Anticipation.
An ambitious undertaking.
Enjoyment.
Incredible attention to detail, but Helena Bonham Carter’s narration wears thin.
In Retrospect.
Thoroughly compelling and haunting.
In 2009, writer Glenn Kurtz discovered a degraded 16mm film in the attic of his parents’ home. It belonged to his grandfather, David Kurtz, an amateur filmmaker who was born in the small Polish town of Nasielsk before migrating to America. Equipped with a Kodak camera during a trip to Europe in 1938, David would shoot 14 minutes of black and white and Kodachrome film, three of which would become one of the only known fragments of history left of the predominantly Jewish population in Nasielsk, one year before the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Slowed down, freeze-framed and recontextualised, this fragment of found footage allows filmmaker Bianca Stigter to attempt the titular “lengthening” through fleshing out and delving deep into the vibrant world within the images. The result of exclusively repurposing this single film strip is often hypnotic in its immersion in colour, magnified textures and dissections of details embedded in clothing and shop fronts.
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Of the 100-plus locals that populate Kurtz’s frames, only 11 survivors have been identified, while the identities of the indistinguishable shadows captured by the camera remain resistant even to André Bazin’s analogy of cinematic mummification. Three Minutes culminates in a contemplation of its central paradox: “The absence in the presence”. It provides a vital memorial to the people whose lives have been lost to time, revealing the significance of preserving film as much as preserving history.
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