Bianca Stitger (2022)
In 1938, Polish-born David Kurtz, who had emigrated to the US in the 1890s and become a successful businessman in New York City, holidayed in Europe with his wife. Kurtz had recently acquired a 16mm Ciné-Kodak camera; on a visit to Nasielsk, where he grew up, he recorded a little over three minutes of footage of members of the local Jewish community in the town square. When Glenn Kurtz, his grandson, came upon the footage in 2009, he didn’t know where or who it showed. He shared the film with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which did restoration work and made it available on their website. Seeing it there, a woman recognised one of the boys on the Nasielsk town square as her grandfather, Maurice Chandler, born Moszek Tuchendler. Over the next few years, another dozen or so names were put to faces in the crowd of some 150 people. Bianca Stitger’s Three Minutes: A Lengthening tells the story of Glenn Kurtz’s remarkable discovery, of a few of those people and of Nasielsk past and present.
I’m currently reading Holocaust and the Moving Image, a collection of contributions (edited by Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman) to a symposium held at the Imperial War Museum in 2001. A recurring theme of these pieces is the extent to which screen treatments of the Holocaust – whether from Europe or Hollywood, whether documentary or drama – have stressed or underplayed the anti-Semitic purpose of the Nazis’ Final Solution. Bianca Stitger begins her sixty-nine-minute documentary by showing David Kurtz’s footage in its entirety, leaving the viewer in no doubt that the people on the screen are Jewish – some of their faces and clothes make that clear. And as soon as we learn when Kurtz filmed, we know what must have happened to most of these people. Yet Stitger keeps the audience in suspense as she describes the history of the footage and the various research it generated, which is very interesting but isn’t what makes Three Minutes: A Lengthening fundamentally compelling.
Kurtz’s film, when it’s first shown, is accompanied only by a projector’s rattle and whirr. As Stitger returns to the footage and starts focusing on particular sections or frames, voices become part of the soundtrack: Glenn Kurtz, describing how he chanced upon the material; Maurice Chandler’s granddaughter, who explains that Maurice’s distinctive full cheeks, which she’d seen in family photographs, made him easy to spot in the town square throng; Helena Bonham Carter, who narrates Three Minutes: A Lengthening. The voices continue to be just voices: Stitger doesn’t cut away to talking heads to distract from, or reduce the grip of, the footage. Some of what is said sharpens awareness of the film as film: the narrator explains its physical degradation and the technicalities of the restoration process. She also describes, with Stitger’s camera continuing to home in on what the 16mm Ciné-Kodak camera captured, the detective work that gradually built up a more detailed picture of Nasielsk in 1938. We learn about the button factory that was one of the small town’s flourishing businesses, about the painstaking deciphering from blurry signage of the name of a shop owner whose premises appear in the film, about Lion of Judah symbols engraved on the door of the synagogue. Voices including Maurice Chandler’s join in to supply their personal recollections of life in Nasielsk.
We know what’s coming but when it arrives it’s still so shocking that we might as well not have known. About halfway through Three Minutes: A Lengthening, the frame freezes. This happens just as the camera has zoomed in so close that the frozen screen is a microscopic blur. A new, male voice recounts what happened to the Jewish community of the town – some 3,000 people in a total population of around 7,000 – in and after December 1939. Most Nasielsk Jews were deported to ghettoes around Poland, including the Warsaw Ghetto, and subsequently transported to the extermination camp at Treblinka. Fewer than a hundred survived the Holocaust. The film stops moving visually while this particular voice has its say; the whole section is terribly powerful. It’s rather surprising that Three Minutes: A Lengthening then resumes the testimonies of Maurice Chandler and other survivors. I must admit I found these slightly anti-climactic. For example, Chandler – who remained in Poland throughout the war years, using false identity papers – recalls the surpassing importance of religion to his family in Nasielsk before going on to say that the Nazi genocide destroyed his own belief in God. His feelings are sadly understandable but they have been heard before.
The films discussed in Holocaust and the Moving Image include, not surprisingly, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). Pauline Kael’s notorious negative review of what is generally considered a masterwork isn’t discussed but the reception of Three Minutes: A Lengthening reminded me of the first sentence of Kael’s New Yorker review. Well aware that her take on Shoah would scandalise, she begins, ‘Probably everyone will agree that the subject of a movie should not place it beyond criticism’. Stitger’s documentary has a 100% fresh rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes; there are only fifty-four such reviews all told but that’s still enough to make the rating worth noting. I agree this is an impressive film but it’s not perfect and I do wonder if a few of the admiring reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are a comment on Stitger’s subject rather than her artistry. The title is apt because her piece, even at little more than an hour, is almost too long. Helena Bonham Carter, although she reads the narration very carefully, sometimes, puzzlingly, breaks up a sentence’s natural rhythm and occasionally sounds like a teacher talking to the students she is educating. And Stitger is silent until almost the last minute about a theme likely to be in a viewer’s head well before then.
Three Minutes: A Lengthening is never so absorbing that you stop wondering how much of what you’re hearing about the disappearance of a community reflects the passage of time as much as the Nazi genocide. In his closing contribution, Glenn Kurtz compares the Nasielsk footage with family photographs of his grandfather’s life in Brooklyn in 1938; those also, says Glenn, show people who’ve now vanished. This welcome admission doesn’t, of course, mitigate in the slightest the brutal, sudden destruction of Nasielsk’s Jewish community. It does make you question why Bianca Stitger, for most of her film, seems content to blur the difference between victims of heinous violence and victims of time.
27 June 2024
