Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished

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Jeb Sharp interviews Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski about her documentary A Film Unfinished. It’s about the Nazi propaganda footage shot in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. Hersonski pieces together the backstory to the reels of film found after the war and in so doing challenges our assumptions about memory, history and reality. (photo by Steven Davy) Download MP3

Thinking of the time when no witnesses will be left to remember and actually we’ll only have the archives and their images, I thought it’s important if not urgent to try to conceive the complexity of these images, the layers of reality that are concealed behind the simplistic way we are used to seeing this extremely important footage and I think that it also creates for us a perspective which we can use in our own contemporary viewing when being mediated by the media and news programs it’s always about our limitations as viewers and when we realize these limitations we know to seek for more than what we are actually seeing and I think this is maybe one of the most ethical tasks we have in front of us as viewers.

The emotional trigger maybe was the death of my grandmother one year before I started to make this film. Until then I was sure that at least during the decades the survivors were still a mass of people it was much more important to listen to them, or even to listen to their silence, because their silence was also a form of testimony, to understand something of what had happened. But now when they’re slowly dying, I think that the images are much more important to understand than anything else, because it is the chemistry of reality in a way. And to understand what it contains is to try and seek for truth. –Yael Hersonski

Jeb Sharp’s radio interview with Yael Hersonski, August 18, 2010