Tre minuti

Bianca Stigter's fascinating semi-experimental Documentary literally takes three minutes of 16mm home movie footage and examines it in extraordinary detail. Save for one very very brief shot, we see nothing else but that film during the course of the suitably brief 69 minutes.

Taken on a European vacation in 1938 by David Kurtz the precious (and, at the time, expensive) footage has quick bits in Paris and Geneva, but the prime focus here is the film he shot in Nasielsk Poland. It was predominantly Jewish, and as fate would have it, be largely wiped out by the Nazis the very next year. In a way, THREE MINUTES is like a tragic ghost story - the viewer haunted by the notion that most of the faces we see would be gone so soon thereafter. Remarkably, through research and interviews, Stigter and her team were not only able to name some of the people we see, but even track down a survivor.

THREE MINUTES is a laudable effort in film examination. No footage so brief has probably been so thoroughly gone over since the Zapruder film. Stigter has done a remarkable job of not only exploring the celluloid for its historical value, but, also giving an afterlife of sorts to the men, women and children of Nasielsk.

Although this received excellent critical reviews and was only 69 minutes long, I wasn't sure how much I would like this one for two reasons. The first one was that the three prior reviews before me on IMDb were not very positive. The second reason is that over the years, Holocaust movies no longer break any new ground, and I find them to be mostly derivative. If you see my IMDb review for "Final Account," you will see that most people don't like that I didn't fall all over myself saying how great that documentary is. That's because I've seen that kind of Holocaust film (documentary or dramatic movie) so many times that I don't learn anything new, and it's an absolute bore.

So why did I l like "Three Minutes: A Lengthening" more? I liked it more because it was a fresher take on the genre, and explored the Holocaust off of a recently discovered home movie taken pre-Holocaust in Poland, and the search to learn more about the town of Nasielsk, and if anyone could recognize any of the people in the home movie, and if anyone who was seen in those three minutes was still alive. I found this all to be very interesting. I also found the eyewitness accounts of what happened in Nasielsk a few years later when the Germans came in to round up all the Jews to be especially sad and powerful.

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.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but unless you have a personal connection to the Holocaust or unless you have professional interest in it, boredom is likely to wash over you as you watch this documentary. I won't recommend Three Minutes: A Lengthening to others. There is an obvious peril in taking three minutes of film and trying to stretch it into an hour-long documentary.

This documentary appeals to a fairly small number of people. I'm surprised by the generally positive reviews it has received if I'm being honest. Folks should be brave enough to characterize work like this as the underwhelming production that it is. You can take a pass on watching Three Minutes: A Lengthening without missing out on much.

This is an unusual documentary that attests to the strength of the cinematographic image in recording the collective memory, not only of a people, but of humanity itself.

On a tourist trip to Europe, in the summer of 1938, an American businessman of Polish and Jewish origin, films three and a half minutes of the life of a small town, North of Warsaw, Naselsk, where his wife was originally from.

Popular curiosity causes around 150 people, mostly children, to appear in this small, partially colored, film.

Just one year later, almost the entirety of this Jewish population was taken to ghettos in various parts of Poland by the Nazis, and will end up exterminated in Treblinka or on the way to this infamous camp.

The few survivors recognize some faces, names and buildings from the film, thus contributing to the preservation of the memory of those people, abandoned by their own God.

An impressive experience.