Composed from a few fragmentary minutes of grainy amateur footage shot in Poland in 1938, Dutch director Bianca Stigter’s formally bold essay film is a quietly moving memorial to a lost Europe and to countless lives cut short by the Holocaust. Stigter is best known in film circles as a producer to her more famous spouse, Oscar-winning British film-maker Steve McQueen – indeed, it was she who first suggested adapting 12 Years a Slave (2013). For Three Minutes – A Lengthening, their roles are reversed, with McQueen serving as executive producer while Stigter switches to directing.
World premiering in Venice and Telluride this week, with a Toronto slot to follow, Stigter’s concise mid-length archival collage is a rigorous exercise in forensic historical excavation that makes few concessions to cinematic entertainment. But the director’s reputation as half of a movie-world power couple will undoubtedly help boost the project’s profile, as will the presence of some heavyweight names in the credits, including a thanks to Steven Spielberg plus Helena Bonham Carter anchoring the film as narrator. Festivals, schools, museums, art galleries and high-end documentary platforms should provide a ready-made audience.
A literary adaptation of sorts, Stigter’s film is based on Glenn Kurtz’s 2014 memoir Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film. Both book and documentary are intensely detailed investigations into a few scrappy clips of 16mm home-movie footage shot by the author’s grandfather David Kurtz while on a “grand tour” of Europe in the summer of 1938. The location is Nasielsk, a small town 20 miles north-east of Warsaw. These street scenes are mundane in content, but fascinating in context, an extremely rare filmed archive of a vanished Middle European milieu of synagogues, schools, shops and town squares. Children pull faces and goof around for the camera. Adults beam and grimace bashfully at the novelty of being filmed. In the strikingly lovely colour clips, vivid red hues stand out amidst the fading sepia tints.
At the time of Kurtz’s visit, Nasielsk was home to around 3000 Jews. A year later, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. By 1942, almost all the people seen in these clips had been systematically murdered in the Treblinka death camp. With the devastation of the Holocaust, the film fragments became a kind of accidental memorial to the town’s Jewish population and a gateway for Glenn Kurtz to examine his own family roots. With hindsight, these fuzzy images have assumed the sombre duty, as Bonham Carter’s stately voice-over puts it, of “keeping the memory of the dead alive.”
From the roughly 100 Nasielsk Jews who escaped extermination, Kurtz managed to track down seven still living for his book. As much scientific investigation as history lesson, Stigter’s film features audio interviews with a handful of them: traumatic accounts of sadism, slaughter and survival against the odds. But there are heartening stories of courage and kindness too, including anti-Nazi German officers who risked their lives by helping Jewish prisoners escape.
Three Minutes – A Lengthening is not Stigter’s first pass at this material. In 2015 she directed an artful essay film on the same subject, Three Minutes – Thirteen Minutes – Thirty Minutes. This new iteration is a more polished and straightforward package, though it remains lightly experimental in form, with images looped and frozen, reversed and blown up to help illuminate the stories behind them. One elegant sequence extracts each of the 150 or so faces seen in the film and lays then out side by side in a geometric grid. Another section, based around voice-over accounts of savage Nazi brutality, features a long slow zoom into a static frame from the footage. As details of appalling cruelty unfold, the screen becomes progressively more blurry and abstract. The banality of evil rendered visually.
A promising dry run for The Occupied City, Stigter and McQueen’s next shared documentary project, Three Minutes – A Lengthening is an engrossing and technically accomplished exercise in remembrance. But it is also a small film about a huge subject, a minor addition to the rich canon of Holocaust cinema, a footnote in a vast archive of horror. There are hundreds of towns like Nasielsk scattered across Europe, all with similar dark histories, most eager to forget the past. As Bonham Carter says in her narration: “No statue, no memorial, no sign… the only thing left is an absence.”
Director, screenplay: Bianca Stigter
Cast: Helena Bonham Carter
Cinematography: David Kurtz
Editing: Katharina Wartena
Executive producer: Steve McQueen
Producer: Floor Onrust
Production Companies: Family Affair Films (NL), Lammas Park (UK)
Sound: Mark Glynne
Music: Wilko Sterke
World sales: Autlook Filmsales
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Giornate degli Autori)
In English, Polish, German, Yiddish
69 minutes
