Sundance Review: ‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’

Content warning: This piece includes discussions of the Holocaust 

At this point it would seem trite to laud cinema’s power to manipulate time; it is, after all, way back before his death in 1958 that André Bazin expanded on a notion of filmic mummification. “All are agreed that the image,” he writes in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” “helps us to remember the subject and save him from a second spiritual death.” It might appear so in Bianca Stigter’s Three Minutes: A Lengthening, the — forgive the editorialization — most beautiful and heartbreaking of the films in competition at Sundance this year. Three minutes of 16mm color footage from the travels of David Kurtz in pre-Holocaust Jewish Poland, sped and slowed and frozen and magnified and hyper-saturated, stretched into a feature work of documentary archeology. Exactly where, who, and when is depicted in this short home video is the ostensible subject of Stigter’s remarkable film, but what Three Minutes: A Lengthening truly and horrifically succeeds in is denying Bazin and his cinematic immortality. By interrogating the space between celluloid, time, and image, the film and the object of its study is ultimately an assertion of the calamitous permanency of death.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening — marvelously narrated by Helena Bonham Carter — spends much of its time in dissection: signs and façades are picked apart for any hint at setting, eventually established as the town of Nasielsk, home to 3,000 Jews at the time of the film’s creation in 1938. The faces are harder to parse: of the some hundred-plus bearded old men, shopkeeping women, and beaming children that appear in Kurtz’s film, just 11 of them come to be identified. “Look at me,” their ruddy smiles seem to demand, “I’m here!” But there is no record of them — only one hundred of the town’s residents survive to the end of the war. They are, for all intents and purposes, ghosts. 

This may sound glib, but the poignancy of Stigter’s film is in the indifference of the image it demonstrates. In its meticulous examination, the footage is seen over and over again in every possible edited and elemental form, rendering its subjects abstractions in the absence of identifying features. The reconstruction of their lives offered by Kurtz’s film thus appears hollow and incomplete; in one evocative sequence, one resident recalls a lively bar filled with the bombastic rhythms of the Bert Ambrose Band. In the film, that room appears heavy with the indistinguishable shadows of dancers, the Ambrose track laid over it failing to resurrect their vivacity. In another sequence, an extraordinarily long zoom picks apart the surfaces of the Nasielsk town square as survivor testimony details the evening of the first round-up of the town’s Jews for deportation; the image’s stillness evokes neither the energy of a bustling market space nor the horror of its use as a site of genocidal transport. 

Return, then, to those faces. As a bar or a town square recall both scenes of quotidian life and the tragedy of its severance — “the absence in the presence,” as Bonham Carter neatly expresses — so too do the faces of Nasielsk’s townspeople demonstrate the tragedy of both time and death’s irreversibility. Not only are all but 11 of their associated names lost to memory and the film’s archival record, some are entirely indistinguishable at all. Take, for example, the people far in the blurry distance of a frozen shot, or those whose faces are entirely obscured by the exposure of light or the mask of shadow. When each of these faces are highlighted one by one in the film’s most staggering and affecting sequence, many of them appear more phantom than human. It is in this way that Three Minutes: A Lengthening makes its most profoundly gutting statement on permanency: whereas Bazin asserts film’s capacity for the prohibition of spiritual death, Kurtz and Stigter’s films demonstrate that, though their outlines and silhouettes may be captured by the camera, some people are truly and irrevocably lost. “Nothing I learned about the people in the film,” states Kurtz’s grandson and donor of the film Glenn Kurtz, “could bring them back to life.” 

If one is to believe one’s most cinephiliac fantasies, it is part of film’s magic to be able to stop death. Its manipulations of time, its capacity to capture and replay some ephemeral moment in perpetuity should present humankind with a divine immortalizing ability. But one would be wrong. As the stretching and dissecting of absence in Three Minutes: A Lengthening shows its viewers, no matter how close one comes to halting it by crystallizing the images of those past, death is permanent. It is a delicate elegy and a sharp warning: there is a limit to the resurrective strength of memory and its material extension, cinema. There is no way, try as one might, to raise the dead.