| Collector's Corner January 2008
 Schindler's
List
- Starring: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph
Fiennes, Caroline Goodall
- Directed by: Steven Spielberg
- Theatrical release: 1993
- DVD release: 2004
- Video: 1.85:1 (widescreen)
- Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS-ES 5.1
- Released by: Universal Studios
A personal odyssey
Schindler’s List has been a challenge for me.
Steven Spielberg’s film about Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved
over a thousand Jewish prisoners from the Nazis during World War II, is one of our
greatest films. The American Film Institute places it at #8 of the Top 100 American Films
-- the only film made in the last quarter century to make that list. It was nominated for
12 Oscars and took home seven, including Best Picture and Best Director. Its list of other
awards is pages long. So what’s been my problem?
Two unrelated assumptions led me down a road of mistrust.
I’m not proud of the second one, but just in case you’ve had the same problem
with Schindler’s List, I offer you my odyssey.
In 1993, the year of the film’s release, I had a lot
of respect for Steven Spielberg: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
E.T. -- he was a great entertainer, if somewhat shallowly going for the emotions
rather than taking the time to make them resonate. Even his failures, though, such as 1941,
were worth watching.
But in the mid-1980s, Spielberg decided it was about time
everyone looked up to him as a serious film auteur, and set about making preachy films.
Audiences left feeling as if a nun had spent two and a half hours spanking them with a
ruler. When Spielberg still didn’t get his Oscar, he started throwing fits. The
Academy gave in and offered him their Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, but that
wasn’t good enough.
So when Schindler’s List came out, I was
certain -- certain -- that it was another ploy on the part of a whiny Hollywood
type anxious for more respect. Reason No.1 for my distrust.
Despite my concerns, I went to the theater to see Schindler’s
List, and was impressed with the artistic photography and the quality of the acting. I
cried my eyes out at the end. But when I left the theater, my guard went up as Reason No.2
reared its head. Was Spielberg exaggerating? Did any of the atrocities depicted in the
film actually happen? I knew there was a terrible Holocaust, but was that level of cruelty
possible? Plus, every Jewish person seemed angelic, while every Nazi seemed to have
infants’ entrails dripping from his psychotically smirking mouth. Things
couldn’t have been that simple.
I also wondered if Spielberg wasn’t manipulating us
with something fictional that he was selling as fact. I even thought Spielberg had
predicted that his critics would charge him with embellishing the anguish to add to the
power, and that that had been his reason for ending the film the way he did. I won’t
spoil it for the few of you who’ve never seen it, but the ending raises the stakes of
the question of veracity.
It all changed when I went to Poland. We drove from Vienna
to Kraków, over the beautiful Tatras Mountains. As we neared the city, we saw huge
industrial plants surrounding the town, most of them closed. They had been built by the
Soviets to spew pollution on Kraków, a punishment for the city’s having too many
intellectuals. Stalinism and smart people don’t mix.
The Poles have been screwed by everyone in Europe:
Prussians, Hapsburgs, Russians, and a multitude of others. The country was so used to
being overrun that they had no fight left in them. This is why Kraków, with its thriving
Jewish community, could sit back and allow the Nazis to build Auschwitz and Birkenau just
a few miles away.
There was one other good reason: If the Nazis suspected you
of offering aid to any of the groups Hitler was trying to exterminate -- Jews,
homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses -- you were put in front of a wall and
executed by firing squad. No trial, no tribunal, no appeal, but summary execution at the
moment you were suspected. Despite the threat, some still helped, but most people just
tried to stay out of trouble and survive the war.
We went to the Jewish City of Kazimierz, a district of
Kraków, with a private guide. She was a student of history whose father had been in
Kraków during the Nazi regime and had been a professor of Economics at the university
during the Soviet reign. As we walked around, she mentioned Spielberg, and I thought I had
my chance to prove what I thought about his disreputable reasons for making Schindler’s
List.
Instead, she talked about how much the people of Poland
loved Spielberg. He had been generous to the people, offering work to locals who needed
jobs, respect to the few elderly Jews who still lived in the area, and money to help
renovate places the Soviets had wanted to destroy. The WWII survivors all felt that
Spielberg had created a perfect representation of the truth. The people considered
Spielberg to be one of their own.
Then she took us to Oskar Schindler’s factory. We
walked up a tall set of stairs to Schindler’s office. I sat at his desk and looked
down at the factory, trying to remember the film. Again Spielberg’s generosity came
up, this time in the help he’d given to preserve the factory. I was surprised to hear
all these things about Spielberg, but still held on to my belief that he’d overblown
the drama. Then we went to Auschwitz.
When we walked through the gates, there were two circles of
Israeli children sitting on the ground, listening to their teachers tell stories. Like
junior high students everywhere, they looked bored, more interested in the opposite sex
than in Auschwitz. As we walked on, we ran into a few hundred Israeli soldiers. I
don’t understand Hebrew, but it wasn’t hard to imagine that their commanders
were telling them "This is why we fight." Many of the soldiers were crying. One
soldier carried a backpack filled with small Israeli flags. He looked for bullet holes in
walls, and everywhere he found one, he inserted a flag.
We entered the buildings, one by one. There was one room
about 50’ long, glass on one side. Behind the glass, standing about 4’ high and
6’ deep, was a mound of human hair. This was what was left when the camp was
liberated in 1945. During the years of Auschwitz’s operation, most of the hair had to
fill German pillows or to be woven into socks and blankets.
We went to the camp doctor’s office, whose inhabitant,
Josef Mengele, had obviously missed the first line in the Hippocratic Oath. He would stand
at the train stop and, as people stumbled out of the boxcars, point them in one of four
directions. Sturdy men went to the work camps. Women went to work for the officers, either
as cooks, cleaners, or sex toys. Another group went to the hospital to be used in
frightening experiments. The Nazis took anyone left over -- children, the elderly and
crippled -- to a ditch and machine-gunned them.
By the time I left Auschwitz, I was wondering if Spielberg
hadn’t been a little too cool in his treatment of the Nazis.
Watching Schindler’s List with new eyes
In 1993, I saw Schindler’s List as a well-made
film with suspicious goals. Watching it 14 years later, after my visits to Kraków and
Auschwitz, was revelatory. What I had seen as Spielberg’s arrogant and dubious
twisting of the audience’s emotions now looked like genius. His efforts to rub our
faces in the brutality and misery now rang true. Had he gone to the trouble of really
showing the terror, the film’s 195-minute running time could have easily run to eight
or nine hours. Instead, he compacts time by putting us right in the middle of the panic.
Yes, he chooses emotionalism over didacticism, but that’s how he keeps the film
moving
 He also leaves us wondering about
Oskar Schindler, a womanizer, Nazi, and con man who nonetheless risked his life to save
1100 Jews from certain extermination. Liam Neeson, making no attempt to hide his Irish
accent, carries the role off brilliantly. He’s at once smarmy and noble, a fox on the
trail of profit with an idea of using Jewish money to finance his new company. Even Ralph
Fiennes’ over-the-top rendition of Göth, the Commandant of Plaszów, a concentration
camp near Kraków, no longer seems quite so cartoonish. I now know there were Nazis even
worse. Ben Kingsley comes off as a little too saintly, but his character is the moral
center of a time desperately in need of one.
As always in a Spielberg film, the photography and editing
draw us right into the action. The great bulk of the film is in black-and-white, and these
scenes are the most effective, simultaneously reminding us of the film’s artifice
while forcing us to focus on the art. John Williams’ musical score, and especially
Itzhak Perlman’s soulful playing, enhance the drama in all the ways we would hope.
The DVD is clear and clean; I can’t wait to see the
HD DVD. And for once, the extras genuinely enhance the experience. Best is the
78-minute Voices from the List, which gives you the opportunity to hear the
survivors themselves.
The odyssey continues
I had originally intended to write a review of Schindler’s
List, cover a few interesting facts, and mention in passing that, after visiting
Poland, I’d come to learn that the Nazis were as bad as Spielberg represents them.
When I began to research the facts, I learned a few things that finally allayed my
apprehensions about Spielberg’s intentions.
When Spielberg first talked with Universal about making the
film, they told him he should just make a donation so that he’d feel better, then go
make a good scary film. That made him angry, so he instead negotiated a deal: He’d
give them a blockbuster -- it turned out to be Jurassic Park -- if they’d
green-light Schindler’s List.
In the beginning, he wanted only to produce the film and
hire someone else to direct. Martin Scorsese turned it down, saying it should be directed
by a Jew. Roman Polanski didn’t think he could make it through the project without
being haunted by his own childhood in Kazimierz and the death of his mother at Auschwitz.
Spielberg even talked to Billy Wilder, himself a Jewish refugee. Wilder nearly said yes,
then remembered that he’d retired because he hated dealing with the studios. Finally,
Wilder convinced Spielberg to do it himself.
So instead of Spielberg making Schindler’s List
in a greedy pursuit of the Best Director Oscar, as I had believed, he actually tried hard
to get someone else to do the job.
Making the movie changed Spielberg’s life. Being in
Poland, talking to the survivors, learning the facts of the Nazis’ inhumanity -- it
all stirred his soul. He became more committed to his religion and his people. He decided
to forgo any salary, calling it "blood money." All his residuals and royalties,
which would certainly have come to tens of millions of dollars, went to the Shoah
Foundation, which films survivors from holocausts around the world so that people can get
a sense of the pure evil of genocide.
With maniacal world leaders claiming that the Holocaust
never happened, and zealots from every religion trying to destroy each other, we now need Schindler’s
List more than ever. In the 20th century, power-hungry despots murdered more than
20,000,000 people in their genocidal insanity. Armenians, Ukrainians, Chinese, Jews,
Cambodians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Chechnyans, Burmese, Congolese, the Sudanese of Darfur --
all have been systematically killed, and none of these groups has had the power or ability
to focus global attention on their problems. The world just stands by and watches.
In Voices from the List, Spielberg says that delving
into the character of Oskar Schindler taught him a very important lesson: one person can
change the world. Now he’s trying to be one of those people himself. He used Schindler’s
List to try to remind people to be vigilant, and now he’s funding the Shoah
Foundation as a voice for the victims.
Perhaps Schindler’s List had a life-changing
effect on you from the very beginning. But if any of you reading this are like me, and
came to its importance circuitously, or haven’t yet, I urge you to watch it soon. And
remember: the reality was far worse.
...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com |
