Advertisement
Three Minutes: A Lengthening, directed by Bianca Stigter, focuses on the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk, Poland in 1938. Shot by David Kurtz in 1938, the footage features what maybe the only moving images from these individuals before the Holocaust. Glenn Kurtz (David’s grandson and author of Three Minutes in Poland) and Stigter talked to Deepest Dream about Three Minutes: A Lengthening.
Three Minutes: A Lengthening is playing this weekend at the Laemmle Royal and New York’s Quad Cinemas 4. Running at 69 minutes, this is one of my favorite documentaries of the year, and I will be considering this feature come awards time. For more information on Three Minutes: A Lengthening, go to its official site.
We interview Three Minutes: A Lengthening on the latest Find Your Film podcast:
Glenn, was writing a passion for you as a youth? Or did you evolve into the craft?
Glenn Kurtz: Actually I was a musician. I was born a musician and that was my first career and in some sense my first life – and my first book. When that career collapsed on me, which is the subject of my first book Practicing, I knew the only other thing that I wanted to do was write.
What was the challenge for you Bianca in writing this documentary?
But then as a writer, every project teaches you to be the writer that it needs. This book needed a very different kind of writer than my first book or books that I’ve written subsequently. So yeah I had to learn to be the writer of this book in the course of researching it, interviewing people, and learning about what the story wanted in order to convey the really powerful and in many sense contradictory emotions that this just few minutes of film provokes.
Bianca Stigter: I did not work with a script, actually. Because I knew from the beginning the three minutes of footage would be the only images we would see and then we started to build it up granually and (see how) to fit in. We developed it, me and the editor as we went along. It was a continuous process of adjustment and thinking of how we can do it.
(I had) most of the stories as a a guiding principle – you had to have a link to something that you see from the footage. A book is a very different thing than film. This was a way for us to choose and really focuys on letting the (short) be the main focus.
What was it like to get to know Maurice Chandler through this process:
Glenn Kurtz: Meeting Mr. Chandler and becoming close to him is one of the great privileges of my life. It was his granddaughter who saw this film arbitrarily online at the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and she recognized her grandfather as a 13-year-old boy in the footage.
She wrote me an email and eventually I was on the phone with Mr. Chandler literally moments after he saw the film for the first time. The first thing he said to me was, “You’ve given me back my childhood.” This is a man who lost his family, he lost his town, he lost the whole culture that his life has existed in before. To see then suddenly, he is there with his friends and in the town that he knew – that was his reality. It was a profound experience for him.
And saying that to me, was a profound experience for me. When someone says that to you, it gives me chils even today. I have had the great privilege to talk with him for 11 years. Every time I talk to him, I learn something about the town, his life, and the culture he has lived in. It was a tremendous experience.
Bianca Stigter: For me it was like an artifact from the past – you see this movie as a historical document. And then suddenly you meet someone who knows a lot about it like Glenn and you meet someone who it’s not a historical document. It is his past. His memories were his reality. So you learn aboub this place from all these different levels.
Also for me, it was an amazing experience.
Bianca Stigter: I wanted to include in a certain moment – the reel of celluolid in the documentary. Because even for us, it is a thing to realize that old film is really something material. It is not pixels, and virtual and in the cloud. It is really made of plastic and gelatin and tangible objects.
Here you have something that is a very – an object that you can have a relationship with that is real. With (digital) it’s so easy to make fakes and your whole relationship with the moving image is changing.
Thank you for your time and I really appreciated your documentary.
Glenn Kurtz: Thank you.
Bianca Stigter: Thank you.
Check out the audio version of this interview:
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!
