A practical gaze at the Warsaw Ghetto: revealing excess & lack in A Film Unfinished

ABSTRACT

Yael Hersonski’s Holocaust documentary A Film Unfinished has been read as an exercise in empathic unsettlement that destabilizes the propagandistic intentions of a Nazi gaze that produced footage of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, this paper argues that Hersonski also shows that a practical gaze that incorporates the gazes of those both inside and outside of the footage can more effectively reveal the contours of regime-made atrocity while humanizing victims of the Holocaust as agents involved in the construction of the footage’s meaning.

KEYWORDS:

• Warsaw Ghetto
• film unfinished
• Holocaust
• practical gaze
• empathic unsettlement
• documentary

Acknowledgments

I would like to give special thanks to Alison Landsberg for her comments on previous drafts of this article and for her encouragement. I would also like to thank Lisa Daily and Caroline West for their comments on presentations based on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1.. For more background on the history of the footage, see Prager (2015, 189–192), and Böser (2013, 40–42).

2.. Although Azoulay uses the term ‘spectator’ when she writes about the event of photography, I prefer Johnathan Crary’s term ‘observer.’ As Crary argues, spectator connotes a more passive onlooker, whereas observer is a more active adjective (Crary 1996, 6).

3.. Diaries, documents, drawings and testimonies of the Jews living the Warsaw Ghetto were preserved by hiding them in various unsuspecting places such milk canisters and tin cans to elude the Nazis.

4.. For instance, The Time of the Ghetto (1961) was narrated by Michael Tolan, The Yellow Star (1981) was narrated by Alexander Scourby, and Mein Kampf (1960) was narrated by Claude Stephenson.

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David Zeglen

David Zeglen is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at George Mason University. His research interests include cultural globalization, critical theory, visual culture, and uneven and combined development.