Considering Three Minutes
IN 1938, DAVID KURTZ RETURNED to Poland, visiting the land of his birth years after achieving financial success in New York City. He brought along a portable camera and some film, a relative rarity back then for a tourist to be schlepping, and captured images of the architecture and people of small Jewish communities such as Nasielsk. The footage shows throngs of locals enamoured with this foreigner waving his contraption about, their excitement of being caught on film palpable as they crowd to be counted, waving and clamouring for attention. Soon almost all of them would be dead, victims of the Holocaust, a wholesale human slaughter that seems a world away from these smiling, laughing moments caught just before the storm would set in.
Bianca Stigter’s Three Minutes: A begins with Kurtz’s travelogue shown in full, recovered after years of being held in storage. The original footage is a bit pedestrian, with a constellation of round faces with dark eyes, wearing simple outfits, all blurring together. The first time through it’s almost boring, as banal as would expected when watching a stranger’s vacation footage.
