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Oskar Schindler was born one hundred years ago - on April 28th 1908 in Zwittau, then part of the Habsburg Empire, now in the Czech Republic. He prospered as a German industrialist, and during the war saved some 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust. In death he became a famous name as the eponymous hero of first a novel and then a Steven Spielberg blockbuster. From 14 years ago, here's my review of Schindler's List:
With Steven Spielberg, the film is the star — such a sensible rule, you wonder why he's the only producer who gets it. As with the shows of his friends Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber, you don't go to Jurassic Park to see Sam Neill; and you won't go to Schindler’s List to see Liam Neeson. Those critics who've expressed a snooty surprise that the fellow who made an effects-a-go-go crowd-pleaser like Jurassic Park should follow it with Schindler's List miss the point. Like almost all Spielberg's work, it displays his reluctance to yield a property to the whims of stars or fashion, and its bigness is nothing to do with the cost or the technology, but rather the size of the subject.
Big events and fundamental questions course, in their different ways, through both Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List but they're anchored in manageable personal stories, discreetly cast. In TV mini-series, when Jane Seymour and some bit-player turn up as penniless Jewish refugees, you know which one to keep an eye on. Spielberg's great achievement in Schindler’s List is to capture the cool indifference of fate. A roomful of frightened Jews being processed for Auschwitz: who to root for? The photogenic moppet? The resourceful beauty? Some live, some die, but you can rarely guess which. Spielberg's choices seem to be as arbitrary as those of Nazi justice.
It's breathtaking after a film as crassly manipulative as In the Name of the Father (Daniel Day-Lewis does the Irish Question). In E.T. et al, Spielberg is the slickest of traffic cops; here, he's content to sit back and let us weave our own way through the confusion. Oskar Schindler, a Cracow industrialist who saved 1,200 Jews, can be seen as opportunist or hero, reckless shyster or reluctant convert: it's up to us. The black and white photography is no affectation either, at least until an ill-advised closing gimmick leaves you with the feeling that even the Holocaust isn’t real enough for Spielberg. But, for most of the time, his eye has the detachment of newsreel footage, and, unusually in motion pictures, his visual images are arresting not because of their composition but because of their revelatory truth. We see a train of Polish Jews leaving the station, on a one-way ticket. The camera, with the measured tempo of a supermarket security monitor, scans their confiscated luggage piled up on the platform, suitcases being emptied, a heap of thousands of photographs — worthless except to those refused even the comfort of a proven past. The clerks pick over hundreds of human teeth, extracting the gold.
Gradually, you understand the film’s decision to adjust Thomas Keneally's original title, Schindler's Ark. What separates the Germans from trigger-happy goons in a hundred banana republics is the system: the bureaucracy, ‘the paperwork’, as a dozen Nazi officials sigh wearily in the course of the film; the grotesque thoroughness of District B and Department W and the Business Compensation Fund regulations. Schindler and his Jewish accountant fight Nazi paperwork with their own list, the names of their factory workers. When a lazy official at Auschwitz offers him another 300 for the ones accidentally miscategorised for processing, Schindler is adamant; he wants his people back. All internees deserve saving, but to accept the officer's trade-off would be to accept the Nazis bureaucrats' obliteration of Jewish individuality.
All films ‘about’ the Holocaust have an uneasy tension between the close-up and the big picture. Spielberg understands that that tension is a problem not just of filming the subject, but of the subject itself: that the tale of any one individual has to struggle to avoid being swamped by the sheer scale of horror. His brilliant answer is to humanise the mass: in the anonymity of the ghetto, in the chaotic frenzy of a massacre, he can sketch characters in a few seconds, so that, in their various small responses, a hundred stories are told. And, even as he ennobles history's vast supporting cast, he corrects all those films which flattered the Germans by personifying Nazi evil in the form of lip-curling bullet-headed commandants. The real face of evil is the German soldiers, after the Cracow massacre, combing the ghetto with the remorseless doggedness of petty officialdom, their stethoscopes pressed to the ceilings just in case there's anyone still breathing up there. A system which transforms the stethoscope into an instrument of death and issues it to its infantrymen: in denying the Jews’ humanity, the Germans killed their own.
from The Spectator, February 19th 1994
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