Is seeing knowing, but is it also believing? This question looms over Bianca Stigter’s brilliant documentary adaptation of Glenn Kurtz’s 2014 book Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film, which is about a brief home movie and the facts and perspectives it can provide.
Deceptively simple, yet expertly constructed and hauntingly evocative, it’s a tribute to lives lost and worlds destroyed that also serves as a meditation on the moving image’s capacity to provide insight—and, more importantly, on its limitations in doing so.
Stigter’s non-fiction work (co-produced by her husband Steve McQueen) speaks volumes about loss, time, tragedy, and remembrance in only 72 minutes, all expressed in grainy color and black-and-white footage whose origins are mundane but whose lasting impact proves exceptional.
On August 19, the film will be released in theatres in New York and Los Angeles. – Three minutes A Lengthening is a film about a film—specifically, a three-minute series of 16mm clips shot by Glenn Kurtz’s grandfather David in Nasielsk, Poland, during his and his wife’s 1938 European vacation, and discovered by Glenn in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, in 2009.
Those reels are shown in full, without commentary, at the beginning of Stigter’s documentary, revealing a swarm of local children and adults on the streets, grinning and angling to be captured in the cinematic frame, standing in doorways and running to and fro around the market square, and entering and exiting the synagogue’s large doors, which feature a carved lion in an upper right panel.
This is a Jewish community, as evidenced by their caps, clothes, and, in some cases, long white beards, and it appears to be a nondescript and joyful one, going about its usual business on a sunny day except for the arrival of David and his camera—a unique and special attraction that’s cast a spell on its citizens.
Glenn had no idea where the footage was or who was in it when he discovered it for the first time. Nonetheless, compelled to learn such fundamentals, he embarked on a process of historical—via cinematic—investigation and excavation, noting minor details (a black sedan, a barely legible shop sign) to determine that it was Thursday, Aug. 4, 1938, in Nasielsk, a town 30 miles north of Warsaw that housed a button factory and was home to 7,000 people, 3,000 of whom were Jewish.
Also read: I Just Killed My Dad: A crime story that will make you lose faith in humanity
Only 100 of those men, women, and children would survive the Holocaust, which began a year later in 1939 when all Jewish residents were rounded up and either immediately shipped out to ghettos on a train (after a horrific march through mud and constant whippings) or herded into the synagogue, where they were mercilessly beaten. Except for a few, the Treblinka concentration camp would be their final destination.
Glenn admits in voiceover that nothing he learns from this film can revive or rescue these people, but he persists in his mission. “All I could do, all anyone could do, was piece together the few remaining fragments of their lives,” he says.
“To highlight their edges and absences, to define the loss of that world by detailing what remained of it.” We may be able to keep the memory of the dead alive in this way. Of remembering them even though they are no longer alive.”
Helena Bonham Carter narrates with inquisitiveness and sorrow, lending this endeavor a highly personal quality. Three Minutes – A Lengthening is a noble attempt to bear witness and remember reverently to gain some measure of enlightenment from what is and is not visible.
The writer/director slowly zooms into the town square as an archival document about the Nazi-perpetrated horrors of December 3, 1939, is read aloud, the image becoming fuzzier and more abstract the closer she peers.
The tension between what is seen and what is known is constant in Three Minutes – A Lengthening, but that doesn’t stop Stigter and Glenn from trying to understand everything they can.
The film resurrects lost voices, stories, and histories through written testimonials and audio interviews with survivors and their descendants. The material slows down and rewinds in a determined search for answers, echoing the venture’s overarching goal to both freeze time and roll back the clock, however briefly.
It’s a fundamentally impossible task, but it’s done with incredible grace, skill, and empathy; in one elderly man’s recollection of successfully rescuing his girlfriend from the synagogue in 1939 (thanks to an anti-Hitler soldier’s borrowed coat and cap), the desperation and terror of the Holocaust are brought into sharp, agonizing relief.
Juxtapositions and collages of profile stills from David’s home movie give affecting (if mostly anonymous) faces to a nightmare that has yet to arrive in Three Minutes – A Lengthening.
The fact that these people have no idea what awaits them is central to the documentary’s poignancy and speaks to the project’s absences—a topic that Glenn and Carter address near the end, ruminating on the idea that what we see while watching David’s footage are its particulars, whereas survivors perceive the surrounding vanished world lurking just outside the frame.
Such melancholy ideas reverberate throughout the novel, such as when Carter discusses how things only gain specificity and definition when they are seriously considered; for example, a tree is just a tree until we pay close attention to it, at which point our very act of reflection transforms it into a Linden tree.
Three Minutes – A Lengthening strives to fill in as many gaps as possible with a deft editorial structure that replays and resplices David’s film in telling ways, all while understanding that it is doomed to incompletion.
This, too, speaks to the voids at the heart of Stigter’s documentary, whose commemoration is touching in part because it can never be fully realized.
What remains are fragmentary images of ghosts, their silhouettes moving around the interior of a restaurant with a curtain backdrop of shining flowers (or are they stars? ), and their happy faces beaming at David as he arrives in this quiet Polish hamlet. They are irretrievably lost, but thanks to Stigter and Glenn, they are also forever found.
