A practical gaze at the Warsaw Ghetto: revealing excess & lack in A Film Unfinished

Abstract

Yael Hersonski’s Holocaust documentary A Film Unfinished has been read as an exercise in empathic unsettlement that destabilizes the propagandistic intentions of a Nazi gaze that produced footage of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, this paper argues that Hersonski also shows that a practical gaze that incorporates the gazes of those both inside and outside of the footage can more effectively reveal the contours of regime-made atrocity while humanizing victims of the Holocaust as agents involved in the construction of the footage’s meaning.