Warsaw Ghetto (1965) dir. Hugh Burnett

This secret Nazi film – unforgettable documentary of a vanquished world – was photographed just before the Ghetto’s total destruction and either never completed or not intended for public release. For once, the Nazis – albeit unintentionally – revealed the truth about an event, though it was a truth distorted by their presence; the only Jews who did not know that they were being photographed were the dead; the others, depending on degree of desperation, indifference, or nearness of death, attempted to smile or otherwise co-operate with the photographer/director (representative of unlimited power over life or death), an obscene spectacle difficult to bear. The footage, by its very artlessness and the sepulchral absence of sound, exerts the most hypnotic and oppressive influence on the viewer; for this is a spectral parade of horrors enveloped by silence. While an attempt is made to pretend that life is proceeding “as usual” in the Ghetto, reality breaks through with a vengeance. A long shot of a shopping area with purchasers (to denote normalcy) suddenly reveals several festering corpses, with flies, lying unattended on the sidewalk; people pass by and no longer notice. Children in dirty cots — their skeletal bodies mercilessly exposed by an anonymous hand turning back their covers — stare at the camera wordlessly. Ghetto inhabitants are filmed with rashes, lice in their hair and dirty feet (in lingering close-ups), to show how filthy Jews are. The nude corpses of a couple, next to each other in strange intimacy, put on to a cart for disposal; one falls off, and is put back, re-establishing the bond. A child, dressed in the most surrealist rags, dancing for the camera and a piece of pretzel, with unaffected, innocent charm, unaware of her future, in total silence and to a tune that will remain unknown forever. A truck full of corpses, dumped by chute into a mass grave, with children tumbling behind women and men. Close-ups of faces (unbelievable faces) staring straight at the camera, undoubtedly compelled to do so, attempting to look normal and happy (lest they be killed on the spot), betraying fear, the horror of things seen, the nearness of death. Dying men on a bed jumping to attention as a piece of bread is offered; children with baggy clothes, roughly searched by German soldiers, “contraband” spilling out of folds, pockets, trouser legs — carrots, more carrots, nothing but carrots. Death exudes from every frame of this film: death past, present, and future; all of its stars and extras died within the year, except the man behind the camera, his identity unknown. And here is an intriguing unsolved mystery: for in choice of subject matter, camera angles, duration of shots and editing, one discerns not only the cruelty of a Nazi historian “objectively” recording impermissible history, but – this is a stab of sudden, uncanny surprise – a note of compassion, of sympathy wrenched perhaps unwillingly from its source, indeed possibly unknown to it. The Nazis, after all, did not believe in the subconscious universe explored by the Jew Freud.