Three Minutes: A Lengthening

The three minutes (and 53 seconds) are a home movie of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk, 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, they visited the place his family had emigrated from and shot Kodachrome footage, some in black and white, some colour, of around 150 of its population. 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 poignancy of this footage is a given, but you may wonder whether some of Stiger's strategies - running the film in reverse, isolating individual faces - really add much to our understanding. I would, very respectfully, take issue with the assertion that the Holocaust is what makes Kurtz's film poignant. Any footage of people from the past has a desperate sadness. Time is the defining factor and its passing is the obscenity that gives it meaning.