The sound of a projector whirring. A crowd assembling in the street, as if for a family portrait. A congregation tumbling out of a synagogue which has the lion of Judah carved into its front doors. A group gathering in front of a store. Men, women and children, some preoccupied with their own business, others with the exotic contraption that’s filming them. It haltingly pans across faces that are full of life, excited kids waving, adults being more laidback but equally fascinated by this intruder in their midst. Whatever they’re doing, though, whether they’re smiling or posing, messing around with each other or just bearing witness from the background, it’s all been snatched from the inexorable passage of time. By the magic of film.
A shot from Three Minutes: A Lengthening.Credit:Neon via AP
The date is Thursday, August 4, 1938. The location is the Jewish quarter in Nasielsk in east-central Poland, and the footage we’re seeing is three-and-a-bit restored minutes of a home movie. Glenn Kurtz published a book about it in 2014, Three Minutes In Poland, Discovering A Lost World In A 1938 Family Film, after he came across it a few years earlier, a forgotten treasure hidden away in his parents’ closet in Florida. A series of street scenes shot in 16mm by his grandfather during a brief visit from the US to his home-town, it’s hand-held, grainy, partly in colour, partly in black and white, some of it shot in the bright light of day, some reducing its subjects to shadowy profiles.
Now, Bianca Stigter’s brilliantly conceived, profoundly moving 69-minute documentary debut is both a study of this hauntingly silent footage – what can we discover about the people and the way of life it presents? Why does it matter? – and a lament for those who appear in it. For, in September of the following year, Germany invaded Poland. Then, on Sunday, December 3, all the Jewish men and women of the town were herded together in the cobblestoned town square before being incarcerated in closed railway carriages whose final destination was the extermination camp at Treblinka.
Assisted by explanatory voice-over commentary by Kurtz and official narrator Helena Bonham Carter, as well as several of the few survivors of the Nazi atrocity, Stigter skilfully analyses the footage to paint a compelling portrait of a neighbourhood and of the people who were a part of it. Unlike Alain Resnais in Night and Fog (1956), his memorable 32-minute evocation of the nightmare of the Holocaust (and one of Stigter’s favourite films), she doesn’t look beyond the home movie to shots of the same place in the present day. Instead, she relies on the found footage, combined with the perspective she’s able to bring to it, to speak for itself.
For Kurtz, who co-wrote the film, it serves as a way of “keeping the memory of the dead alive”. For Stigter, a former film critic in her home-town of Amsterdam, who previously worked as an associate producer on her British-filmmaker husband Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013) and his TV series, Widows (2018), Three Minutes is an act of defiance. “I see it as a film against the erasure because that’s what was happening,” she said in a recent interview. “The whole community was erased. I tried to extract as much meaning from the celluloid as possible. And it feels like a kind of victory over the erasure.
“On the one hand, we’re so close to these people that suddenly we can look them in the eye,” she adds. “At the same time, we cannot cross time and warn them; they are locked in that piece of film. So, in that sense, there’s the illusion of nearness that film can bring, but then the devastating realisation that it is just an illusion.”
As Bonham Carter reflects on the soundtrack about how “images preserve detail but not necessarily knowledge”, Stigter works to create a wider context in which we can acquire that knowledge. And her research brings the hum of life to the neighbourhood – pondering the sounds that the people there might have been hearing at the time and what they might have been thinking; providing an account, courtesy of secret documents retrieved from the Warsaw ghetto, of the sacrilege that befell the synagogue after the German occupation; reflecting on the deciduous linden trees in the street that provide shade for passersby during the summer; drawing our attention to the recurring store with the SPOZYNC sign outside and the owner’s seemingly indecipherable name.
Significantly, it also points out that the cobblestones in the town square where the Jews were forcibly gathered have been replaced by asphalt, but that there are no monuments or memorials to them. Just a statue of John Paul II, the first Polish Pope. And it powerfully reminds us how the danger hovering over the footage lends it a resonance absent from a similar account of, say, a neighbourhood in Brooklyn.
Stigter’s memorable achievement here is not just a lengthening; it’s also a deepening and an emotionally enriching one. First screened in Australia at the Sydney Film Festival last year, it’s soon to be followed by Occupied City, a documentary based on her 2019 book, Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, directed by her husband and due for release later this year.
What: Three Minutes: A Lengthening
Where: DocPlay, from January 23
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