The idea you make of a film before watching it has always been a strange concept – a title without context can quickly become something unrelated, but hearing commentary over the years from others, a name mentioned here and there, can lead to an entity far removed, a vision of a work of art fuelled by personal experience and interests. Schindler’s List only escaped from this in part for me. I envisioned a metaphorical list to the sounds of the violin piece I had listened to on film soundtrack compilations during exam-fuelled work sessions. I was convinced that it was about a noble German man who fought to save as many Jewish people as he could during the Second World War, hiding them in his home underneath floorboards a la Mr LaPadite, enlisting friends and family to help. While the second half of the sentence may be untrue, the first remains debatable. What was incorrect was the assumption of a saint-like saviour, sacrificing himself for the benefit of others – I negated the complexity of Schindler’s character. Naturally, the opening scene, in which Schindler proudly displays his Nazi pin on his lapel, came as somewhat of a shock to me. I thought that perhaps he was “faking” it, and that we had been invited to join in media res – his grand conniving plan was to bomb a Nazi party and cackle grimly over the remains. Of course, as I soon learnt, and continue to ponder, Schindler’s List is a lot (a lot) more subtle. Oskar Schindler was indeed a member of the Nazi party. He was also responsible for saving over one thousand Jews during the Second World War.
Schindler’s morally grey character is only the surface of what has been termed Steven Spielberg’s magnum opus. It is a deeply devastating and harrowing recounting of the Holocaust, sparing very little detail or tragedy, present both inside and outside of the camps – Spielberg hesitated a long time before opting to direct it, having approached the likes of Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski who both declined. To say I watched Schindler’s List fully would be an overstatement – I committed to snippets in four or five sessions, thinking at first that I was bored, or overwhelmed by its three and a quarter hour runtime. It was only halfway that I began to process how difficult of a watch it was, and how I was able to afford the luxury of digesting it gradually – even if this meant omitting some necessary tensions. Liam Neeson as Schindler and Ralph Fiennes as Płaszów’s commander Amon Göth are excellent, steeping themselves into those they sought to portray. Besides the obvious preparations such as practising Schindler’s intonations from a short recording of him speaking, or resembling the real Göth so much one of the survivors, Mila Pfefferberg, trembled in fear, Neeson and Fiennes the actors are almost forgotten (despite the slight Irish or British twang lurking here and there) – there is something truly real about their depiction. Without colour, Spielberg pays special attention to lighting, casting shadows on pained faces, glows on the tables at which people strenuously labour. It is masterful work. Despite this, Schindler’s List was and has by no means been spared criticism. Phillip Gourevitch highlighted the fact that it “depicted the Nazis’ slaughter of Polish Jewry almost entirely through German eyes”, for instance, while Art Spiegelman declared that “there weren’t any Jews in the picture”. To others, the Jewish were not fleshed out enough, background noise, tools used to drive the narrative of the more developed German characters. Like many Holocaust films, Schindler’s List addresses the exception to the rule: “Think that was about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about six hundred people who don’t”, Stanley Kubrick supposedly said to close collaborator Frederick Raphael, who stated this in his memoir. Amidst accusations of sentimentalism and excessive dramatization, criticism of Schindler’s List poses more than one question around the representation of reality, and more specifically, the representation of one of history’s darkest moments. “After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric”, writes Theodor Adorno of the inadequacy of art to show or speak the Holocaust. Is a story about the genocide from the perspective of the victim possible unless it is autobiographical (see the likes of Primo Levi)? Is Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil unsayable, unrepresentable? Is such horror reconcilable with a piece of fiction from a story structure perspective? Holocaust films famously play with borders, what you see, what you don’t see. Nothing can exactly be left to the imagination: the reality is far worse. Characters, or real people, are chosen carefully: a man who survives in hiding (The Pianist), the commandant of a concentration camp and his family (The Zone of Interest, playing with borders on a particularly literal level), a German who saved over one thousand Jews by having them work in his factory. Whether the artist desires it or not, a retelling of a real event will necessarily dramatize certain aspects of it – even if the voice, costumes, sets are “right”, sequences can be embellished, emotions can be heightened. It is just that in the case of the Holocaust, very little can be forgiven. Is this why, then, so many films have focused on a ‘German’ experience? Is this necessarily a bad thing? We forget, in the process perhaps, that Schindler’s List is about a real person, and that this is no doubt a story that deserves to be told. Perhaps Schindler is the beating heart of the story, then. But the fact stands that he was also in control of the narrative in real life – he had money, charm, authority, and a Nazi pin. Whether he was dramatized and made out into more of a hero than he actually was is another story.
Another fact often forgotten is the driving force behind the film, and the book that inspired it. Leopold “Poldek” Pfefferberg was one of “Schindler’s Jews”, who made it his mission after the war to tell his saviour’s story, and who pitched it to production companies and helped get him featured on television. He opened a leather goods shop and happened on the writer Thomas Keneally one day, who was looking for a suitcase: when he showed him his extensive notes on Schindler, Keneally agreed to write the book, which would later become Schindler’s Ark. Spielberg bought the rights, and Leopold was subsequently credited under the name Leopold Page as a consultant in the credits. He described Schindler as “a Noah”. Was this actually the case? Does the fact that his intentions only morphed as he grew to understand the Nazis’ intentions make him less of a good person? Was Schindler a hero? To Pfefferberg, he certainly was. Certainly, some scenes, such as the shower sequence, are perhaps too drawn out for dramatic effect, though I doubt this stemmed from ill will on Spielberg’s end. But how do you depict such a horrific scene without having to select certain stylistic choices? Rapid camera movement, sharpened sound – without these, you are at the risk of making such a scene fall flat. Or, in a full circle moment, you choose not to depict it at all. The only notable faux pas perhaps remains the girl in red, a little too artistic for a film that seeks to represent reality as truthfully as possible.
Many a critic has focused on the Jews appearing only in the background, as cutout figures, but in light of Spielberg’s efforts to name and commemorate those who died and those who survived, this does it a disservice. The Jewish people in Schindler’s List are not committed to inaction: if Schindler and his dubious morals are the beating heart of the film, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley at his best) is the beating heart of the list. Aside from this rather obvious example, Spielberg dedicates a fair bit of screentime to life in the ghetto and later in the camps: women tell stories, children hide in pianos and underneath floorboards, men debate over the war. We follow a little boy as he escapes the line up, or a man who is watched over by Göth as he makes a door hinge, then sent out to be executed. A woman organises a private audience with Schindler in an attempt to convince him to save her parents by bringing them to his factory. She is never seen again. These are snippets of life, committed to the screen, and named. While terrifying, the register or selection is also a valuable tool Spielberg makes use of to ingrain the Jewish memory in a fictional space: Janek Dresner, Danka Dresner, Olek Rosner, Mila Pfefferberg, Poldek Pfefferberg, Helen Hirsch. The latter is asked to repeat her name four times during register. In this way, Spielberg has truly hammered them into our collective consciousness.
