Steven Spielberg (86 page)

Spielberg recalled that when he paid his first visit to Auschwitz during preproduction, he “went expecting to cry buckets, and I didn’t cry at all. I wasn’t sad one bit. I was outraged. I was furious. It was a reaction I didn’t anticipate.” That feeling of smoldering rage suffuses much of the film, helping keep it from succumbing to the temptations of sentimentality. While unfamiliar emotional territory for a Spielberg film, this was not an altogether new feeling for Spielberg himself. His Saratoga High School friend Gene Ward Smith had been surprised by the way the teenage Spielberg “radiated [a] genuine but seemingly inexplicable rage and disgust”; Smith only later realized it was the result of Spielberg’s experiences with anti-Semitic bullies. As Spielberg acknowledged, those still-painful memories of his adolescent “Hell on Earth” came rushing back to the surface when he directed
Schindler’s
List.
But he never lost sight of how much his own experiences, and his imagination, paled before the reality of the Holocaust.

G
IVEN
the nature of the subject matter, no representation of the Holocaust, whether concrete or abstract, can be expected to do justice to the memory of the victims. No film, no book, no memorial has ever failed to arouse passionate concern about whether it is appropriate to the subject. There is even a school of thought which holds that the Holocaust is an event so unique in its evil, so incomprehensible in its ultimate meaning, that it is wrong to attempt to depict it. “After Auschwitz,” argued Theodor Adorno, “to write a poem is barbaric.”

Schindler’s
List
was rapturously praised by most reviewers. “[L]ike all great works, it feels both impossible and inevitable,” wrote Terrence Rafferty in
The
New
Yorker.
“…It is by far the finest, fullest dramatic (i.e., nondocumentary) film ever made about the Holocaust. And few American movies since the silent era have had anything approaching this picture’s narrative boldness, visual audacity, and emotional directness.”

“This movie will shatter you, but it earns its tears honestly,”
Newsweek
’s David Ansen wrote in a cover story on the film and its director. “… Confronted with the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the ghastly sight of children hiding from capture in outhouse cesspools, Spielberg never loses his nerve…. Spielberg’s very nature as a filmmaker has been transformed; he’s reached within himself for a new language, and without losing any of his innate fluency or his natural-born storytelling gift, he’s found a style and a depth of feeling that will astonish both his fans and those detractors who believed he was doomed to permanent adolescence.”

“Mr. Spielberg has made sure that neither he nor the Holocaust will ever be thought of in the same way again,” Janet Maslin declared in
The
New
York
Times.
“[I]t’s as if he understood for the first time why God gave him such extraordinary skills,” wrote
New
York
magazine’s David Denby, who admitted, “I didn’t think I could be affected this way anymore.”

But the film aroused equally ardent opposition from a minority of critics who found it, for various reasons, an inadequate representation of the Holocaust. Some objections bordered on the frivolous, such as that of Simon Louvish, whose essay in the British film magazine
Sight
and
Sound
derided it as a “Holocaust theme park,” a phrase sometimes used by European critics of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Others raised more fundamental issues. French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, whose austere nine-hour documentary
Shoah
explores memories of the Holocaust without showing a single frame of historical footage, criticized
Schindler’s
List
for allegedly putting undue emphasis on Jews who were rescued, rather than on the six million who died. “The project of telling Schindler’s story confuses history,” Lanzmann claimed. “All of this is to say that everything is equal, to say there were good among the Nazis, bad among the others, and so on. It’s a way to make it not a crime against humanity, but a crime of humanity.”

In one of his rare responses to criticism of the film, Spielberg accused Lanzmann of wanting to be “the only voice in the definitive document of the Holocaust. It amazed me that there could be any hurt feelings in an effort to reflect the truth.” Spielberg watched
Shoah
several times before making
Schindler’s
List,
and it influenced his deceptively dispassionate-seeming, documentary-like depiction of the bureaucratic apparatus of the Holocaust. But he wanted to go further and explore the human dimensions behind what was, in fact, “a crime of humanity” as well as “a crime against humanity.” For a popular filmmaker seeking to influence a far wider audience than Lanzmann’s relatively elite viewership, it was essential to stimulate the audience’s emotions by re-creating events and dramatizing the thought processes of those involved. Neither film should cancel out or overshadow the other; it is precisely because the Holocaust is such a central event in modern history that any attempt at prescribing or limiting its aesthetic treatment is misguided. For artists to shrink from the task of dealing with the Holocaust for any reason is to encourage historical amnesia. The real question in evaluating
any dramatic treatment of the Holocaust is that posed by Elie Wiesel: “How is one to tell a tale that cannot be—but must be—told?”

Too often the terms of the debate were framed in shopworn critical clichés about Spielberg’s artistic personality,
ad
hominem
attacks derisively questioning his intelligence and judgment and finding him inadequate to the momentous task at hand. But the film’s detractors also raised some challenging arguments. Whether or not one agrees with their assessments, the public debate helped focus attention on what Spielberg was attempting in
Schin
dler’s
List
and how he went about crafting it. In his Holocaust memoir
Night,
Wiesel recalled his father’s observation that “every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.” The often unanswerable questions raised by Spielberg’s film, as well as those raised by its detractors, are a testimony to the film’s extraordinary emotional influence on audiences throughout the world.

Defying all box-office predictions by grossing $321.2 million around the world ($225.1 million of it outside the U.S. and Canada),
‡‡
Schindler’s
List
became such a major event in the public consciousness of the Holocaust that it unexpectedly elevated Spielberg to a stature few other filmmakers have ever achieved. The leaders of the U.S., Israel, Germany, Austria, Poland, France, and other countries attended special screenings and held public and private meetings with the filmmaker, treating him as if he were a visiting diplomat on a mission to combat ethnic hatred. Spielberg rose to the occasion, accepting that role with eloquence and humility. The film even received a televised endorsement from President Bill Clinton (of whom Spielberg has been a prominent supporter). After attending the Washington preview of
Schindler’s
List,
Clinton told his fellow countrymen, “I implore every one of you to go see it…. you will see portrait after portrait of the painful difference between people who have no hope and have no rage left and people who still have hope and still have rage.”

Appearing just eight months after the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which gives visitors a three-dimensional immersion into the actual sights and sounds and artifacts of the Holocaust,
Schindler’s
List
provided a remarkably similar emotional experience. Taken together, as complementary educational and memorial representations of this century’s most shattering historical event, the museum and the film have helped stimulate a much broader public awareness of the urgency of Holocaust study and its relevance to contemporary life.

Spielberg’s return to his roots in making
Schindler’s
List
was also, paradoxically, an act of liberation from his culturally imposed and self-imposed limitations. In confronting the Holocaust, he radically redefined his public image, confounding most (though not all) of the skeptics who thought him
merely a frivolous entertainer, a child-man incapable of dealing with serious themes. But there was a double edge to their abrupt reevaluation. Annette Insdorf, author of
Indelible
Shadows:
Film
and
the
Holocaust,
commented in
The
Village
Voice,
“Many of us were expecting him to simply apply the techniques of
Jurassic
Park
to the Holocaust, but were pleasantly surprised that he transcended his reputation for a glib, feel-good approach.” As Armond White wondered in a
Film
Comment
essay on Spielberg’s career, “Can the man who directed the most splendid, heartfelt Hollywood entertainments of the past twenty years accept that praise, that dismissal of his life’s work, as reasonable?”

Nowhere was that dismissive attitude more evident than in the schizoid voting of three critics’ groups—the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), the New York Film Critics Circle, and the National Board of Review—all of which chose
Schindler’s
List
as the Best Film of 1993 yet pointedly failed to honor Spielberg for directing it.
§§
The implication was either that the film somehow directed itself, or that, as Scott Rosenberg put it in the
San
Francisco
Examiner,
the subject matter had caused Spielberg “to resist the urge to imprint his own sensibility on the film,” an act of self-abnegation more characteristic of a producer than a director.

After Spielberg won his second Directors Guild of America award, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him his Oscar as Best Director; the film received six other Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
¶¶
Backstage at the Oscars, Spielberg could not resist a touch of sarcasm: “I could have dealt with never winning an Academy Award, because I had practiced dealing with it for the last twelve years.” But then he added, “So this was a wonderful honor tonight. If I hadn’t gotten it, I probably would have been shattered.”

While the question posed in one form or another by many critics was, “How is this film unlike any other Steven Spielberg film?,” it is more enlightening to ask, “How is this film profoundly
characteristic
of Steven Spielberg?”

K
ENEALLY
observed that by taking collective responsibility for the postwar financial support of Oskar Schindler, “Oskar’s children”—the
Schin
dlerjuden
—“had become his parents.” The image of Schindler as a deeply flawed father figure who ultimately assumes responsibility for his “family” of eleven hundred Jews is at the heart of Spielberg’s film. In the improbable but inspiring figure of this rescuer whose underlying humanity was brought out by the social cataclysm that threatened to engulf his “children,” Spielberg
could see writ large the themes of parental responsibility that have obsessed him throughout his career.
Schindler’s
List
extends his preoccupation with the breakdown of the nuclear family to encompass the breakdown of European society and the destruction of Jewish family life during the second World War.

Deprived of their freedom and placed in a helpless and dependent position by the Nazis, the Schindler Jews are in a situation resembling that of abused children. At any moment, they are subject to arbitrary punishment and death at the hands of Amon Goeth and his fellow SS men. Among the most chilling scenes is that of Goeth casually shooting Plaszów inmates at random from his balcony, as if for sport, before his morning urination (“Oh, God, Amon!” whines his mistress, covering her head with a pillow during the shooting. “Amon, you’re such a damn fucking child!”). When Schindler takes physical charge of “his” Jews, guarding them against the depredations of the Nazis, they still remain in an infantilized position, even though he tries to restore as much of their prewar social structure as he can under the circumstances, reuniting families and enabling a rabbi among them to conduct
Sh
abbat
services inside the factory. “There will be generations because of what you did,” Stern tells Schindler. This truth is demonstrated in the epilogue, with its reunion of Schindler’s real-life “family,” a long line of his workers and their families filing past his grave in the Latin Cemetery of Jerusalem. They lay memorial stones on the grave while the following words are superimposed: “There are fewer than four thousand Jews left alive in Poland today. There are more than six thousand descendants of the Schindler Jews.”

Some critics found fault with Spielberg for not spending more time rounding out the characters of individual Schindler Jews. One of the film’s most vociferous opponents, Philip Gourevitch, complained in
Commentary
that it “depicts the Nazi slaughter of Polish Jewry almost entirely through German eyes. Except for Itzhak Stern … few Jewish figures are individuated from the mob of victims. When Jews
are
seen on their own, the camera eyes them with the detachment of a
National
Geographic
ethnographic documentary.” Incredibly, Gourevitch went on to accuse Spielberg of employing “Jewish caricatures” lifted “from the pages of
Der
Stuermer,
”
the notoriously anti-Semitic Nazi organ. Calling that charge “truly enraging,” reader Ruth King of New York City responded, “The movie shows Jews—ugly, plain, beautiful. This is how we look.”

In fact, not only are Stern and Helen Hirsch (Goeth’s maid) among the film’s central characters, Spielberg also follows the fates of many other Schindler Jews carefully throughout the story. But they are seen mostly in brief vignettes or as faces in the crowd, for the director deliberately chose not to deal expansively with the personal stories of most of the Jewish characters. While the TV miniseries
Holocaust
concentrated the viewer’s attention on one Jewish family—a device that encouraged audience identification with the characters but gave the series the emotionally indulgent tone of a soap
opera—Spielberg wanted to avoid that kind of narrow, melodramatic focus. Instead he set out to demonstrate in brutally direct dramatic terms how the Nazis systematically stripped Jews of their individuality, robbing them of their property and freedom, chopping off their hair, dressing them in striped uniforms, and reducing their names to numbers. The first graphic indication of what is in store for the characters in
Schindler’s
List
comes when a trainload of Jews leaves the Kraków station and Spielberg’s camera moves into an adjacent storehouse filled with piles of suitcases, valuables, family photographs, and bloodstained teeth with gold fillings. This, said Spielberg, “wasn’t the story of eight Jews from Kraków who survived—it was a conscious decision to represent the six
million who died and the several hundred thousand who did survive with just sort of a scent of characters and faces we follow all through the story.”