Three Minutes: A Lengthening. (12A.)
Directed by Bianca Stigter
Featuring Helena Bonham Carter, Glenn Kurtz, Moszek Tuchendler. Partly subtitled. In Cinemas or Curzon Home Cinema. 69 minutes.
The three minutes (and 53 seconds) are a home movie of the Jewish inhabitants of a Polish village near the Ukrainian border shot in 1938 by visiting American businessman, David Kurtz, who was making a tour of Europe with his wife and three friends. On Thurs 4th August, Kurtz rented a black Sedan and drove out to Nasielsk, the place where Kurtz's family had emigrated from in the previous century when he was just 4 years old. Here he shoots Kodachrome footage, some in black and white, some colour, of around 150 of its population; mostly just them staring into the lens. Less than a hundred of Nasielsk’s 4,000 Jewish inhabitants would survive the Holocaust.
The Lengthening is the hour (just over) Stigter's film spends exploring the images, trying to identify the people, draw out meaning and recount their fates. The film's poignancy is a given, but you may take issue with some of its strategies in trying to draw it out of the images. Stigter employs Bonham Carter as a narrator but gives her some almost children's TV presenter lines to say. Commenting on Kurtz after he'd rented the Sedan in Warsaw, the narration has her say, “Where did he go? What do we see? Is it possible to locate a place solely by looking? If you don’t see the Eiffel Tower how do you know you’re in Paris?” Sequences running the film in reverse, or isolating the individual faces of the people don’t really add much to our understanding and seem, frankly, gimmicky. In contrast, off-screen, a survivor recounts an amazing story of how he'd rescued his Jewish girlfriend from the trains, and that has extraordinary power.
Odd, that such a purely cinematic film is adapted from a book, Glenn Kurtz’s Three Minutes in Poland. The approach is novel but not unique. Elsewhere this week, I review Lynch/Oz, a film by Alexandre O. Philippe, who'd previously made a whole film 78/52 dissecting the shower scene from Psycho. Filmmakers love to celebrate the preciousness of cinema: every celluloid is sacred. Looking at this though what you notice as we go back and forth over the images is that the movies play favourites. As the camera moves around certain faces follow it, desperate trying to stay in the frame. But they aren't necessarily the ones that lodge themselves in your memory. Without trying to, a few faces stay with you, become the stars, standing out from the rest of the cast. It was not a stardom that would translate into anything.
The beauty and sadness are undeniable but I would, very respectfully, take issue with the assertion that the imminence of the Holocaust makes this film poignant. Any film of people from the past has a desperate poignancy. Time is the defining factor and its passing is the obscenity that gives it meaning.
Directed by Bianca Stigter
Featuring Helena Bonham Carter, Glenn Kurtz, Moszek Tuchendler. Partly subtitled. In Cinemas or Curzon Home Cinema. 69 minutes.
The three minutes (and 53 seconds) are a home movie of the Jewish inhabitants of a Polish village near the Ukrainian border shot in 1938 by visiting American businessman, David Kurtz, who was making a tour of Europe with his wife and three friends. On Thurs 4th August, Kurtz rented a black Sedan and drove out to Nasielsk, the place where Kurtz's family had emigrated from in the previous century when he was just 4 years old. Here he shoots Kodachrome footage, some in black and white, some colour, of around 150 of its population; mostly just them staring into the lens. Less than a hundred of Nasielsk’s 4,000 Jewish inhabitants would survive the Holocaust.
The Lengthening is the hour (just over) Stigter's film spends exploring the images, trying to identify the people, draw out meaning and recount their fates. The film's poignancy is a given, but you may take issue with some of its strategies in trying to draw it out of the images. Stigter employs Bonham Carter as a narrator but gives her some almost children's TV presenter lines to say. Commenting on Kurtz after he'd rented the Sedan in Warsaw, the narration has her say, “Where did he go? What do we see? Is it possible to locate a place solely by looking? If you don’t see the Eiffel Tower how do you know you’re in Paris?” Sequences running the film in reverse, or isolating the individual faces of the people don’t really add much to our understanding and seem, frankly, gimmicky. In contrast, off-screen, a survivor recounts an amazing story of how he'd rescued his Jewish girlfriend from the trains, and that has extraordinary power.
Odd, that such a purely cinematic film is adapted from a book, Glenn Kurtz’s Three Minutes in Poland. The approach is novel but not unique. Elsewhere this week, I review Lynch/Oz, a film by Alexandre O. Philippe, who'd previously made a whole film 78/52 dissecting the shower scene from Psycho. Filmmakers love to celebrate the preciousness of cinema: every celluloid is sacred. Looking at this though what you notice as we go back and forth over the images is that the movies play favourites. As the camera moves around certain faces follow it, desperate trying to stay in the frame. But they aren't necessarily the ones that lodge themselves in your memory. Without trying to, a few faces stay with you, become the stars, standing out from the rest of the cast. It was not a stardom that would translate into anything.
The beauty and sadness are undeniable but I would, very respectfully, take issue with the assertion that the imminence of the Holocaust makes this film poignant. Any film of people from the past has a desperate poignancy. Time is the defining factor and its passing is the obscenity that gives it meaning.
