February 15, 2010 – Fake Documentaries

As someone who was first overwhelmed by the pieces of film, “Hitler Builds a City for the Jews,” which was made by Thereisenstat inmate, the director Kurt Gerron, I read about Yael Herpolski’s “A Film Unfinished” with a kind of glee. For while Gerron was blamed for “collaborating” with his jailers to make an image of a terrible concentration camp into a paradise, I sympathized with the desire of a film-maker to make a heaven from hell in celluloid that would perhaps create it in reality. Once it was filmed, I thought, there would be no way in which the contrast between the film and the camp would be maintained. But the discrepancy was solved in an antithetical way – Gerron and all the many participants in faking reality were erased, making the film the only evidence.
Although i haven’t seen “A Film Unfinished” as yet, the concept here is antithetical. It is an attempt to return the staged documentary on the Warsaw ghetto to its reality by interviewing participants, cameramen, etc. returning that famous documentary film, excerpted all the time to prove the condition of the ghetto, to fiction.
It is not that I do not approve of documentaries – but that they are only as good as the research done elsewhere by the filmmakers, and the knowledge and judgement of the audience.