“Three Minutes: An Extension” deals with Jewish life before the Nazi invasion
AMSTERDAM – Glenn Kurtz found the 2009 reel in the corner of his parents’ closet in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. It was in a dented aluminum canister.
Florida’s heat and humidity almost solidified the celluloid into a mass “like a hockey puck,” said Kurtz. But someone had transferred part of it to VHS tape in the 1980s so that Kurtz could see what was in it: a homeland film entitled “Our trip to Holland, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, France and England, 1938”.
The 16-millimeter film, which his grandfather David Kurtz made on the eve of World War II, showed the Alps, picturesque Dutch villages and three minutes of footage of a lively Jewish community in a Polish city.
Old men in Jarmulkes, skinny boys in hats, girls with long pigtails. Smile and joke. People stream through the large doors of a synagogue. Pushing in a café and that’s it. The footage ends abruptly.
Kurtz nevertheless understood the value of the material as evidence of Jewish life in Poland shortly before the Holocaust. It would take him almost a year to find out, but discovered that the footage showed Nasielsk, his grandfather’s birthplace, a town about 50 kilometers northwest of Warsaw that was home to about 3,000 Jews before the war.
Less than 100 would survive.
Well, the Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stierter used the fragmentary, ephemeral footage to create “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a 70-minute feature film that helps define more precisely what and who was lost.
“It’s a short piece of footage, but it’s amazing how much it brings in,” Stierter said in a recent interview in Amsterdam. “Every time I see it, I see something I’ve never really seen before. I must have seen it thousands and thousands of times, but still I can always see a detail that previously escaped my attention. “
Almost as unusual as the footage is the journey it took for it to become more widely known. Almost forgotten in his family, the videotape was transferred to DVD and sent to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 2009.
“We knew it was unique,” said Leslie Swift, director of the museum’s film, oral history and sound recording division. “I communicated with him straight away and said, ‘If you have the original film, that’s what we want.'”
The Holocaust Museum was able to restore and digitize the film and published the footage on its website. Kurtz didn’t know where he had been shot at the time, nor did he know the names of the people in the market square. His grandfather emigrated to the United States from Poland as a child and died before he was born.
This began a four-year detective work process, which Kurtz used to write a acclaimed book, “Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film,” published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2014.
Stierter relied on the book to complete the film, which is co-produced by her husband, Steve McQueen, the British artist and Oscar-winning director of “12 Years a Slave,” and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. It has received attention in documentary circles and was shown at the Giornate degli Autori, an independent film festival that runs parallel to the Venice Film Festival; the Toronto International Film Festival; Telluride Film Festival; the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival; and DOC NYC. It was recently selected for this month’s Sundance Film Festival.
Nasielsk, home to Jews for centuries, was captured on September 4, 1939, three days after the German invasion of Poland. Three months later, on December 3rd, the entire Jewish population was rounded up and driven out. People were forced into cattle wagons and drove for days without food or water to the cities of Lukow and Miedzyrzec in the Lublin region of Nazi-occupied Poland. From there they were mostly deported to the Treblinka extermination camp.
“When you see it, you want to yell at these people, run away, go, go, go,” said Stierter. “We know what is happening, and they obviously don’t know what is happening, just a year later. This puts an enormous amount of pressure on these images. It is inevitable. “
Stierter stumbled upon the footage on Facebook in 2014 and immediately found it mesmerizing, especially since much of it was captured in color. “My first idea was just to extend the experience of seeing these people,” she said. “It was very clear to me, especially with the children, that they wanted to be seen. They are really looking at you; they try to stay within the scope of the camera. “
Historian, author and film critic for the Dutch national newspaper NRC Handelsblad, Stiger worked on this film, her directorial debut, for five years. She started it after the Rotterdam International Film Festival invited her to produce a short video essay for the Critic’s Choice program. Instead of deciding on a feature film, she decided to explore this found footage. After a 25-minute “cinematic essay” that was shown at the Rotterdam Festival in 2015, she received support in developing it into a feature film.
“Three Minutes: A Lengthening” never stands out from the footage. The audience never see the city of Nasielsk as it is today, or the faces of the interviewees as talking heads. Stigt highlights, zooms in, stops, rewinds; she goes into the cobblestones of a square, the types of hats the boys wore, and the buttons on jackets and shirts made in a nearby factory owned by Jews. She creates still image portraits of each of the 150 faces – no matter how vague or blurry – and names some of them.
Maurice Chandler, a Nasielsk survivor who is over 90 years old, is one of the smiling teenagers in footage. He was identified after a granddaughter Detroit recognized him in a digitized clip on the Holocaust Museum website.
Chandler, who was born as Moszek Tuchendler, lost his entire family in the Holocaust; He said the footage helped him remember a lost childhood. He joked that he could finally prove to his children and grandchildren “that I am not from Mars”. He was also able to identify seven other people in the film.
Kurtz, a writer and journalist, had found out a lot through his own research, but Stierter helped solve a few more puzzles. He couldn’t make out the name on a grocery store sign because it was too blurry to read. Stierter found a Polish researcher who found out the name, a possible clue as to the identity of the woman standing in the doorway.
Leslie Swift said David Kurtz’s footage is one of the “most requested films” from the Holocaust Museum’s moving image archives, but most often it is used by documentary filmmakers as archival material or background image to evoke pre-war Jewish life in Poland ” in general terms, “she said.
Kurtz’s book and Stierter’s documentary, on the other hand, examine the material itself in order to answer the question “What am I seeing?”. again and again, she said. By identifying people and details of the life of this community, they manage to restore humanity and individuality.
“We had to work as archaeologists to extract as much information as possible from this film,” said Stierter. “The interesting thing is that at a certain moment you say, ‘We can’t go on; this is where it ends. ‘ But then you discover something else. “