Bianca Stigter’s recent documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening is based on a short home movie taken by an American tourist in the Polish town of Nasielsk in 1938. The same section of film appears again and again, accompanied by commentary and testimonies, slowed down, zoomed in on and freeze-framed. Yet these everyday images of Jewish life acquire an extraordinary poignancy because we know that almost everyone on screen will soon be caught up and killed in the Holocaust.
Something of the same spirit pervades Philip Hoy’s striking essay-length book M Degas Steps Out. When he went to an exhibition about Edgar Degas in 2011, he became “totally mesmerised” by a nine-second film clip of the ageing painter walking down a Paris street. So he downloaded it on to his computer, slowed it down and broke it up into 250 stills, 42 of which are included here. Just before the screen fades to black, we witness what he describes as a “beatific” moment as a passing young woman turns towards us, “we register how beautiful she is” and she “positively beams at [the camera], and in so doing beams at us as well” – and “the more than one hundred years which separate us are wholly annulled”.
