The Film "Spell Your Name" is infuriating.

Not in the sense that hearing about Nazi violence and cruelty is infuriating but in the way that the film itself was a waste. It is also infuriating to think that someone could actually make an account of the Holocaust boring. During the USC Shoah Foundation Institute's showing of the film last Sunday at the Norris Theatre on campus, at least three people were spotted nodding off before the film was even halfway done.

Director Sergey Bukovsky had in his possession hundreds of thousands of hours of footage from testimonies of Holocaust survivors from Ukraine. This resource should have been treated like gold. Instead of presenting the interviews in a well conceived manner that let them speak for themselves and in a sense breathe life into the testimonies, Bukovsky stifled them. He turned the interviews into mere accessories to his mindless attempts at creating an artsy film.

The interviews were cut short and edited in a way that made them choppy and rushed. In the middle of a survivor telling an account, the camera pans away to a random area of the room or outside to a scene of a town covered in snow. Interspersed between the harrowing accounts of the brutal killings, murders and immense suffering that went on during the Holocaust were random shots of ice on a lake, a limping dog, and scene after scene of a train window.

Random? Yes.

Necessary? Absolutely not.

Bukovsky also introduced the viewer to an elderly Ukrainian couple living in an old, abandoned synagogue. In one of his many voice-over narratives throughout the film, Bukovsky explains that the couple refused to speak on camera. Apparently he thought it was vital to continue to show them performing mundane tasks throughout the film instead. He literally showed the couple eating at a table, sleeping and walking around their house multiple times for no conceivable reason. He also spliced them into interviews with survivors; an effect that was completely distracting to the viewer and took away from the profundity of the interviews.

Despite all of the nonsense presented along with the interviews, the survivors themselves saved the film from being a complete failure. One woman recounted a Nazi soldier killing a crying baby by smashing it against a brick wall, then tossing the baby back to its mother. Another woman spoke methodically of the months she spent hidden in a chimney and of the way it sucked the humanity from her very existence. These are the stories that were begging to be told - that Bukovsky would rather cover up or cut short with a long shot of some snow.

In another poignant moment, one of the students who transcribed the Holocaust interviews for the film was asked if she would want to be Jewish.
"Now or then?" she replied. Then. After a short deliberation, she decided she would not.

But such personal moments are all too rare, being drowned out instead by self-conscious film-making. Towards the end, Bukovsky attempts to make a point about why a subway, instead of a memorial, was built on a site where mass killings of Jews took place during the Holocaust in Ukraine. To make this point, he showed himself walking through the subway, talking on the phone. It was nauseating to watch as the cameraman apparently mistook the film for the Blair Witch Project and decided to shake, rattle and roll with every step.

If Bukovsky would have just let the interviews speak for themselves, without all the mindless clutter he shoved in, this could have been a truly amazing film. It's hard to believe that out of all the people who worked on the film, no one had the courage to tell him that the film could have been half as long and done completely without his narration. Instead, it was an utter waste of some truly extraordinary footage.