In 2009, the writer Glenn Kurtz discovered a badly-degraded three-minute film in the attic of his parents’ Florida home. That film, a kind of vacation home-movie shot in 1938 by Kurtz’s grandfather, David Kurtz, contains seemingly innocuous footage of the Polish town of Nasielsk — David’s birthplace as well as one of the hundreds of Jewish communities eventually devastated by the Holocaust.
Not that the majority of us would be able to discern the film’s menacing context. Silent and grainy, it shows children crowding around the camera, bearded elders staring from a distance, people spilling out of a building that you might recognize is a synagogue — if you look carefully.
“Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” by the Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter, is committed to just that: looking carefully. The images from David’s three-minute film — at first shown from beginning to end, then chopped, screwed and restored, with several moments rewound and played over and over again — comprise the entirety of Stigter’s stirring documentary.
“Three Minutes” draws from Kurtz’s book, “Three Minutes in Poland,” which chronicles the author’s efforts to identify the people in the film, many of whom ultimately perished in concentration camps. Stigter’s documentary unfolds using voice-over narration by Helena Bonham Carter as well as voice-over testimony from Kurtz and some of the individuals who assisted his research.
David’s three-minute film gives us access to a reality that hasn’t really been captured on camera, one of a regular Polish town during that prewar period when life was still normal and danger remained in the shadows. Stigter and Kurtz guide our gazes, revealing the vast universes contained in each frame — from neighborhood politics to the background of a local grocery store. “Three Minutes” is more than a documentary about the Holocaust — it is an investigative drama, a meditation on the ethics of moving images and a ghost story about people who might be forgotten should we take those images for granted.
Three Minutes: A Lengthening
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 9 minutes. In theaters.
