A Film Unfinished NYT Critics' Pick

[lsanderson]

A scene from Yael Hersonski’s “Film Unfinished,” an investigation into an incomplete Nazi propaganda movie.
An Israeli Finds New Meanings in a Nazi Film
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
Published: August 17, 2010

For almost half a century, an unfinished Nazi propaganda film of the Warsaw Ghetto, simply titled “Das Ghetto” and discovered by East German archivists after the war, was used by scholars and historians as a flawed but authentic record of ghetto life. Shot over 30 days in May 1942 — just two months before deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp would begin — this hourlong silent film juxtaposed random scenes of Jews enjoying various luxuries with images of profound suffering. More