A Film Unfinished Summary - Jessica Sidebottom

“A Film Unfinished” shows the unedited scenes from a German propaganda film of the Warsaw Ghetto. Watching this documentation you can easily see the intentions behind the film. The Nazis wanted to ease the tension of growing suspicion by showing a film of what life in the Ghetto looked like or what they wanted people to believe. They depicted the Ghetto as a place where the Jews could live in luxury and maintain ordinary lives. The first part of the film shows the contrast between the staged scenes of rich Jews and the real scenes of poor Jews. Whereas the second half focuses on the contrast between the all-out staged scenes with actors and actresses compared to the unedited sections capturing real life in the Ghetto. They staged scenes of weddings, funerals, theater, and casual meetings, most of these were exaggerated. In one scene they asked the prettiest and healthiest waitresses at a restaurant to line up outside the front door and the Nazis pulled children and beggars off the street and forced them to walk up to the waitresses with open hands, but nothing was to be placed in those hands. This was an attempt to show how stiff-necked the Jewish people were, and how they didn’t even care for their own poor.

            I can’t imagine what the reporters and cameramen felt being in the ghetto, seeing and filming every aspect of Jewish life and character, not knowing why they were doing this and only having an inkling of the purpose for it all. How could you not be haunted by those images and the treatment with which these people endured by the Nazis.

            I would say the hardest part for me was watching all the hurt, tortured, intelligent faces of so many malnourished people staring at the camera wondering what would come next. Some of them looked like terrified animals about to be beaten. The tragic reality hits hard when you see the unedited scenes, especially the corpses. They would wheel around handcarts picking up the skeletal corpses lying on the streets and take the bodies to the graveyard, where they would have mass burials to account for all the dying people.  All this really happened and it’s heartbreaking and very disturbing what these people had to go through.