A film Unfinished is a film about a film. This to me is the starting point and a place where I keep pausing after seeing the film and thinking about it. The film was disturbing in its imagery and more so in what it was exposing. But thinking of it, I could not ignore that this exposure is also after all, a point of view. I do not attempt to debate what is the truth; rather for a minute I want to circumvent the analysis and think about what the process of selection and rejection of images or words does.
The Ghetto which is the film, A Film Unfisnished (AFU) is referring to, was made to serve a certain purpose: Nazi Propaganda. From the narration in AFU we know that The Ghetto was a rough cut. It was made of constructed and candid sequences. Out of the raw unedited stock of footage, some shots were chosen to be in the film and others were omitted to form the narrative, a point of view, for propaganda. We saw the footage of The Ghetto but did not have access to the omitted parts. Actually we didn’t have access to the whole of The Ghetto. Because in A Film Unfinished this was edited and shots and sequences rearranged from the rough cut of The Ghetto, to tell a specific story, from a different standpoint. For example, if the sequences in which a rich and a poor Jew stand next to each other in The Ghetto were constructed then so were the close-up shots of the survivors, in AFU, who were reminded of the Ghetto by showing selected parts of the rough cut to get specific reactions.
A film Unfinished, for me, is an exercise about the nature of viewing. Is it possible to see more than what is projected for us?
-Nandita
EYE TO EYE 