Schindler’s List is supposed to be one of the most outstanding movies of the 1990s. It won many awards and listed in the best 100 movies of all time. The movie is about a corrupt German businessman who saved about 1000 Jews during the holocaust. The movie is about the heartlessness of the holocaust and how people could make a difference even if they wanted to. As art, the film succeeds in achieving the artist’s or director’s intentions: that of evoking the feelings of the Jews saved by Schindler in a convincing, news-like form. The film accomplishes this in spite of its weaknesses.
The movie portrays Oskar Schindler as one such person—a man who would do anything to make money, but at the same time try to help those under his care, in this case the Jews during the war and holocaust. The film seems to be accurate with this point. The rest of the movie is a fictionalized account of what happened during the holocaust.
The film boasts of an excellent cast. The three lead actors—Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern, Schindler’s assistant, and Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth—were outstanding. One can suspend that he is watching a film and actually think of these actors as the character themselves. One can easily develop hatred toward Goeth and much sympathy for Stern as a result of the actor’s portrayals. The ruthlessness and unfeelingness of Goethe was effective captured by Fiennes, especially in the scenes when he was shooting Jews at the courtyard.
The movie sometimes seems to have been directed by two different persons. One is from a director doing a documentary; the other, a director doing a regular fictional feature film. The approaches in themselves work. One cannot really complain about anything about these differences. They just happen to be a bit recognizable. One can guess that the reason for the distinction is that the documentary-style portions were fairly accurate depiction of events; the other portions were the fictionalized dramatization.
There are also some portions of the movie that tend to be self-indulgent or calling attention to itself as an art. In particular are the scenes of the little girl with the colorized red coat. Some of the scenes seem to have been out of place or a bit too contrived. How could the girl not have been noticed by the military as she walked amid the crowd? Why did the director have to add color to the girl’s coat, the only one in color in the entire black-and-white segments? At first, this seemed more like a distraction. The girl did not really seem to be an effective actress. She looked like she was pretending to be afraid when she was hiding under the bed. However, the director seems to have been able to redeem himself toward the end of the girl’s segments. It was only through her red coat that one would realize that she was among the corpses pile together like garbage. That realization evokes strong feelings. Still, sometimes one wonders if a better device could have been utilized to convey the same experience.
There are portions of the film that seemed to look staged. Toward the ending of the movie, the crowd gathered around Schindler was too organized with much choreographed movements. The scene looks like some old movies shot in sets though.
The film also suffers some weaknesses in the characterization of people. The Germans—with the exception of Schindler himself and his wife—appear a bit too one-dimensional. They seem like to be unfeeling individuals, especially the character of Amon Goeth portrayed by Ralph Fiennes. He was portrayed as an unfeeling shooting machine, killing Jews at random in the courtyard. At only one moment in the movie did he convey the possibility that he too might have feelings when he described the Jewish woman he seems to be infatuated with but was continually beating. Only toward the end, when Schindler dismissed the army guarding them, that the Germans were shown to have some feelings.
Oskar Schindler is portrayed as the German with a conscience despite his weaknesses. Yet, the movie’s depiction of him tends to be also a bit one-sided. His weaknesses sometimes look like caricatures. For instance, his interest in beautiful women—as when he was choosing a personal secretary—was a humorous take on that episode in his life but obviously exaggerated.
Understandably, this may have stemmed from the original sources of the stories. The sources were the victims themselves and they would have relayed their stories from an angry vantage point. Curiously, the Germans seem to have been portrayed in a similar way in other literature. They behave in that way because they have become blind to the truth and operate like robots following orders from their leaders.
The film also loses grasp of its period context. At the end, when the end of the war was announced, it became obvious that the script was written way after the war. It had a fore-knowledge of the holocaust that people in such an isolated location would not have known.
The movie certainly has strengths that make it succeed as an art. In characterization or contextualization, religion and religious rituals are used in the film to provide contrasts and differentiation. The movie opened with a Jewish family praying together, and ended with the descendants of the Jews saved by Schindler placing stones on his grave. The scene would have been particularly poignant for those who understand what that gesture meant. Others might be lost to the meaning of the whole thing. Still, the whole scene was executed in a way that would evoke sympathy from the viewer. Schindler too was portrayed as a Catholic. He may not be practicing his faith well, but he seems to be a true believer. He met his wife inside a Catholic Church during a moment of remorse. He also did the sign of the cross as he talked with the Jews after they learned that the war has ended. He was afraid for himself as he would be treated like a criminal and also for there were some people he was not able to help even if he had wanted to.
Social rituals like parties and protocol are also used in the film to develop characterization. The party that Schindler was preparing for some German officers demonstrated how knowledgeable he is about image-building and manipulating people’s perceptions. Little details were attended to show how committed he is to planning so he can achieve his goals. At the same time, it showed how the rich and the pretentious would do to project an image of power and wealth.
Music and film editing seems to be adequate for the kind of movie that it is. The music did not call attention to itself and went unnoticed. The editing was fine and perhaps effective. One does not notice that film actually ran for more than 190 minutes or more than three hours. There were not fancy transitional devices. The film was mainly cut-to-cut with a few visual devices as with candle smoke cutting to the smoke of the train at the start of the movie. The music and editing were appropriate as they were unobtrusive.
The production design—in particular, the costume design—was very successful in conveying an authentic picture of the period. More importantly, the costume design was particularly effective in delineating differences among cultural groups and characters. The scene when the Jews were being forced to register showed how different they could be from other people. They could be easily recognized because of their religious leader’s hairstyles and manner of dressing. Curiously, the film did not show any of these cultural and character dimensions among the Germans other than Schindler and his wife. The costume design also succeeded in showing class or situation distinctions in the film. Schindler and his wife were shown to be elegantly and fashionable dressed through the entire movie. This distinction becomes more emphasized toward the end of the movie when the couple had to be the prisoner clothes of the Jews.
Perhaps, the most outstanding aspect of the film is its cinematography. Almost the entire film is in black and white. It starts and ends in color; the start and ending are set in the present. The entire flashback—which is practically the entire film—is in black-and-white. The film also uses two approaches in the camera work. For more ordinary portions, the camera-style is typical of black-and-white Hollywood movies in the 1940s and 1950s like Casablanca. For large crowd scenes—like the train scenes wherein the Jews would have to be transported to concentration camps like Auschwitz—a newsreel or documentary style approach was utilized. The two approaches convey a sense of reality to the film. They make the film to not at all seem like a fictionalized account of the story.
The use of black-and-white also allowed for the film to utilize very dramatic lighting effects. The lighting of the movie is certainly artistic in itself. It is reminiscent of Rembrandt’s paintings. It sets the mood of every setting. Bright flood lights were used for more trivial moments like that of the scene of Schindler with the applicants for the secretarial position. For somber and other serious moments, stark contrasts were used; bright lights with strong shadows that half of the people’s faces are well lighted and the other in darkness. This seems to be the approach every time there is a serious conversation in the film as when Schindler would be privately negotiating with some German officer. The lighting of the scene when Schindler met with his wife at a Catholic Church was particularly dramatic. It felt like it was an enlightening moment for the couple.
The strengths of Schindler’s List as a movie outweigh whatever weaknesses that the movie may have had. The weaknesses mentioned here can be subjective observations. After all, certain approaches to conveying a message are very personal matters that observers may like or not like. More importantly, the film succeeds in conveying the message about the Jews’ suffering during the war and the emotions associated with that suffering. The movie is not a historical documentary, but rather a fictional recreation of real events. In this regard, the film succeeds as an art, especially as an artistic expression of the director who is himself a Jew.
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books, 1963. Kindle.
Bülow, Louis. Oscar Schindler: His List of Life. 2013. Web. 2 Dec 2014. <http://oskarschindler.com/>.
Keneally, Thomas. Schindler's List. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Kindle.
Schindler's List. By Thomas Keneally and Steven Zaillian. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes. Prods. Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures, 1993. VCD.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "Oskar Schindler." Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial. Holocaust Encyclopedia. Washington: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2014. Web. 2 Dec 2014. <http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005787>.
