Three Minutes a Lengthening

In Three Minutes a Lengthening, director Bianca Stigter transforms rare color home movie footage shot in 1938 Poland into a meditative meditation on what it means for a lost community to be captured on film. Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, the film examines those precious minutes moment by moment to reveal their human stories.

1. Look carefully

Looking carefully is what director Bianca Stigter does with three minutes a lengthening, a haunting essay on history and memory that uses a faded home movie shot by her grandfather David Kurtz in 1938 to explore the fragility of film. She shows the flickering, grainy images of Nasielsk, a Polish town where Kurtz’s family had lived before the Holocaust, moment by moment, rewinding and examining them over and over until they reveal the faces of a small village that would soon be lost.

The eloquent documentary, narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, is a remarkable meditation on how film can shape the past. It’s also a powerful testament to the Holocaust, as it presents us with images of unsuspecting Jews living in a Jewish community before it was destroyed by the Nazis.

Stigter’s meticulous editing is a crucial part of the film’s effectiveness, as it highlights the impossibility of ever really knowing anyone in the footage. She has the camera freeze frame every face, and adds them to a memorial collage that fills the screen, in what is one of the most moving sequences in Three Minutes.

It’s the only time we see any modern people in the film, a decision Stigter consciously takes on to make this an examination of how the destruction of a community can be seen on film. Her decision to only show the original images is a strikingly stark contrast to the work of other filmmakers who have attempted to preserve and examine the Holocaust on film, such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah.

Stigter’s work is both thrilling and heartbreaking. She’s a rare filmmaker who knows the dangers of not looking carefully enough, and her film is a stunning reminder that film can be an invaluable tool for remembering.

2. Listen carefully

In three minutes a lengthening, Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter has given us a glimpse into the history of a lost community that was wiped out by the Nazis during World War II. She has taken David Kurtz’s shimmering home movie of a Jewish village in Poland, cut it up and repurposed it into a riveting cinematic experience.

Stigter’s approach to transforming this film — a snippet of 16mm colour stock — into a stirring meditation on the power of visual technology is no small feat. In the process, she demonstrates that the moving image has a lot to offer us in terms of history and memory.

The best part of the process is that it does so without any sentimentality or gimmickry. Stigter uses freeze-frame imaging to reveal a dazzling array of details in a single frame, and the result is hypnotic.

The film is currently streaming on Hulu with a subscription, and you can buy it from iTunes, Amazon Video, Vudu, and Google Play Movies. It’s the perfect way to spend a rainy afternoon or a snowy winter morning. You can also find it on your local library, if you’re not lucky enough to own a copy of the film in question.

3. Think carefully

Three minutes a lengthening is a remarkable documentary about how film can help uncover the stories of lost people. In a moment when we seem overwhelmed by a mass of data that cannot tell us much about our past, three minutes a lengthening offers an ode to cinema’s unique ability to reveal history through images.

In 1938, when David Kurtz shot a few minutes of amateur film on his visit to a Jewish-populated Polish village before the Holocaust, he never imagined that his footage would become one of the only moving images left of this tiny community. Yet in her new movie, director Bianca Stigter has made an extraordinary case for how this footage - shot on colour 16mm film - can provide a rich source of detective work when it is examined with care.

Stigter’s 69-minute documentary takes up the story of Kurtz and his efforts to identify the people on the film, as told in Kurtz’s book Three Minutes in Poland. She has retraced Kurtz’s steps, pored over every frame and tried to shed light on the lives of those who were killed by the Nazis.

When Stigter freeze frames the faces of those who appear on the film, she essentially creates a town directory over time. It’s a beautiful and powerful way to memorialize those who died in the war, but there is also a moral dimension to her approach. It’s a reminder that a culture can be lost so quickly that its citizens have no chance to ever know how they lived or what they loved before they were killed.

Stigter has made a distinctly Dutch-style meditation on the fragility of the memory of those lost in war. She has pushed Kurtz’s archival footage to the limit in ways that reaffirm their importance and re-emphasize our responsibility to preserve them.

4. Act carefully

Unlike most documentaries that attempt to dissect history, writer/director Bianca Stigter’s Three Minutes a Lengthening is committed to close looking. It is a meditation on what it means to resurrect lost memories and images from the past through film.

Originally shot on 16mm stock, this snippet of pre-Holocaust footage by David Kurtz offers rich material for Stigter’s detective work to reconstruct the stories of a Jewish community that was destroyed by the Holocaust. She aims to make her film as compelling and as revealing as possible by repurposing this fragment of a movie strip, slowing it down, freezing it, examining it with magnified textures and dissections of details embedded in clothing and shop fronts.

The resulting 70-minute film is a haunting essay about history and memory that examines Kurtz’s home movie with different voices enhancing the images: Glenn Kurtz, grandson of David Kurtz; Maurice Chandler, who appeared in the footage as a boy; and narrator Helena Bonham Carter. As the film progresses, we witness Kurtz’s detective work as he uncovers more about these people who perished in the Holocaust.

At the same time, Stigter demonstrates how close looking can be a form of labor; resurrecting the stories of these people from the past is hard, but the process can also be exhilarating and rewarding. This is the kind of work Sedgwick would have us do in his reparative reading, where close looking is not used to dissect the traces of past events, but rather to suture them together.

One of the most moving sequences in the film occurs when Stigter freeze frames the faces caught on the celluloid, and adds them, one by one, to a memorial collage that fills the screen. In doing so, she not only creates a sense of scale and scale of loss for each person in this film, but also gives each one the space to be remembered.