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There are no on-camera interviews, just voices of people who were there or who know people who were there or who know things about Poland in the 1930s, especially the Jewish experience. Sometimes Helena Bonham-Carter reads scholarly material, which is likely a distillation of things the director and her team learned during the project, but which cannot be attributed to a particular interviewee. Footage is slowed down, frozen, zoomed in. Sometimes it moves slowly back and forth (creating a kind of pendulum effect) while the interviewee talks about his personal knowledge of a certain person in the crowd. While this person is talking, we may wonder which of the persons he is talking about, although we usually have a pretty good idea; the arc of the pendulum back and forth shortens until we stop at the face and freeze frame the image, capturing a moment in time and holding it.
The word “granular” is usually used as a metaphor to suggest focus and depth, but in this case it is applied literally. When we hear a witness speak of what happened to one of the two lions of Judah that were at the synagogue door, or when Carter reads observations about the social and economic aspects of the colors seen in women’s clothing, or when we learn about what he tells us the difference in the boys’ hats to how much money their families probably had, sometimes we see a piece of film footage so tightly cropped we might as well be in a museum looking at an impressionist painting: blotches of celluloid instead of paint.
We know how this story ended from a historical perspective. By the end of the war, only 100 Jews remained in the neighborhood, and the rest were relocated and killed en masse by the Nazis and their auxiliaries. The final section of the film deals with the deportation of the community in a manner consistent with the rest of the film.
There’s a fundamental benevolence and generosity in the very idea of making a film like this, although if such emotions were inherent in the production, we’d never know it from the way the material is presented. It has been described as a forensic exercise, but that adjective is full of forensic associations. “Three Minutes” shows us people and things that no longer exist, but a respectful and innovative approach to just three minutes of footage gives life briefly to a community on the brink of obliteration.
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