Three Min­utes: A Lengthening

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.

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.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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