Three Minutes: A Lengthening

The film medium has often been discussed in academic terms as a vehicle to contain the passage of time. But “Three Minutes” does much more than that. Although it raises all sorts of issues about the nature of the film image and how it can affect us, it is also the least theoretical of movies. We are bearing witness.

A poetic meditation on film, history, and loss, Three Minutes – A Lengthening gives a glimpse into a lost world and then unpacks just how much can be learned from that brief fragment.

Stigter’s method is simultaneously creative and forensic, but never sentimental. Working with a digitized copy that bears the blemishes left by the deterioration of the original celluloid, she conjures up exactly what she declares in the subtitle: a lengthening.

Three Minutes – A Lengthening is not a ghost story, but it still feels haunting.

It grips the attention from start to finish.

The impression “Three Minutes” leaves is that it’s more probing than moving, more of a mystery to be unraveled than an emotional journey into who and what were lost. It’s still quite worthwhile as history and as a meditation on tragedy and the nature of filmed memory.

The truth is that even at 71 minutes much of this film feels padded, as though Stigter couldn’t let go of the subject but also wasn’t sure how to expand it further. Because Kurtz’s concept is so moving, however, the film retains much of the power he brought to his book.