Three Minutes: A Lengtheningis a fascinating and haunting 2022 one-hour and nine-minute longdocumentaryby Dutch filmmakerBianca Stigterbased on a book by American musician and authorGlenn Kurtz. Though officially categorized as historicaland a war film, it is like no other.It is a historical artifact and a Holocaust remembrance film, but it must also be viewed as a contemplation of humanity and film itself.
What Is ‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’ About?
The documentary begins with an uncut screening of three minutes of found footage with only the whirring sound of the movie projector in the background. By itself, the footage gives details but explains nothing. The images are almost impressionistic: high contrast, hard to make out, badly photographed, full of shaky, seemingly unmotivated camera movements,like an art filmor an American experimental film of the 1960s, something by Brakhage or Maya Deren. Silhouetted figures in dark interiors give way to faded color images of smiling children in harsh sunlight leaping and lunging forward to get in the frame. It all has a holiday atmosphere, a feeling of novelty and celebration. Women in bright red print aprons and dresses, rabbis, bearded unsmiling men, and curious happy children come from doorways into a European village square to smile and wave. A variety of people appear through large wooden church doors until the final frame of the film freezes and the projector stops.
The remaining sixty-six minutes tells the story of musician and author Glenn Kurtz’s 2009 discovery of the three-minute color and black-and-white home movie in a closet in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Kurtz determined that the film was made by his grandfather, David, a prosperous New York businessperson, on a vacation trip to Europe in August 1938.The three-minute sequence was made on a visit to the Polish town of Nasielsk, a small village known for button-making, thirty miles north of Warsaw on the Ukrainian-Polish border. It was there, for no particular reason, that David Kurtz decided to try out his new movie camera.
What we come to find out, and what makes this otherwise meaningless footage of interest, is thatexactly four years later, in August 1942, German troops would march into the town and kill almost all of the 3,000 Jews in the village, all the people in the video. Those who survived immediately were transported and exterminated later at Treblinka. They represent a singular and horrifying atrocity.
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‘Three Minutes’ Lengthens From A Home Movie To A Book To A Full-Length Masterwork
Integral to the experience of the film is the viewer’s knowledge of the fate of the peoplein it. That knowledge gives the film a meaning, a haunted, ghost-like quality separate from the images. It also speaks to the nature of film and life by revealing film’s power to capture and freeze images of life and life’s fundamental impermanence. Neither film nor life will last forever. It is the moment that matters in life and this film, and the desire to honor both.
Three Minuteswas co-written byGlenn Kurtz, who saysof it, “This is probably the only movie imagery of this community before it was destroyed, and almost certainly the only images of many of the people, particularly the children who appear in it, in existence. I felt this tremendous sense of responsibility to their memory.”
The film goes on to examine and reexamine in increasingly finer detail the raw and restored footage. By adding sounds, music, and thoughtfully written narration spoken sensitively byHelena Bonham Carter, it tells the story of Glenn Kurtz’s surprisingly successful effort to identify the date, time, place, and the identities of many of the faces that appear in the film.Essential to this was his search for and audio interviews with survivorswho knew them. In so doing, Kurtz has given these people whose existence, and by extension so many others, was meant to be erased forever, their humanity back.
Three Minutes, adapted from Kurtz’s bookThree Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film, was produced by Dutch filmmakerFloor OnrustforFamily Affair Films of Amsterdam. The original home movie has since been donated, restored, and preserved by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Three Minutes: A Lengtheningis available to stream on Hulu in the U.S.
