Schindler’s List - Spielberg (1993)

Spielberg has succeeded in bringing life to Europe’s defining ethnic cleansing event. The opening scenes are abuzz with a Rockwellesque multiplicity of Jew-types filing en masse into ghetto-life. Spielberg may be more than a commercial artist, as Rockwell has been dismissed as being, but he definitely has something to sell us. Don't be put off by the dreary subject, or the fact that Schindler didn't make Cahiers du Cinema's 10 best of the year list. Schindler, I mean Spielberg, finds a way of making the unspeakable saga of dispossession and murder entertaining.  

Schindler’s List, which might have been called Schindler’s Memorial, would, for all its well-oiled mis-en-scène, have benefited from some old-school studio intervention. Instead of leaving it up to the movie-maker-business-man in one. Given that he wasn't attempting an edge-of-your seat thriller but something between action-packed biopic and period drama with an epilogue, the observation that he allows the punch of the film to dissipate in solemn commemorative festivities, is somewhat gratuitous. Still, it points to a basic flaw in the work, setting up a tension between the prerogatives of aesthetic vs. moral judgment which informs the problematic nature of all Holocaust renderings. I will exploit every opportunity to highlight those aesthetic cum moral discontinuities in my review.

Lest I dissuade anyone from seeing the film, there is plenty of graphically staged and expertly shot ethnic shooting, er--cleansing, making Spielberg's felicitous production an instant classic. It's originality outside the context of its prototypes--Jakubowska's The Last Stage (1947), Pentecorvo's Kapo (1959)--may be overstated, but it's iconography of Holocaust horrors is indisputably unique.

There isn't any actual shooting until forty minutes into the film, which is remarkable considering it's reputation as an endless series of horrific executions. The wait seems calibrated for optimal effect.

Framed in zoom by columns of ghetto residents clearing the street, we see the figure of an old man--the one-armed senior Stern transferred to Schindler's workforce at the eleventh hour. He stands slumped over facing a wall between two implacable SS officers as shovel-fulls of snow are thrown left and right, briefly obscuring our view. Culled from the line of workers for his want of productivity, the man points out his special status but makes no further appeal for mercy, frozen still where his over-seers position him. Having for all purposes exited the world of humanity, his execution seems a mere formality. And it is carried out with understated 'dash.' 

 

The sequence feels slight-of-hand, but is unforgettable in its matter-of-fact precision and great but too-brief visual beauty. I hesitate to call it "tastefully executed," but that is exactly what it is.

The conscripted Jews assiduously apply themselves to shoveling. When two siblings peer in the direction of the men their mother, attempting to redirect their curiosity, exhorts them to ‘look at the snow!' In deep focus one officer stands imperiously behind the old man, his pistol-wielding arm stretched out in the direction of his head. Snow is flying across the screen as the shot is fired. A dot of white signaling the bullet’s ejection is answered by what looks like ink shooting out of the man’s head as his body sinks to the ground like a sheet from a clothes-line. It's a kinaesthetic marvel in a film replete with visual master-classes. 

Cut to Schindler in an office decrying the loss of work-force and demanding compensation. Then back to the old man lying face-up, slowly imbuing the snow with his blood.

Spielberg makes no attempt to spell out what made killing Jews so irresistible to Deaths' Head functionaries. It suffices that the perpetrators of the slaughter are there--the ciphers of Pure Evil. This is warranted enough, as the liquidators themselves were frequently mystified by their 'duties-are-duties.' It took less antisemitism than simple obedience. That is to say--conformity. Whence the "authoritarian personality" and all the attendant nonsense. As if the invitation to conform were not universally accessible and required a special morally degenerate type.

 

Spielberg's film focuses on explaining why one man, untouched by eliminationist zeal, would go out of his way to throw a monkey wrench in the orderly process of ethnic liquidation. Spielberg is at pains to leave the all-too-entrepreneurial soul of Schindler untransfigured for the duration, repeatedly underlining that Schindler’s motivation was largely economic. Or in some perhaps unparseable ratio moral and economic.
 

The nocturnal arrival of a train in Aushwitz as snow falls and the chimneys glow is genuinely eerie. We see figures descending into the bowels of the crematoria throwing up their endless clouds of glowing ash. On repeat viewing I discovered that my memory had assembled a single master-shot of the sequence that exists on film only as separate shots of the various elements. A fact for which I credit the magic of film-construction (= editing) rather than the suggestibility of my imagination. The two work in tandem to create such totalizations, in any case, illustrating the synergy of spontaneity and convention at the assimmilative end of artistic creation.

It is during this scene that the disparity between a formal, shot-analytic approach to the horror of the Holocaust becomes conspicuous. One could of course just acknowledge that the spectacle of mass extermination has its own distinct beauty as visual production, but then one must also accept that the aesthetic point-of-view over-rides the moral. That displacement is precisely what the taboo against  the cinematic treatments of the holocaust was concerned to obviate. The pleasures of the visual-auditory perspective are beyond the morally crucial disjunction of good vs. evil. Not because that perspective is cynical or immoral, but because it is abstract; it brings to bear the same power of concentration (focus/selection, therewith omission/elimination) which informs both the artist's construction and, here, the act (= art) of making entire communities disappear.  

Has Spielberg put this dilemma to rest? has he vindicated the capacity of the medium of cinema to 'mount' the Holocaust in such a manner as not to dishonor or trivialize the memory of its victims? Perhaps. I'm not certain, but at least I am not convinced that he has traduced that memory. It is his prerogative and perhaps even his duty as an artist to conceive the inconceivable. For is there not a danger comparable to misconceiving the inconceivable? namely to mythologize as irreducibly unique the brutalization of Jews during the Holocaust? to institutionalize historical fact as untouchable and sacred?

The film celebrates lighting effects, of which it is a kind of compendium. One obvious example: the panning beam that illuminates Goeth’s villa in the background while Schindler and Stern negotiate. Some of the indoor shots are elaborately lit in German expressionist style, the high-contrast luminescence flattening features and obliterating detail. Figures seem to loom in light that has no source in the locations they occupy.

The zoom lensing during Schindler’s hill-top epiphany evokes the documentary feel of films like The Battle of Algiers, with its epic crowd scenes. I was frequently reminded of Toland’s use of ceilings to frame his figures. A rather mannered approach, but then Kane was the brain-child of one of cinema’s most manic stylistic maximalists.

 

One shot in the sewers that looks like a wide-screen version of the famous sequence in The Third Man. Near the end there are a couple of miraculous shots of snow-covered rural landscapes traversed by a smoke-spewing locomotive that recall the conclusion of Grand Illusion. Not just a work of remembrance and a gesture of tribal solidarity, Schindler’s List, in its black & white Sachlichkeit, is a magisterial homage to the art of cinematography. 

The duality of light and dark enforces moral clarity. Or at least--the polarity that informs a dualistic version of the world riven by the forces of good and evil. A vision which, in its Judaic embodiment, is inseparable from the dialectic of obedience and transgression, repentance and forgiveness. 

 

It is a tribute to his post-dualistic appreciation of the grey zone which complicates simple oppositions that the portrait of Schindler emerges as ambiguously as it does. The portrait of an opportunistic profiteer and well-nigh unwitting humanitarian who embraces his philanthropic potential almost as an after-thought. The fact that lives destined for extinction were saved strikes us as miraculous.

During he evacuation of the ghetto a father obstructs the line of fire of an SS man attempting to shoot his fleeing son only to be shot down himself to blood-curdling and horrific effect. It is the first time in the film when I felt taxed by the excess of violence, though the frisson that surged through me was as much a response to the formal brilliance of this sequence as the abrupt brutality of the SS man’s "order-keeping." A dovetailing of literal and formal executions that will only seem problematical to those indifferent to the formal requirements of art.

By canceling the reflective distance between audience, perpetrator, and victim, the cinema-vérité style heightens not just our sense of immersion, but of our complicity. Cinematically, qua instrument of entertainment, it constitutes an effective tool of the trade. But if all imitation--including cinematic 'emplotment' or mis-en-scène--implies a moral dimension (Rousseau), then seduction and holding imaginations captive are subordinate to supra-aesthetic criteria. From this perspective it represents a gratuitous heightening of immediacy.

As for the cast, Kingsley just looks too jewish, while Liam Nesson resembles a hapless bear and has difficulty conveying a believable level of callousness. Fiennes' bloated fairy-prince may appeal to pre-pubescent girls, but is a bit delicate to portray the colossal Goeth. He does manage to convey an appropriate level of malice, progressively modulated by a sense of quasi compassion.  

 

Schindler's pointing out that real power resides in refraining from the gratuitous violence to which the work-camp tempts some is enough to make him question his proclivity to torment Plaszow inmates. Though not to the point of rising above his need to randomly pick them off from his perch above the campground. Besides a spell of clemency we don’t get any sense of Goeth's ideals, beyond his love of absolute freedom. In archival footage of his execution he can be seen hailing his Leader seconds before a chair is kicked out from under him.

There is one brilliant sequence which plays with our expectations of moral regeneration that I can’t praise enough. Having pardoned a young servant for using soap instead of lye in his bathtub, Goeth sends him away. The lad descends from the villa while Goeth stands in close-up scrutinizing his own dark reflection in a mirror. He raises two fingers in a Christ-like gesture, in mesmerized incantation announcing, “I...pardon you.” As if he were trying on the part of pardoning judge to gauge it's potential to empower before reverting to the baser yet more accessible thrill of playing actual executioner. 

 

Cut to the boy at the bottom of the flight of stairs proceeding across the camp grounds. Then back to Goeth, his self-transcendent moment dissolving in the here & now as he examines his fingers for what appears to be an irritating spar. He looks pensively up in the direction of the youth. Shots are fired. The youth pauses, casting a glance in the direction of the villa, before continuing on his way. Just then Stern passes. A tracking shot follows him as he overtakes the youth lying face-down in the dirt. Cut to an extreme close-up of Goeth’s hands being manicured by his Jewish love-interest. The scene ends on a close-up of Goeth looking almost innocent. He is in love!

We've come a long way since Adorno’s exhortation that to write poetry after Aushwitz would be barbarous. Evil seems less and less ineffable these days. Or we have grown a lot less pious. In Schindler’s List we are led with the huddled masses covering their nakedness in a modern-day expulsion from paradise. They wail and moan awaiting a fate no one believed the German Geist could impose.

But this is Hollywood, so rather than cyclone-B, actual water streams out of the shower-heads, to the ecstatic relief of all and sundry. The end-of-the-road has not yet come for these Schindler Jews--they really are being disinfected. 

 

However historically accurate the scene, it feels like the vicarious collective miracle Hollywood’s miracle-workers have always been at pains to produce. The fact that it is staged with sweeping gestures and swelling chords makes it at once instantly effective and instantly offensive.    

This film might have ended less tendentiously had Spielberg saved his commemoration for the extra features of a DVD. As it is, he has made a masterful film with an epilogue that feels tacked-on and sanctimoniously manipulative. What made Schindler's List exceptional was the relative absence of sentimentality, so its ponderous implementation seems like a return of the suppressed. Or the suppression of better judgment. 

Appending a sermon, even a wordless sermon to a fact-based world-historical tragedy, renders dramas tendentious. Especially when the film already contains an explicitly stated morale in the form of a speech from the mouth of its eponymous 'hero.' Spielberg's humanitarian commemorative gesture constitutes a dual violation--it detracts both from the film's formal dramatic integrity and from the genuine solemnity of honoring those exterminated.

 

Granted, there are notable lapses in the rest of the film, mostly pertaining to sentimental scoring (the children’s choir during the liquidation of the ghetto; a chorus to soaring strings accompanying the exhumation and burning of corpses at Chujow Gorka, etc.). These lapses would be less objectionable in the absence of Schindler’s self-reproach-filled speech and the grave-site tribute of modern day survivors. Feeling compelled to spell out what should have been left to the viewer’s imagination does not render the film more moral, only more formally commemorative. That is to say, it heightens it's propagandist valence.  

 

The common-thread of all these failings is a certain heavy-handedness. 

Its camp-scenes are incomparable, in any case. Polanski may have been able to avoid the melodrama of Schindler’s confession, but it’s hard to imagine he or anyone could have improved on the mis-en-scène of concentration camp life. He himself confessed he would probably have failed to muster Spielberg's "objectivity," given his own 'brush' with Auschwitz (his mother died there). He certainly would have been able to avoid the heavy-handed sentimentality Spielberg pours like syrup of his production.

 

A film that matter-of-factly emplots the systematic destruction of persons and goes to great lengths to show Schindler in all his pragmatic fallibility, ends with an old-fashioned paean to...character. Instead of leaving the theater in state of moral outrage, we exit feeling morally surfeit. 

Postscript: German Guilt

 

I've never been able see ethnic cleansing as the inevitable out-come of Germany's history. Though to many contemporary lecteurs of Peter Viereck's famous diagnosis (Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler), including Thomas Mann, it seemed self-evident. 

 

The obligation to attempt to comprehend the motivation of Hitler's henchmen--the duty of attempting to understand the crimes and sacrifices of those who could have been my brothers in arms--imposes itself. As descendant of the Tätervolk, I feel the shame of the perpetrators more intimately than those whose ethnic identifications allow them to view the Holocaust as the unique derangement of a hateful foreign people. At the same time, against all better judgment, I feel a preparedness to understand. As if there could be some supervenient post-historical reconciliation with the perpetrators of Zivilisationsbruch.

 

There are limits to understanding. To see an entire ethnicity as carrier of contagious degeneration is too fanciful. Though perhaps no more than the belief that Germans were collectively Jew-haters of eliminative propensity. As has been demonstrated by historical inquiry (see: Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101), shooting entire communities into ditches required no particular animus towards Jews, just a sense of obedience. 

 

It is at least questionable whether believers in the 'misfortune' of the Jews were any more numerous among Germans than Europeans of other nations. Ethnic identification that is more than a linguistic-territorial sense of belonging always runs the risk of distortion and xenophobia, as present day Israeli policies towards Palestinians bear witness. 

I do not subscribe to the idea that one can humanize National Socialists too much. A film that normalizes the unthinkable by putting us in the hearts and minds of its perpetrators further humanizes the victims. It drives home not just the evil of those who murdered, but the absurdity of the whole racist distortion. 

 

Perhaps it is unavoidable that the work of mourning confronting anyone who contemplates the fate of Europe during the Second World War picks and chooses its victims. That Spielberg's film does so by focusing on his own people rather than Poles, gypsies, Jehovah's witnesses, POWS, or some other group, is understandable given that he was telling a specific story. Its specific fate is intended to be emblematic of the fate of humanity writ large. 


In spite of its shortcomings, Schindler belongs on the short list of great World War II films: Rome: Open City, Paisan, Germany Year Zero, Le Silence de la Mer, Murderers Are Among Us, Decision before Dawn, Mr. Klein, Lacomb, Lucien,  The Ascent, Das Boot, The Tin Drum, The Wannsee Conference, Europa (Zentropa), Les Misérables (Lelouch), Black Book.