How long does a director need to capture history? David Kurtz took three minutes, the extent of a silent European holiday movie the Brooklyn family man shot in the first half of the last century. It plays in full at the start of another film devoted to decoding it, the unshakeably powerful Three Minutes: A Lengthening.
The original amateur 16mm footage features no explicit mention of time or place: just the curious, delighted faces of rowdy boys and beaming girls. This, we learn now from documentary-maker Bianca Stigter, is the small Polish town of Nasielsk. The film was shot among the Jewish people who then made up half the population. It was summer 1938.
Stigter lets us sit with our initial loss of bearings. It primes us to see a history we may take for granted anew — and in close-up. The original footage was a family affair. Shot by David Kurtz during a visit to his father’s hometown, it was found in a Florida closet in 2009 by his grandson Glenn, whose voice we hear alongside narrator Helena Bonham Carter. He then refocused attention on his grandfather’s subjects, a forensic research project that pieced together Jewish Nasielsk from this single Kodachrome fragment. Freeze-framed and magnified, the pictures speak of the stuff of any town: everyday customs, architectural quirks, social hierarchies, individual backstories.
But most of the people go unidentified. Briefly, Bonham Carter recounts the arrival in Nasielsk of Nazi soldiers. The coming horror gives the attention to detail a vast and vital weight. Memorials list names. Here, overwhelmingly, there are only faces.
Had David Kurtz’s footage spent even a month longer in 2009 without being found and restored, decay would have left it physically unwatchable. Stigter’s film is thus bound up with both the Holocaust and the frailty of the moving image. Like Abraham Zapruder’s record of the Kennedy assassination, you are reminded of its limits. However pored over, film can’t return the dead to life. But it can hold precious knowledge: that lives were lived, and how, and where.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from December 2
