2016-07-06 ‘Topless aint’t illegal / any more.’

 2016-07-06 ‘Topless aint’t illegal / any more.’           

 

An object in (e-)motion tends to stay in (e-)motion, a smarter guy than this one wrote it better (though of course it was ‘motion’ -id. but attaboy for looking at the How Does It Feel-ing of it / all), and an object at ®est tends to stay / at ®est.   Lacking both, your man Cin the humble(d) narrato® of this Take This Thing Back to Baltime-moirs and Dea® Dia®y dia®ist takes either, any chance / that he gets, e-motion is all / we gots.

 

Good times, course while ‘things could be better, Lloyd’ – What Would Jack Say to bartender Lloyd better in Kubrick’s take on your The Shining, innit Mr King – ‘‘things could be a whole lot / better’, it’s not all that bad up on out on up on out on up on out on up on out on up in here in / the cindominium of this WTFednesday evening, what with the 27 degree celcius warmth (if it hits 30 above we’ll summon / the AC, innit you little monsters) and all of the lighshows and smokeshows of this year’s Bluesfest across the road, but without the ©acophony  and / or the c®owds because Bluesfest Day and Night / Off , a WTFednesday evening without the ©acophony  and / or the c®owds is all / we gots.

 

Course amidst all of this f®ivolity and verbal Dear Dia®iah, there’s still a film to videe of this WTFednesday evening edition of this Take This Thing Back to Baltime-moirs and film / audiobook / music / daily planner / Behold the Dia®ist ®eviews.  And that film is a do©umentary dear reader, A Film Unfinshed, it’s a film within a film within a film within (that’s enough -id.) about the Warsaw Ghetto as it was filmed during the year 1942, with the participation of its occupants, willing / or not.

 

It is highly cinapproriate to use cintax while cintemplating the horrors as depicted – but truly, as they were filmed – and Cin will try to hulk-smash away at the same with as few affectations as possible (oh please Ben Afflecktation -id.)

 

What it is is in A Film Unfinished is that the Nazi Party, the elected government if he is not / cincorrect of Germany at the time and also aggressor into Poland and its capital Warsaw before during and after the course of World Wa® Two, took upon itself apparently, innit Apparent / Lee, to produce some kind of sick propaganda film, a documentary of a sort itself, meant to show somehow that the conditions within the Warsaw Ghetto for its inhabitants were not as bad as they might otherwise seem.

 

To that end a local cameraman and sound man and erstwhile director were all dispatched by the Nazi Party to Warsaw and told to film / away.  What the camera crew found of course were levels of depravity and depravation and horror too cruel to contemplate, inflicted upon prisoners from all through the Nazis’ Third Reich at the time, a war-time empire that spread right across Europe, and included the Poles from Warsaw and beyond, European Jewish prisoners from Warsaw and abroad, gypsies and other political prisoners of all stripes. 

   

  It’s ®ough videeing (that’s enough -id.) / going, movie is partly narrated in English, with English subtitles for the interviews, subtitles which ©in is more than certain would be appreciated too by his hate®s and those who like and / or choose to give him (that’s enough monkeyshines -id.) / the gea®s.

 

Propaganda selfie, the original film / documentary within this documentary was stored in film (?) / celluloid form for many years and decades, following the end of World War Two but not before many of the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto as shown in the film were sent to their deaths following the completion of the quasi-documentary.

 

During the course of tracking down the local Poles and Nazi officials in charge of the project, the producers of this documentary about the original film were able to find the cameraman who shot the film at the time, and who agreed to a partial on-screen interview to discuss his memories of / the same.  Much has been written about the banality of evil that four-lettered word, and the scenes and exposition within this documentary bear that banality out : occupants of the Ghetto, while simultaneously watching the original film in a screening room, relive their (often painful, and painful to watch) memories of the same for the producers, and viewers of the new film.

 

Unwatchable images of emaciated occupants of the Ghetto, striving to maintain some kind of dignity despite the horror of having to live under the Nazis’ version of house arrest – ‘we moved all of our possessions into one room of our house’ a survivor recalls in the film, as the Nazis’ regulations required that Jewish families live only and all together in one room of their own homes – ‘and then a family of strangers moved into our house’. 

 

 ‘Sometimes’ one of the survivors says it during the film, of the small pleasures that the Ghetto occupants tried to maintain under the circumstances – the city itself was divided from the looks of it, with the prisoners and occupants of the Ghetto walled off from the rest of the city, populated by German officers and assumedly Warsaw residents who really in other cities would surely have been called collaborators – ‘we would smile / and laugh’.

 

Ghetto occupants managed also to keep track of and record the conditions under which they were living, in written form, though some were also coerced and / or volunteered to appear in the film that the Nazis were recording, ‘acting’ as themselves or as other occupants of the ghetto, and directed to carry on for the camera as though conditions were anything other / than brutal, as Francis Ford Coppola did similarly under different circumstances, appearing in his own film Apocalypse Now as a U.S. military film-maker, or as a director engaged perhaps by the U.S. military, and encouraging the actors playing U.S. soldiers in the film to ‘keep going’ as the Coppola character filmed them during a sortie in Vietnam, ‘keep going’.

 

Occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto in An Unfinished Film are similarly asked to ignore the camera, though like the actors playing the soldiers in Apocalypse Now, they are not always able to do so, casting baleful and angry glances into the camera as was held in 1942 by the cameraman and as interviewed by the same in this documentary.

 

These horrors are heart-breaking – Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto are required to wear the Star of David as identifiers on their clothes within the ghetto - even as the occupants struggled to find courage in their predicament, not to mention enough food to eat within the chokehold of the Nazis, who were attempting within the ghetto itself and within the frames of their propaganda film to maintain a grotesque version of normalcy, with schools set up for the children of the occupants, and all varieties of entrepreneurial facades set up to depict a functioning / society.

 

‘Babies were born’ one of the survivors says it better as she watches the original film, ‘woe to those babies.’  Images captured in the original film, and filmed again for this documentary, belie the original intent of the first film – Ghetto occupants, men and women, forced to strip down for the camera and then to bathe in a ‘ceremony’ in Warsaw bathhouses are all skin and bone, and their participation in the scenes, though not entirely coerced as they were grateful for the chance, if contrived, to wash, and even though for the camera is much more of a forced scene than of an acted one.

 

When the occupants started to die of starvation within the ghetto however, and corpses to appear on the streets, the occupants became numb and simply walked around the dead during the course of their daily business, ‘we became indifferent’ one of the survivors says as the camera captures the bodies of men, women and children on the ghetto streets, dead and dying and starving to death before their eyes and the eyes of the camera.

 

It is unspeakable, ‘here is the funeral scene’ the narrator of An Unfinished Film tells us as yet another film within the film, taken by an occupant of the ghetto with his own camera who captured both the ghetto scenes on his own as well as the making of the original film - in this case a scene set up and staged to depict a funeral within the ghetto – ‘and the market’, this latter made up of shots of the actual ghetto food market, which appears to be  functioning in the original film, despite the presence of human corpses on streets and sidewalks nearby, and of course worst of all the acceptance and indifference toward human dignity, even or especially in death, of the survivors towards the same, amplified by later images captured on film of the mass burials within the ghetto of occupants who have starved to death or succumbed to the diseases rampant in such conditions, images made even more shocking by the forced participation of surviving Ghetto occupants to dig the graves and bury the dead grotesquely.

 

Triblenka was the next and final destination for many thousands of the occupants of the Warsaw ghetto, this the next Nazis’ directive after the film crews had left the ghetto with their propaganda efforts in their film cans.  One of the collaborating Warsaw city officials who carried out these last directives given to him by the Nazi occupiers – provide the names of a certain large number of prisoners to be transported to Triblenka – and realizing that this final act of collaboration would surely end in all of their deaths, himself swallowed a cyanide pill kept for that purpose, joining the others in final rest.

 

Thank you for reading this Take This Thing Back to Balti-memoires and unspeakable.