Schindlers List - Background and Analysis - Essay Example

Schindler’s List: Its Background and Analysis Schindler‘s List altered the career and reputation of its director and producer Steven Spielberg from a Hollywood director known for fantasy blockbusters into an Academy-Award winning director capable of making profound films. The film also restored his pride in his Jewish heritage, a heritage he has ignored for many years while growing up in Arizona and when he faced anti-Semitism from his high school classmates in California. Spielberg rendered the film’s title character as, appropriately, an obviously flawed man who initially hired Jews for his enamel factory workforce because they’re inexpensive labour. Schindler is portrayed as a self-absorbed, materialistic philanderer who dabbled in the black market, purchasing jewellery and fur coats to bribe the Nazis. He later resolves to rescue the Jews only after witnessing the horrors that occur in the Krakow and Plaszow concentration camps of Poland. At the time of its release in December1993, the film mirrored the horrors of genocide around the world, most notably in former Yugoslavia. Influenced by the current events of the times, Spielberg also wanted to make the film to remind viewers of the first Holocaust … and to remind them that a second one could occur. A New York Times book review of Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s List, presented to him by MCA president Sidney Sheinberg, first interested Spielberg back in the 1980s, yet Spielberg at the time didn’t feel right about making the film. According to the former president of Amblin entertainment, Kathleen Kennedy, when Spielberg finally resolved to bring the screen adaptation to fruition in the 1990s, he had a more “emotional maturity” (Perlez, 1993) than in the 1980s, adding that Spielberg has spent 12 of his then-15 year old career discussing the film. “I’ve never seen him so passionately involved in something,” she said (Perlez, 1993). Schindler’s conflicting personality traits was another reason Spielberg wanted to produce and direct the film; he was intrigued by the fact that the rescuer of about 1,200 Jews was was a vain, attention-seeking German Nazi spy. “He provided women, cognac, perishables—things you couldn’t get except through the black market,” Spielberg said. “He threw good parties, pimped and did some wenching himself. He had a great awareness of his charisma and he used it as if Eastern Europe during World War II were one great confidence game” (as qtd. in Fensch, 52-53). Spielberg reflected on the genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Middle East that also prompted him to make the film: “We were racing over these moments in world history that were exactly like what happened in 1943” (as qtd. in Fensch, 60). He thought about one question during the film’s production: “What would drive a man like this to suddenly take everything he had earned and put it all in the service of saving these lives?” (as qtd. in Fensch, 53) For research, Spielberg interviewed several of Schindlerjuden (Schindler’s Jews in German), many of whom appear as themselves at the end of the film visiting Schindler’s real-life grave in Israel and placing stones on his tombstone, a customary Jewish act of respect. When he questioned the Schindlerjuden about Schindler’s possible reason for rescuing them, they said they only cared that Schindler helped them at all (Fensch, 53). The film was shot mostly in black and white; the only coloured portions were the opening scene, when the surviving Jews sing their prayers, and when the Schindlerjuden visit their rescuer’s grave. In the first scene, the camera takes a close-up shot of the candle as its flame is extinguished. Then the scene changes from the candle’s smoke to steam blowing from a train’s smokestack in black and white, bringing the film into wartime Europe. Spielberg conceived of the opening scene when he almost completed production. The only splash of colour throughout the film’s black and white portions is depicted in a Jewish girl’s coat as she runs through the streets, sneaks into a building, and crawls underneath a bed to hide from Nazis as they carry out yet another one of their murderous raids. Schindler, from atop a hill on horseback, views the red-cloaked girl. When Schindler goes to a death camp, where the living Jews have the unfortunate task of disposing and cremating their deceased, he sees the same girl as a corpse being wheeled about. The fully-coloured scenes symbolise the “glint of color” and a glimmer of hope,” according to Spielberg (Fensch, 74). “I thought it (the film’s opening scene) would be a rich book-end, to start the film with a normal Shabbes service before the juggernaut against the Jews begins,” he added (Fensch, 74). Spielberg, who previously established himself as a director by using fancifulness in such blockbuster fantasy and science fiction films as E.T., the Indiana Jones films, and Jurassic Park, acknowledged that to effectively convey the sorrow and seriousness of the film’s subject, he should film Schindler’s List with the profound subtly of a documentary (Fensch, 55 and 57). “All the photos of the Holocaust are in black and white. In color, they look Hollywoodized,” Spielberg said (Perlez, 1993). Bob Dorian, an American Movie Classics television host, explained the different effects a black and white film and a coloured film have: Color shows the texture of objects. Black and white reveals the essence. The focus is much stronger, it gets you into the story much quicker. Roger Ebert once said that with color, you notice the fabric of a woman’s dress as she enters a room. With black and white, you admire the form underneath (as qtd. in Fensch, 111). Film studies professor Richard Brown of the New School for Social Research said, “The (black and white) photography literally becomes a character that is critical to the understanding of the film. Black and white gives the movie weight and gravity, and suggests the filmmaker approached his difficult subject with understanding and humility” (as qtd. in Fensch, 110). Most of the actors the director used in this film were relatively unknown at the time. They were not even from the United States. The Catholic Polish and the Israelis portrayed minor Jewish parts. The only noted star in the film is the award-winning Ben Kingsley as Schindler’s Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern (a part Spielberg sought to cast first). Irish actor Liam Neeson plays Schindler. Spielberg viewed Neeson’s work in the play Anna Christie. He eventually asked Neeson to portray the film’s title character after “Spielberg’s mother in-law- met Neeson (backstage after a performance), who put a comforting arm around her. As they were leaving, Capshaw turned to Spielberg and said, ‘That’s what Schindler would have done’” (Fensch, 70). British actor Ralph Fiennes portrays Amon Goeth, the brutal SS commander whom Schindler befriends and eventually bribes in order to collect the Jews for his workforce (and freedom) in the film (Fensch, p. 70). One of the film’s producers Bruno Lustig plays the headwaiter that welcomes Schindler into a restaurant at the beginning of the film. Lustig himself supervised the appropriate location of the number tattoos that many extras had to wear, which is the lower left arm, the same spot where his number, 83317, was etched during his ordeal at Auschwitz (Perlez, 1993). To give the film the spontaneity approach, and therefore a more credible atmosphere, Spielberg did not used any special cameras, such as the dolly or the crane, for filming. Much of Schindler’s List was filmed with hand-held cameras. He deliberately procrastinated in planning camera shots. Spielberg once said to Neeson before filming the scene where Schindler persuades Goeth to permit Schindler to set his Schindlerjuden free: I know how to do it! You’re going to be outside, and I’m going to be inside with the camera on you, and I’m gonna just keep the camera steady and you walk into the shot and walk out again. The scene is so important I’m going to throw it away” (as qtd. in Fensch, 71). Even though a scene is somewhat erroneously acted out, or a camera hasn’t properly captured an image, Spielberg resumed filming the scene. Neeson commented on Spielberg’s filmmaking style on the set, “Actually, Steven’s direction on Schindler was a bit like Woody Allen. We didn’t know how he was going to shoot a scene. You just had to be prepared in not being prepared” (as qtd. in Fensch, 71). Spielberg and the studios debated Schindler’s characterisation. The studios wanted a “big Hollywood catharsis,” according to Spielberg, meaning the studios wanted Schindler to have the abrupt and dramatic revelation that he must rescue the Jews from the concentration camps, and then to carry out his plan (Fensch, 69). “That was the last thing I wanted,” Spielberg said. “I did not want to bring in a Camille moment, some kind of explosive catharsis that would turn this into The Great Escape” (as qtd. in Fensch, 69). One controversy that surrounded the film’s production was Spielberg’s choice to use Auschwitz as the on-location site for the recreation of the death camps. The newswire Reuters (1993) reported for the New York Times that though Spielberg used gas chamber replicas, the World Jewish Congress didn’t want the production to take place on a land that so many of their people have perished on. The World Jewish Congress also disliked the fact that Spielberg solicited permission from the Polish Government instead of the council that supervises the Auschwitz State Museum. The Congress believed that Spielberg’s on-location filming at Auschwitz would trivialize the horrors that occurred there, and thus encourage on-site defilement (Jews try to half Auschwitz filming, 1993). Spielberg credits Schindler’s List for fully embracing his long-denied Jewish background. When he was very young, his family lived in Arizona, where they were “the only Jews on a block of 200 homes” (as qtd. in Fensch, 53). Spielberg experienced full-frontal anti-Semitism after his family relocated to California; the students at Spielberg’s new high school harassed him and even pelted coins at him. It was so terrible for him that even though his high school was only a “walking distance” from his house (as qtd. In Fensch, 54), his mother had to pick him up in a jeep (Fensch, 54). Edward Guthmann (1995) quoted Spielberg in an article for the San Francisco Chronicle as he spoke of his experiences with anti-Semitism in school: “I wanted to belong to the majority and the Jews weren’t it then. And I think that as I grew up, I stopped caring about that sort of thing. My Judaism became less of a shondeh (shame)” (as qtd. in Fensch, 54). Schindler’s List not only helped Spielberg rediscover with his Jewish heritage, but also enabled him to share his religion with his wife Kate Capshaw, who converted to Judaism prior to their marriage, and their five children. Spielberg joined her in the conversion, and said he doesn’t believe he “was really trained properly. I think it would have stuck with me a lot longer had the training been less like going to the dentist and having my teeth pulled” (Fensch, 54). Spielberg said that her also was able to bond again with Judaism by instructing his children about the religion (Fensch, 54). The director said that he was always “frightened” (as qtd. in Fensch, 61) about confronting his feelings while making Schindler’s List because this is the first film he had emotionally immersed himself in. According to Spielberg, he always catered to the audience’s entertainment tastes with his films. “Now I go to Poland and I get hit in the face with my personal life. My upbringing. My Jewishness …I cried all the time. I never cry on sets making films. I’ve often protected myself with the movie camera,” Spielberg said (Fensch, 61). Spielberg speaks further about his emotional experiences while filming Schindler’s List: So every single day was like waking up and going to hell, really. There were no jokes on the set. No funny outtakes to show at the wrap part. Twice in the production I called Robin Williams just to say, Robin, I haven’t laughed in seven weeks. Help me here. And Robin would do 20 minutes on the telephone (as qtd. in Fensch, 62). Many critics have showered accolades on the film when it opened in December 1993. Janet Maslin (1993) of the New York Times writes, “With every frame, he demonstrates the power of the film maker to distill complex events into fiercely indelible images.” According to Frank Rich (1994) of the same newspaper however, a few discrepancies exist in the film. The one that bothered him the most is the lack of emotion connection the audience could have made with the imprisoned Jews. Most of them don’t the singular character traits that could have made them inimitable: “They (the Jews) blur into abstraction, becoming another depersonalised statistic of mass death. Since Schindler is also presented as a psychological blank, no wonder the unhinged Nazi commander (Ralph Fiennes) runs away with the movie” (Rich, 1994). According to Rich, a film critic for a Jewish newspaper writes that Itzhak Stern, as a film character, is the “king of the wimps” (as qtd. in Rich, 1994). He also writes that the few final scenes render as too much of the poetic justice found in so many Hollywood film endings, including the scene where Goeth is executed for his crimes. Rich criticizes that the Jews gawked at Schindler as he is speaking to them in his factory “as though he were the levitating mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind” Rich concludes his article by writing, “Schindler’s List is good news for everyone, it seems, except its shadowy and often nameless extras, the six million dead.” In response to Rich’s article, Sophie Veffer (1994), a Jew who has survived the Holocaust, writes an editorial letter saying that Spielberg was correct in filming the Jews that the audience seemingly cannot identify or personally connect with. That is “the movie’s strength and central focus” (Veffer 1994). The reason is that the Nazis had taken care in seeing that slowly, all aspects of the Jews’ customary lifestyles were taken away from them, and that their psychological and emotional strengths would deteriorate as a result., this would make it easier for the Nazis to destroy the Jews when the latter are sent to death camps. “Jews did not have the luxury of bringing individuality to this macabre world of annihilation. To survive, Jews had to be nameless with no past and no future” (Veffer, 1994). At the time of the film’s release, genocides were occurring in Bosnia and Rwanda, where the Hutu tribe was annihilating the Tutsi tribe (Fensch, 205). The then-president Bill Clinton was pondering about Bosnia, but decided not to because, according to the writer Jonathan Alter of Newsweek wrote, “the American people do not want him to” (Fensch, 200-201). Alter asked him if Schindler’s List helped him to reconsider his Bosnia policy. The president said to the reporter: The most troubling thing to me about Schindler’s List was being reminded that we turned away boatloads of Jews…. And so, we are now engaged in the longest humanitarian airlift in American history in Bosnia…. (The film) didn’t make me think we should have put huge numbers of soldiers on the ground (in Bosnia) to try to stop them. It did make me think we cannot afford to be totally disengaged (as qtd. in Fensch, 200). Professor at Cornell University Stephen T. Katz said that the Holocaust is history’s sole example of a real genocide. After one decade and over one thousand pages that fill three volumes, including 3,000 pages of footnotes, he concluded that out of all the historical racism incidents, such as slavery (anywhere), the Crusades, and even the murders in Bosnia and Rwanda, that none of them constitute as actual genocide. The Holocaust can be considered the one authentic genocide because by definition, a genocide is the mindful and purposeful attempt to annihilate a certain group based on religion or ethnicity, and the Nazis’ purpose of the Holocaust was to eliminate all Jews. The Catholics never made a legal attempt to murder all the Jews the way Germany has (though the tension between the Jews and gentiles existed for about two millennia). Brutality, sadism, or the reign of a dictatorship is not enough to call violence toward a certain group “genocide” (Fensch, 202-206). Katz writes in his book: Employing this definition we can begin to recognise that Assyrian, Babylonia, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, and Crusade policy was cruel, but not every cruelty is genocide. That Hun, Muslim, Mughal, Imperial Japanese, Mongol, and conquistador behaviour was tyrannical, but not every tyranny is genocide. That slavery—ancient, Caribbean, and American is an abomination, but not every abomination is genocide” (as qtd. in Fensch, p. 205). Several of the Schindlerjuden who watched the film thought the film was remarkable; they praised it for its toned-down approach to the Holocaust (making Schindler’s List dissimilar from several preceding films such as Shoah). Many of them felt as though they were reliving the Holocaust by watching such scenes where the Schindler asked the Nazis to spray the dehydrated Jews in train cars with a fire hose. The Schindlerjuden also believed that Spielberg has muted much of the actual atrocities; furthermore, the Schindlerjuden observed “that as portrayed by Liam Neeson, Schindler has been cleaned up a bit; in actuality, they say, he had the ruddy face and raspy voice of a heavy drinker” (Margolick, 1994). Schindler’s widow Emilie was invited by Spielberg to film the last portion of the film via a letter in 1993 (the director even mailed her airline tickets with the letter). In her memoir Where Light and Shadow Meet, about her life as Oskar Schindler’s wife, she discloses that she was finally able to meet the Schindlerjuden, their children, and grandchildren in Israel. She wrote that there were some details in the film that were found in the Keneally novel, rather than based on true events. She also wrote about an inaccuracy in the film. For instance, Emilie discloses that the scene where Schindler is witnessing the events at Krakow camp from horseback with his mistress was “bad taste,” but she never explains her reason (Schindler, 143). She writes that in the film, the German army owned the horses, but in real life, her husband bought those horses from his mistress (the one riding with him in the scene) to relieve her of economical debt. The reason Emilie sits in a wheelchair in the film’s final scene is “reliving the past affected me spiritually and physically” so much she fell sick (Schindler, 142). Schindler’s List “did not change my life much, except for the constant visits from reporters, always looking for news with which to fill their radio and television programs or pages in their newspaper and magazines” (Schindler, 143). Only realism and frankness can convey Schindler’s List, and only a Jewish person such as Spielberg, as raw as it may be to the director, can effectively bring to life the events and the protagonist. Schindler was far from perfect, and even the Schindlerjuden knew that, but if he were portrayed as the ideal hero, the type of hero found in several other Hollywood films, the audience would not connect with this film, and will only take the events portrayed in it lightly. Spielberg was careful in orchestrating of pathos without the melodrama, and to convey a sense of understanding without blatantly reminding the audience of the horrors. Spielberg knew that he had to take the opposite approach of the way he filmed his other pictures; he filmed in black and white, filled his cast with unknown performers, and gave more depth and complexity to Schindler, as opposed to rendering him as the Hollywood hero prototype. Schindler’s List is the type of film that must be watched by everyone whether or not anyone wants to. Jewish or Christian, black or white, this film reminds everyone that the Holocaust did occur. Though a professor claims that the Holocaust is the only actual genocide in human history, to witness anyone’s death because of a hate crime, a dictatorship, or terrorism is still a tragedy—in real life or on film. References FENSCH, T. (ed). 1995. Oskar Schindler and his list: the man, the book, the film, the Holocaust, and its survivors. Forest Dale, Vermont: Paul S. Erikkson. Jews try to halt Auschwitz filming. 1993. The New York times: 25. January 17. MARGOLICK, D. 1994. Schindler’s jews find deliverance again. The New York times: E1, E4, Feb. 13. MASLIN, J. 1994. Imagining the Holocaust to remember it. The New York times: C19, C23, Dec. 15. PERLEZ, J. 1993. Spielberg grapples with the horrors of the Holocaust. The New York times: 64, June 13. RICH, F. 1994. Extras in the shadows. The New York times: E9, Jan. 2. ROSENBERG, E. & SCHINDLER, E. 1996. Where light and shadow meet: a memoir. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Schindler’s list (videorecording) 1993, Director, Steven Spielberg. VEFFER, S. 1994. Movie shows how Nazis dehumanized Jews. The New York times: A20, Jan. 12. Read More