In 1980, novelist Thomas Keneally would enter a briefcase shop owned by Poldek Pfefferberg. After learning he was a writer, Pfefferberg showed Keneally his extensive collection of documents about Oskar Schindler, the man who saved him – and 1200 other Jews – from the Nazi death camps. After two hours of talking, Keneally agreed to write a book about the man. “Schindler's Ark,” published two years later, became a best seller. Coincidentally, Pfefferberg was friends with Steven Spielberg's mother. He had been trying to get a movie about Schindler made since the sixties and seemed certain Spielberg was the right man to finally bring the story to theater screens. The director, however, wasn't sure he was mature enough to make a movie about the Holocaust. He spent the eighties trying to convince other filmmakers – ranging from Martin Scorsese to Roman Polanski and Brian De Palma – to direct it instead. Yet the distressing rise of antisemitism and Holocaust denial in the early nineties, as well as a pep talk from Billy Wilder, finally gave Spielberg the courage to make “Schindler's List.” The film would, of course, change the director's career and become one of the most acclaimed and important movies of the decade.
In 1939, Nazi Germany conquers Poland. In the city of Kraków, the local Jewish population is forced into the ghettos. Oskar Schindler, a Czech-born member of the Nazi Party, moves into the city to open an enamelware factory. He hires a Jewish accountant, Itzhak Stern, to fill the worker positions with desperate Jewish workers. By listing them as “essential workers,” Stern keeps many people out of the concentration camps. Schindler, meanwhile, is only interested in money and women. SS lieutenant Amon Göth arrives to build the Plaszów camps, leading to the liquidation – systematic slaughtering or imprisonment – of every Jew in the ghetto. Becoming increasingly effected by the horrors he witnesses, Schindler works harder to keep Jewish prisoners employed in his factory and protected from the tortures of the camps while hiding the truth from the Nazi forces.
It's all too understandable why Spielberg was reluctant to make a movie about the Holocaust. Not just because he, personally, specialized mostly in popcorn cinema before this point. There's a reasonable case to be made that the horrors of the Holocaust are so insurmountable that any fictionalized retelling of them is irresponsible. Perhaps such events, any genocide anywhere, should only be told in a documentary context. Trying to make "entertainment" out of the systematic murder of millions of people is morally offensive, right? As a Jewish man himself, one can only assume that Spielberg was aware of these difficulties. “Schindler's List” stands apart from his earlier movies for its sheer commitment to realism. The director and his team seemed to take the philosophy of, if these events must be retold as fiction, they must be approached in as realistic a manner as possible.
To portray such horrific historical events, and to avoid sensationalizing them as much as possible, Spielberg and his team sought to create a documentary-like air. "Schindler's List" frequently uses title cards, to establish locations and historical context, much the way a documentary would. Spielberg intentionally did not storyboard the film, to increase a sense of on-the-spot verisimilitude. This is most evident during a sequence where Jews inside the Plaszów camps are forced to strip and run laps, to determine who is healthy enough to work and who is to be killed. The camera work is shaky and handheld here, to make it easier for us to imagine that we are there. These events happened and the film is visually constructed in such a way as to always remind us of that, to impose the reality of these horrors on the viewer.
This is most apparent during the film's treatment of violence. The death onscreen is often depicted as bluntly as possible, bodies jerking backwards and folding to the ground in a totally lifeless fashion. There is no "cool" movie violence in "Schindler's List." The only effect is to horrify the audience with depictions of such brutality and slaughter. The liquidation of the ghetto – which is such a sterile name for such a vicious act – begins with little warning. In a tumultuous series of scenes, we see human souls reduced to nothing but limp meat. Machine gun fire rains out, cruelly assaulting the viewers' senses every time, as blood and feathers from mattresses fly. There is no orchestral music in this scene, to further emphasize the horrible reality of it. Nazi soldiers bicker among themselves, play piano, and even mock the survivors as the killing goes on around them. It is perhaps the best example of how the film sets out to make these then-54 year old events feel as real, as raw, and as awful to viewers as possible.
Ultimately, "Schindler's List" is Spielberg's most visually disciplined film. Every directorial choice has a clearly defined purpose behind it. Janusz Kaminski's black-and-white cinematography is clearly designed to bring the stark horrors of these events into further contrast. It recalls what would've been documentary footage of the time. Yet it is stylized at times too. The Nazi officers, and Schindler in his most conflicted moments, are often shrouded in shadows, to cause us to further reflect on the obscure movement of the mind that brought them to this place. The only example of stylized violence in the film is when a one-armed worker is murdered out in the snow. The camera watches his blood spread over the white snow, as if the purity of the land is being sullied. It is a visual foreshadowing of the pain and death that was only beginning.
“Schindler's List” depictions of real events forces us to grapple with another question: How does something like this even happen? An idea the movie returns to over and over again is the way Jewish people were dehumanized by the Nazi government. Early on, groups of Polish Jews are reduced down to a list of names. Among the film's many difficult-to-watch sequences involves Amon Göth's treatment of Helen Hirsch, the Jewish woman he has conscripted to be his maid and mistress. He's sexually attracted to her. Yet any time it seems like he may have actual feelings for the girl, he reduces her again to something less than human, beating her and blaming her for his attraction to her. His philosophy, enforced by the state, causes him to consider someone he clearly sees as a living being as nothing more than vermin. A few times throughout “Schindler's List,” we see German citizens sneering at the Jews, throwing things at them and yelling. This is what happens when an entire race of people are othered by those in power. When they cease to be human in the public's eyes, it makes their extermination seem more acceptable. “How was the Holocaust allowed to happen?” is a question with many different answers but a successful propaganda campaign, playing on centuries of bigotry, to make people believe other human beings are not like them is certainly a big component.
"Schindler's List" is a film about good and evil but not in broad, abstract strokes. Amon Göth was undeniably a monstrous human being. His actions, literal random acts of murder and cruelty, can only be described as sadistic. The film depicts him as a man obsessed with power, with the ability to exert that power over other living things. The Nazi philosophy, which elevates the self-defined "pure" individual over countless other people who have been deemed "inferior," obviously appeals to men like Göth. Men who can only define themselves in contrast to those they consider less important. The thirst for power is the search for self-actualization, to make oneself feel important. Nazism – and all fascism – bends this in the most sickening direction, as it strips away empathy for our fellow humans to make the self feel stronger and more momentous, in pursuit of a political body's goals.
Yet even this does not strike me as the most despicable thing about Göth. During the slaughter in the ghetto, he complains to his fellow officer that it's a tedious, drawn-out process. The murder and imprisoning of countless humans is just a job to him. It means nothing but a long, boring day at work to this man. Later, while attempting to execute a metal-worker for the pettiest reason possible, Göth becomes repeatedly frustrated by his gun refusing to fire. He's more upset that his weapon isn't working, that his daily routine of executions is interrupted, then he is by a person suffering. And what causes him to ultimately turn away from Schindler's plan to protect people? A bribe. A briefcase full of money that the camera focuses on for a solid minute. When Spielberg pans over countless shelves full of gold and silver objects taken from Jewish homes, or devotes a montage to Schindler's sexual conquest, he's showing us that evil is not complicated. It's greedy. It's selfish. It's the decision to go about your day while others are suffering. It's the ability of the human brain to zero in only on the self – to treat the systematic killing of millions as just another day at the office – that is the truest evil of all. And that's something that's inside all of us.
To what purpose do you include moments like this in a film about the Holocaust? Why are you trying to build suspense in the true story about how six million lives were exterminated? I also feel this conflict as “Schindler's List's” perfectly paced three-hour-and-fifteen minute run time winds down. After the war ends, Oskar flees Poland and the incoming Soviet army. The workers in the factory thank him for all he's done but Schindler breaks down in tears, saying that he could have done more. This is the only reasonable response. Oskar Schindler saved more than a thousand people, which is amazing, but it does nothing to bring back the millions more who were lost. This lack of catharsis is reflected in another ending scene, when Amon Göth's execution is delayed by the chair under his noose refusing to give way. Yet Spielberg still goes for the inspirational ending, emphasizing those that were saved in the final moments. The real life survivors appear on-camera to pay tribute to the complicated, achingly human man who protected them. That's a story worth telling, yes. But it still feels weird to end a film like this on even a somberly triumphant note.
Regardless of the fraught balance between history and emotional storytelling apparent in “Schindler's List,” there's no denying that it's an extraordinarily well-made film. The cinematography is gorgeous. The production design and costumes are flawless. The editing insures that every on-screen act conveys just the meaning that was intended. John Williams' score is elegant and powerful, incorporating melodies from traditional Jewish folk music. All the cast do incredible work. Liam Neeson essentially gives a double performance, as the Oskar Schindler that the Nazis saw and the true man that helped the Jewish workers. He always finds the complications and complexities between the two. Ralph Fiennes is consistently terrifying as Göth. Embeth Davidtz is heartbreaking as Helen, a woman constantly pushed pass her breaking point. Ben Kingsley does some of the most subtle acting of his career as Itzhak Stern. There's no doubt that everyone involved in this production approached the material with the utmost seriousness it demanded.
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