Le intenzioni della memoria. Ipotesi per una teleologia semiotica da Das Ghetto a A Film Unfinished

In 1942 a troupe of German servicemen shot a film in the ghetto of Varsavia which was subsequently found in an archive only in the 1960s. For over 30 years historians used this film as a base for their studies of life in the ghetto. In 1998, however, another reel was discovered containing elements which had been excluded from the first, and which made it clear that the situations shown in Das Ghetto were for the most fruit of a mis–en–scene, staged by the Nazis for purposes of propaganda. Historians had placed their trust in a text without knowing its context. In 2010, Israeli director Yael Hersonski produced A Film Unfinished, for the first time including in the same film Das Ghetto and the revealing 1998 reel, and editing everything together with testimonies of survivors and extracts from diaries and documents belonging to those who had lived in the ghetto. The result is a film of rare complexity, where numerous layers of intentionality are entwined. The aim of this essay is to propose an analysis of the dialectic of intentions inscribed in A Film Unfinished and how this relates to Das Ghetto. Parallel to the narrative and formal inquiry, it will be necessary to re–examine the paradigm of “textual autonomy” and define the way in which semiotics can interface with historical research through intentional analysis.