SCHINDLER'S LIST
The Horror and the Pity
My disenchantment with Steven Spielberg's oeuvre since Close Encounters of the Third Kind (l977) has been informed by a sense of early promise gone to extravagant waste (Empire Of The Sun {l987}) a notable exception). The director had acquired an assured grasp of technique and production by his late twenties. Yet he persistently squandered his talent on hyperbolic homages to the negligible genre fare of a movie-addicted youth; or upon misguided attempts to gain recognition as a major auteur with heavyhanded "serious" pictures like The Color Purple (l985).(l)
Following the disastrous commercial and
critical failure of Always (l989), Spielberg returned to his pop culture roots
with a vengeance. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (l989), Hook (l99l), and
Jurassic Park (l993) he yet again married the spectacle of wretched excess to
bathetic sentimentality, the cloying celebration of childhood innocence, and the
virtues of bourgeois family life. Dino-sized boxoffice seemed to guarantee that
more of the same would follow.
Given his recent track record, the news
that Spielberg's next project was to address the Holocaust caused a shudder of
anticipatory Schadenfreude in cynical Hollywood quarters. How would Auschwitz be
rendered by the feelgood sensibility which had transformed The Color Purple's
incest ridden homestead into an absurdist rural paradise out of Song of The
South (l946)?
Confounding every expectation, Schindler's List is a painful triumph, accomplished unabashedly in the rhetoric of classical narrative cinema. It priveleges one of the earliest functions of the photographic image -- memorializing the dead against the erosions of memory. Here, the deceased constitute nearly the entire Eastern European diaspora. Against the native tide of forgetfulness, against the vile insinuations of recent anti-Semitic Holocaust "revisionists", Spielberg has undertaken to illuminate the Jews' dreadful passage at the crucial moment of history when their surviving remnant is dying out.
According to Thomas Kineally's fictionalized biography, (2) Oskar Schindler was a burly Sudentenland businessman with a faint resemblence to Curt Jurgens and George Sanders. A dapper charmer, he posssessed a subversive sense of humor and an appetitive nature. He drank heavily; his marriage to a woman of steadfast Catholic faith and quiet integrity was marked by unembarrassed adulteries.
After several financial failures, Schindler travelled to occupied Poland in l943 with the hope of redeeming his fortunes through war profiteering. Jews had thrived in the town of Cracow for seven centuries. Reich law barred them from owning their own businesses, presenting a golden opportunity for entrepreneurs like Schindler.
In Steve Zallian's capable if reductive
screenplay, Schindler is encountered just as Nazi policy has turned from
intimidation to destruction. Cracow's Jews are being dispossessed of homes and
livelihoods. Schindler is a party member, but he has joined solely with an eye
on the main chance. He owns no politics, treats everyone -- Gentile or Jew, SS
officer or prisoner -- with shrewd affability, as potential instruments towards
his enrichment.
Schindler emerges as an ironic humanist,
agreeably short on principles -- including official anti-Semitism. Liam Neeson
has his bulk; wonderfully captures the companionable rumble described by
Keneally as well as the garrulous opacity. He portrays Schindler as a
charismatic bunkum artist -- much gloss, little substance, ever but slimly known
even to himself.
Schindler gains permission from the SS -- salted with liberal bribes -- to manufacture military and civilian enamelware. Jews, he discovers, can be bought cheaper than Polish conscripts from the SS to labor for him. Slim rations are his workers' only recompense, but they already suffer on a ghetto starvation diet and are grateful for their hire.
Schindler enlists a virtuoso Jewish accountant and scholar, Itzhak Stern, to run the shop and fiddle his books. Ben Kingsley excels at roles combining immense authority and reserve: The secretive Meyer Lansky of Bugsy (l99l), and the disdainful, despairing grandmaster Bruce Pandofini of Searching For Bobby Fischer (l993) lay the foundation for Kingsley's subtle reading of the scholarly Stern, whose preternatural calm conceals a raging passion to garner even an hour of precious survival for even a fragment of his people, against the time when witness can finally be born. Kingsley captures every nuance of the man's lapidary intelligence, grim realism, mordant wit.
Schindler's enterprise thrives under Stern's care. The accountant takes little pleasure from its success or his employer's company, until he begins to discern in Oscar's unlikely character the lineaments of "the just (gentile)...who could be used as a buffer or partial refuge against the savagery of others."(3) The two then embark on a curious life-affirming partnership.
Identification is compelled alternately with the Jews and their prospective saviour as the former undergo forced resettlement in the ghetto; an inutterably brutal night-time round-up; confinement in Plaszow, the local second-string labor camp; then deportation to the giant mills of murder. In the setting of Stern's prompting and the mounting desecrations he daily views, Schindler's stance of narcissistic disavowal crumbles. He commences blending a swelling stream of unlikely "machinists" -- artists, historians, sundry intellectuals and professionals, their children and aging parents -- into the work force. When he learns "his Jews" have been consigned to Auschwitz, he exhausts his profits on pay-offs to have them shipped to his Czechoslovakian home town. He opens another factory nearby, where his unbrutalized charges make prudently sabotaged ammunition, and are kept safe until the war's end.
At one point Schindler tries to assure the obdurately skeptical Stern that he will save his life even if his friend is sent to Auschwitz. Out of patience, Schindler complains: "Do I have to invent a whole new language for you?" "I think so..." replies the Jew in one of his formidable dry understatements. Their exchange crystallizes a dilemma perenially confronting efforts to portray the Holocaust: whether a language can -- or should -- be created to imagine the unimagineable. Some deem the task impossible, or sacriligious; others believe it to be as vital to the sacred mission of remembrance as the trial of war criminals.
Pictures from the camps -- skeletal corpses tumbled into limepits, shards of charred bone spilled across crematory floors -- possess a unique, if flawed authority. The grisly antecendent events, the manner and agents of death are mainly to be found in verbal, not visual testimony, except for the very limited photography inmates themselves were able to smuggle out, and the even smaller quantity of film and stills infamously shot by SS personnel against official policy for their private enjoyment.
Licit SS camp photos exhibited Potemkin-village milieus peopled by contented Jewish stereotypes, or Jews passively submitting to dire, but not mortal penal procedures (the occasional hanging excepted). Obviously, the producers of the latter material supposed German viewers would find the harsh treatment of Jews and other inmates richly deserved, a supposition which generally proved correct. My point here -- it is hardly new (4) -- is that however barbaric and atrocious these images appear in retrospect, they were constructed by the torturers. Much was manipulated, the horrific surrounding reality deliberately suppressed.
Lengthy cinematic recreations of the Holocaust (e.g., NBC television's l978 eponymous miniseries) have been uncommon, and peculiarly inept at retrieving the power of the original pictures. Holocaust-related feature films have generally deployed actual or staged camp footage as brief flashbacks, often in the context of dramatizing a survivor's attempts to grapple with the past (e.g., The Pawnbroker {l965}, Enemies: A Love Story {l989). Mainstream American and European "art" cinemas have also favored the depiction of pre- or extra-camp experiences, especially life in hiding (e.g., The Diary of Anne Frank {l959}, The Last Metro {l98O}, Europa Europa {l992}). While harrowing enough, such "solutions" have been perceived by studios as more acceptable (and bankable) fare than summoning up the infernal dominions of Auschwitz.
The documentaries Night and Fog (l955) and Shoah (l966) employ poetic meditation or personal recollection about the Holocaust to evoke a more complex, mournful emotional register than the visceral anger or angst attendant upon horrific representation. These films, and others in a similar vein comprise the most comprehensive, aesthetically balanced (if such a term is proper) exploration of the Holocaust.(5) Although well received upon release, (Night and Fog was widely distributed in France, is still shown to schoolchildren there; Shoah was broadcast on PBS), it is not likely they will find substantial audiences now, or in the future due to difficulties with length, ease of access and other considerations. It is Spielberg's honorable achievement to have recuperated the primal Holocaust images, to have fleshed out their antecedent and surrounding circumstances in a fashion accessible -- and, without compromise, acceptable to general audiences. Schindler's List painstakingly documents the outrages perpetrated; exposes the perpetrators and bystanders, both the unspeakly wicked and the sickeningly indifferent.
The film opens with a family celebrating the Sabbath. The worshippers fade into thin air, a child last of all, then two candles from the service melt away in a lovely series of dissolves; the flames are slowly drained of color, and flicker out. A curl of smoke ascends against darkness, an effect which poignantly evokes the sense of irredeemable loss in purest cinematic terms. The camera then descends on steam that rises from a train bringing deported Jews of every age and background to Cracow for internment. Thereafter, until the end, Spielberg has the admirable Janusz Kaminski shoot in adroitly modulated black-and-white (one of two brief exceptions is a lost girl in a red dress who becomes a heartrending synechdoche of the slaughtered Jewish community). The absence of color enhances the melancholic impression of a vanished past; and contrives to suffuse the film with ineffable intimations of the mythic.
In the sequences centered around Schindler, the photographic stock has the straightforward crispness of exposition sequences in Forties' melodrama. Scenes of the Nazi onslaught often possess a used-up grainy quality, are intermittently shot with a subjective camera -- skilfully reinterpreting news and documentary footage of the period. Noir chiaroscuro is used sparingly, thus to greater effect, at the nightclub where Schindler ingratiates himself with SS bigshots, and during a murderous pursuit through the Cracow sewers.
Spielberg refuses the lure of gratuitous beauty throughout, modestly effacing the typical grandiose signatures of his presence. Formal homages to Welles, Hitchcock, Landsberg and (most notably) Eisenstein are both unobtrusive and deeply relevant. The avoidance of excess heightens one's anguish before a monumental tragedy which seems to artlessly spin itself out. This "certain tendency" of the cinematic apparatus to efface the means and ideology underpinning its operation has been frequently critiqued by Marxist film scholars. Here, it is apposite to Spielberg's avowedly polemical intentions, The viewer is captured in his narrative net, the better to witness baleful, uncontestable truths.
Schindler's List documents the inexorable progress towards the final solution in microcosm, with an unsparing authenticity borne of impressive research, saving a few lapses.(6) A well-nigh unendurable cascando of atrocity is rendered all the more distressing by the Jews' renewed hopefulness at each station of their martyrdom. ("Why would they create a work force and then destroy it?" argue female prisoners upon hearing rumors of the crematoria -- "We are very important to them!")
The passivity of the Jews before their persecutors has long been a bone of contention. Ample evidence indicates that much active opposition has frequently gone unrecognized, or has even been played down in aid of underscoring the Jews' helpless victimization. While resistance seems to have roughly parallelled the availability of the means to resist, it arose even under the most unfavorable circumstances. Ghetto underground groups bombed restaurants frequented by the SS in Cracow. Ragged warriors at Plaszow stood ready to perish rather than meekly submit.
Spielberg and Zallian may be reasonably faulted for not paying appropriate heed to those who sought to fight the Nazis in the very teeth of death. Nor are the schools and theaters shown by which the Jews sustained their spirits. But the very real passivity that did obtain becomes understandeable as never before, through careful depiction of the Jews' inability as reasonable beings to grasp the strength of foul unreason that motivated Nazi wrongdoing, of the erosion of their defenses by the oppressors' canny manipulativeness as well as the demoralizing impact of repetitive tramatization. Annette Insdorf makes the desolating observation that lack of resistance did not betoken mass cowardice, but rather represented "a loss of the very desire to live -- or resist dying -- after witnessing daily atrocity."(7)
Susan Sontag warns that the simulation of Holocaust atrocity may verge on the pornographic, "making the audience passive, reinforcing witless stereotypes...creating meretricious fascination..." (8) Spielberg's simulations are unshrinking, but chaste. He never revels in violence (as in the Indiana Jones cycle), simply displays the thing itself with chilling austerity from near and afar.
Thus, the blood of a Schindler worker, summarily executed for protesting his conscription elsewhere, seeps into the bright snow, a pathetic bloom of mortality. With his mistress, Schindler watches from a hill beetling over the ghetto as Jews are rounded up. A festival of carnage simultaneously unfolds at several levels beneath him. Telephoto lenswork promotes a strange Brueghel-like detachment, paradoxically enhancing the shudder of moral disgust Schindler feels at what was a signatory moment for him.
Stark, punctate images concisely metaphorize volumes of Holocaust theory: a child, hiding in a latrine, is discovered standing waste deep in ordure. The shot recapitulates in one agonizing stroke Terrence Des Pres' commentary on the camps' "excremental assault" upon personal dignity.(9)
Schindler's List particularly foregrounds the charnal-house absurdity and paradox which was a staple of Holocaust existence for both the Nazis and Jews. Paradox serves to highlight the profound inhumanity lurking beneath a cultured facade: an SS officer, directing the slaughter of ghetto residents who have sought to evade resettlement in the labor camp, suddenly pauses to give an exquisite rendition of Bach on a Jewish piano. Other instances of absurdity underscore the inhuman splitting and denial necessary to maintain a murderous daily round: Schindler, attempting to rescue Stern from deportation, is told by a train-yard manager that saving this or that Jew is a matter of total indifference to him -- it's just that Schindler is mucking up the "paper work".
Unpredictable cruelty, deadly absurdity were also conscious instruments used to break the inmates' will. Monstrous Amon Goeth, Placzow's commandant relishes playing Caligula to his empire of excrement (Ralph Fiennes' astonishing impersonation eerily conflates attraction and repulsion). Goeth shoots prisoners at random from his balcony every morning. He has the lovely director of his construction team liquidated because she persists in pointing out errors, then orders them corrected according to her plans. "He beats me because I ask him why he beats me," says the savaged housekeeper whom he both loves, and compares to a louse or rat.
Goeth's sadistic caprices are in no sense banal: they are emblematic of a resourceful, remorseless psychopathy, regularly sanctioned by the Nazi rulers to debilitate the psyches of the subjugated and promote a robotic compliance, such that one would stretch out one's throat before the knife.
In a wrong-headed backlash, some critics have taken Spielberg to task for not developing any single Jew's story with the depth of Schindler's. There are surely no lack of narratives about the vicissitudes of individual Jews during, and after the Holocaust. Schindler is Spielberg's device, a prism through which the director refracts the entire scope of unholy degradations and depredations visited upon all the Jews.
J. Hoberman (lO) also infers that Spielberg cheapens the Holocaust martyrdom with a pollyanna emphasis on the Schindler thousand's survival. The film in fact offers repeated evidence that their rescue appears so miraculous precisely because of the multitudes who did not survive -- e.g., the hellish disinterment at Plaszow of a mountain of incriminating labor camp (the scene is a deliberate gloss upon the destruction of Pskov which begins beginning of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky {l938}).
Nevertheless, some kind of miracle did occur. Schindler's decision to save the Jews descends upon him in an apparent spasm of grace, from whence neither he nor we can say.(ll) The Gods are silent in Spielberg's bleak existentialist vision, or else wear Amon Goeth's demonic face and tear us for their sport. Chosing to do good in the face of overwhelming evil -- especially when others are overwhelmingly unwilling to make that choice -- is the closest one can come to the apprehension of divinity.
According to Kabbalistic teaching, all of creation springs from the actual letters and words of the Torah. The Jews are the People of that Word; the Nazis, as others before them, sought to expunge the Word and its People from history. Reprising the close-up of an SS list in the film's opening, the camera closes tightly upon the names being typed by Stern into Schindler's list. The creation of each letter becomes a sacred undoing of the awful Nazi purpose. A fallible, sainted gentile has saved his chosen Jews from the anonymous deaths the Germans would have meted out, restoring to them their names, their lives, and their Word.
In the end, vibrant color returns to the film as the remaining Schindler Jews are lead by the actors who played them to lay the stones of remembrance upon their benefactor's grave in Israel. Spielberg has closed the circle of death, mourning, and rebirth by retelling Schindler's story, providing an indelible record of the Holocaust for those, now and to come, who can neither mourn nor learn from what they have yet to know.
REFERENCES
l. For a fuller critique of Spielberg's recent work, see: Harvey Roy Greenberg, "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Serial Mythmash", TIKKUN, Vol. 4,#5, l989, pp. 78-8O; "Raiders of the Lost Text: Remaking as Contested Homage in Always," Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol. l8, #4, l99l, pp. l64-l7l.
2. Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List. New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, l982/l993.
3. Keneally, p. 46.
4. See Lucy Dawidowicz, "Visualizing the Warsaw Ghetto: Nazy Images of the Jews Refiltered by the BBC", Shoah, Vol.l, #l, p. 5.
5. For an authoritative list of relevent Holocaust cinema, see Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, Second Edition, New York: Cambridge University Press, l989.
6. Notably, Schindler's collapse into tears after his final speech, the only glaring moment when Spielberg's penchant for bathos surfaces. Schindler made the speech, but the breakdown never occurred. In any case it would have been thoroughly out of character, given his unfaltering ironic and pragmatic disposition. Regarding other quibbles, the Schindler survivors themselves have vouched for the film's overall accuracy (David Margolick, "Schindler's Jews Find Deliverance Again", The Week In Review: The New York Times, Sunday, l3 February, l994, p. 4.
7. Insdorf, P. l8l.
8. Susan Sontag, "Eye of the Storm," New York Review of Books, XXVII, l98O, p.2.
9. Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Pocket Books, l977.
lO. J. Hoberman, "Spielberg's Oskar", Village Voice, 2l December, l993, p.63-6.
ll. "It can be said...that Oskar was a gambler, was a sentimentalist who loved the transparency, the simplicity of doing good; that Oskar was by temperament an anarchist who loved to ridicule the system; and that beneath the hearty sensuality lay a capacity to be outraged by human savagery, to react to it and not to be overwhelmed. But none of this, jotted down, added up, explains the doggedness with which, in the autumn of l944, he prepared a final haven... (for his workers)." Keneally, p. 28l.