the ghetto, while their fellow Jews were living in dire poverty - ah, the cruelty and inhumanity of the Jews! Perhaps this concept was too absurd even for the Nazis, or perhaps they abandoned the project because the leaders decided just to wipe out the ghetto altogether - nobody knows. Amazingly, the filmmakers were able to track down a German who was one of the photographers on the project, then just a young man obviously, and he talks very frankly about the filming. Most horrendous is that, though the film was meant to be Nazi propaganda, the unedited footage is the strongest graphic evidence we've ever seen about the horrors of life in the Warsaw ghetto - truly unbearable to watch at some points. This film is truly monumental, a visual record of the horror - one of the great documents of our time.

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