The Post and Courier__________________________________________________ CHARLESTONSCENE.COM __________________________________________Thursday, October 21, 2010.33E
‘Freakonomics’ presents unconventional wisdom unevenly
‘Unfinished’ is a profoundly unnerving historical document of Jewish history H
BY MICHAEL O’SULLIVAN
The Washington Post
BY MICHAEL O’SULLIVAN
The Washington Post
‘A
Film Unfinished” may not be the strangest making-of documentary you’ve ever seen. It may, however, be the most affecting. The film that Israeli director Yael Hersonski takes as her subject is also a documentary, of sorts. It’s an hour-long rough cut of a silent Nazi propaganda film, shot over 30 days in May 1942 inside Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto and titled simply “The Ghetto.” “A Film Unfinished” doesn’t so much finish “The Ghetto” as it does place the earlier movie in its proper context, incorporating longmissing outtakes that reveal staging of scenes that were once thought to be authentic by many historians. There’s no real surprise there. The fact that Nazis might have set up a scene of well-dressed Jews ignoring Jewish beggars as they stride into a shop, as a way to prove that Jews don’t care about those in need, is disgusting, but is it really news? Of course the Nazi film tries to portray Germans in the best possible light. “Look how well we take care of our Jews,” it seems to say. Butchered geese, meant to show abundance of the ghetto, would be brought in when scenes were shot at the Warsaw market. (Though the film also shows residents of the ghetto buying horse meat as well. Not many, of course, could afford even that.) But revealing the secrets hidden in the raw footage is not Hersonski’s most powerful weapon. The film doesn’t hit you over the head, but in its own way, it is quietly devastating.
AP
Yael Hersonski’s documentary “A Film Unfinished” looks at “The Ghetto,” a Nazi-produced movie about the Warsaw Ghetto. The unfinished film, discovered after the war, had no soundtrack. Since the end of WWII, one copy of a 60-minute propaganda film, shot by the Nazis in May 1942, sat undisturbed in an East German archive.
movie review ★★★★★ (of 5)
DIRECTOR: Yael Hersonski, RATED: R for disturbing images and Holocaust atrocities, including graphic nudity, RUN TIME: 1 hr. 28 min.
special event
Author and Holocaust scholar Ted Rosengarten, along with filmmaker Paul Brown, will lead a discussion after today’s 7 p.m. showing of “A Film Unfinished” at the Terrace Theater, 1956 D Maybank Highway. A portion of the evening’s proceeds will benefit the Charleston Jewish Federation’s REMEMBER Program for Holocaust and Genocide Education. To learn more about the program, visit www.charlestonremembers.org. Admission is $10, $5 for student tickets (with an ID). Tickets are $18 for patron tickets, which includes guaranteed premium seating. Advance tickets are available at the Terrace Theater or Charleston JCC. Call 571-6565 or visit www.jewishcharleston.org.
Like the filmmakers behind “The Ghetto,” she, too, uses staging, in this case filming an actor in the role of Willy Wist, the only cameraman who worked on “The Ghetto” to have been identified by name. In the end, “A Film Unfinished” doesn’t really need to
add anything to “The Ghetto” to put the final touches to it. The eyes of those whom Wist and his crew filmed — alternately hollow, haunted and horrified at being made complicit in their own character assassination — speak most loudly of all.
ere’s a stumper for authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, the geniuses behind the 2005 best-seller “Freakonomics,” which mined strange correspondences and uncanny connections out of the most seemingly unrelated things (more widely available abortion and the falling crime rate, for instance): Even if you’ve never read the book, why does the new documentary based on it feel so ... familiar? Maybe it’s because of all those cocktail-party conversations the book inspired. At this point, who in Washington doesn’t feel like they’ve read it? Or maybe it was all those New York Times Sunday magazine articles the authors penned under the “Freakonomics” banner. They certainly helped make the term, which describes a new way of looking at the world and the sometimes unexpected way things work, a household word. Maybe, just maybe, it’s because the movie isn’t freaky enough. It certainly comes with a pedigree. The omnibus documentary is a compendium of four “chapters,” each based on a section of the book and each directed by a different hotshot documentarian. In “A Roshanda by Any Other Name,” Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me”) looks at the economic impact of “black” vs. “white” names. In “Pure Corruption,” Alex Gibney (“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”) examines cheating in the world of Japanese sumo wrestling. In “It’s Not Always a Wonderful Life,” Eugene Jarecki (“Why We Fight”) plumbs the aforementioned connection between abortion and crime. And finally, in “Can a Ninth Grader Be Bribed to
AMANDA SCHWAB/AP
“Freakonomics” director Morgan Spurlock arrives at the New York premiere of the film last month.
movie review ★★ (of 5)
DIRECTORS: Morgan Spurlock, Rachel Grady, Heidi Ewing RATED: PG-13 for elements of violence, sexuality/nudity, drugs, and brief strong language RUN TIME: 1 hr. 25 min.
Succeed?” Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (“Jesus Camp”) ask whether, well, the title of that last one is kind of selfexplanatory. That could be part of the problem. There’s a certain obviousness to the movie that blunts some points made by Levitt and Dubner, who appear between segments in lively interviews. Take, for example, the revelation, in Spurlock’s generally bouncy installment, that the same resume, sent out once under the name Tyrone and again under another stereotypically white-sounding name would generate fewer callbacks. The fact that such prejudice still exists, even in this supposedly post-racial age, is disturbing but hardly a bombshell. Nor is cheating among sumo athletes, at least to American ears, which have become inured to hearing about such sporting scandals. The most interesting thing about that segment,
which plays like an episode of “60 Minutes” or “20/20,” is the statistical analysis that led to the conclusion that cheating among Japanese wrestlers was rampant. But perhaps the freakiest of the chapters is the one drawing a link between the legalization of abortion in America and the attendant drop in crime. It’s controversial, which makes it most deserving of the movie’s title, whether you agree with the premise or not. Yet in the movie at least, the hypothesis that fewer unwanted children naturally equates to fewer criminals seems hardly as “unimpeached” as Jarecki’s segment calls it. In the end, we see Levitt — an economist, Dubner a journalist — wondering aloud whether the experiment might work better if they started the carrot-andstick approach earlier, say, in elementary school. Yeah, maybe. Get back to us when you find out.