The Warsaw Ghetto, Seen from the Screening Room: The Images That Dominate A Film Unfinished Available to Purchase

The documentary A Film Unfinished (2010), by the Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski, examines footage produced in 1942 that was intended for a propaganda film. The Nazis left their original production incomplete, and its fragmentary remnants are the unfinished film to which Hersonski's title refers. A Film Unfinished presents a paradigm of redoubled spectatorship: it is an Israeli film about the production of a German propaganda film, and it is also a film about the experience of encountering scenes from one's own past in such a film. The film's witnesses are positioned before archival images, and the earlier footage is thus doubly reframed. In the exploration of the survivors' relationship to the archival images, the film critiques and revises perspectives adopted by earlier films, particularly those that take an uncritical orientation toward iconic Holocaust imagery.