Saturday Night Cinema: Schindler’s List

Tonight’s Saturday night cinema classic is in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance day, Schindler’s List.

I tried to find it online for free, but alas. It was not to be. So pay the $2.99.

NY Times:

Review/Film: Schindler’s List; Imagining the Holocaust to Remember It
By JANET MASLIN
Published: December 15, 1993

There is a real photographic record of some of the people and places depicted in “Schindler’s List,” and it has a haunting history. Raimund Titsch, an Austrian Catholic who managed a uniform factory within the Plaszow labor camp in Poland, surreptitiously took pictures of what he saw. Fearful of having the pictures developed, he hid his film in a steel box, which he buried in a park outside Vienna and then did not disturb for nearly 20 years. Although it was sold secretly by Titsch when he was terminally ill, the film remained undeveloped until after his death.

The pictures that emerged, like so many visual representations of the Holocaust, are tragic, ghostly and remote. The horrors of the Holocaust are often viewed from a similar distance, filtered through memory or insulated by grief and recrimination. Documented exhaustively or dramatized in terms by now dangerously familiar, the Holocaust threatens to become unimaginable precisely because it has been imagined so fully. But the film “Schindler’s List,” directed with fury and immediacy by a profoundly surprising Steven Spielberg, presents the subject as if discovering it anew.

“Schindler’s List” brings a pre-eminent pop mastermind together with a story that demands the deepest reserves of courage and passion. Rising brilliantly to the challenge of this material and displaying an electrifying creative intelligence, Mr. Spielberg has made sure that neither he nor the Holocaust will ever be thought of in the same way again. With every frame, he demonstrates the power of the film maker to distill complex events into fiercely indelible images. “Schindler’s List” begins with the sight of Jewish prayer candles burning down to leave only wisps of smoke, and there can be no purer evocation of the Holocaust than that.

A deserted street littered with the suitcases of those who have just been rounded up and taken away. The look on the face of a captive Jewish jeweler as he is tossed a handful of human teeth to mine for fillings. A snowy sky that proves to be raining ashes. The panic of a prisoner unable to find his identity papers while he is screamed at by an armed soldier, a man with an obviously dangerous temper. These visceral scenes, and countless others like them, invite empathy as surely as Mr. Spielberg once made viewers wish E.T. would get well again.

But this time his emphasis is on the coolly Kafkaesque aspects of an authoritarian nightmare. Drawing upon the best of his storytelling talents, Mr. Spielberg has made “Schindler’s List” an experience that is no less enveloping than his earlier works of pure entertainment. Dark, sobering and also invigoratingly dramatic, “Schindler’s List” will make terrifying sense to anyone, anywhere.

The big man at the center of this film is Oskar Schindler, a Catholic businessman from the Sudetenland who came to occupied Poland to reap the spoils of war. (You can be sure this is not the last time the words “Oscar” and “Schindler” will be heard together.) Schindler is also something of a cipher, just as he was for Thomas Keneally, whose 1982 book, “Schindler’s List,” marked a daring synthesis of fiction and fact. Reconstructing the facts of Schindler’s life to fit the format of a novel, Mr. Keneally could only draw upon the memories of those who owed their lives to the man’s unexpected heroism. Compiling these accounts (in a book that included some of the Titsch photographs), Mr. Keneally told “the story of the pragmatic triumph of good over evil, a triumph in eminently measurable, statistical, unsubtle terms.”

The great strength of Mr. Keneally’s book, and now of Mr. Spielberg’s film, lies precisely in this pragmatism. Knowing only the particulars of Schindler’s behavior, the audience is drawn into wondering about his higher motives, about the experiences that transformed a casual profiteer into a selfless hero.

Schindler’s story becomes much more involving than a tale of more conventional courage might be, just as Mr. Spielberg’s use of unfamiliar actors to play Jewish prisoners makes it hard to view them as stock movie characters (even when the real events that befall these people threaten to do just that). The prisoners’ stories come straight from Mr. Keneally’s factual account, which is beautifully recapitulated by Steven Zaillian’s screenplay.

Oskar Schindler, played with mesmerizing authority by Liam Neeson, is unmistakably larger than life, with the panache of an old-time movie star. (The real Schindler was said to resemble George Sanders and Curt Jurgens.) From its first glimpse of Oskar as he dresses for a typically flamboyant evening socializing with German officers — and even from the way his hand appears, nonchalantly holding a cigarette and a bribe — the film studies him with rapt attention.

Mr. Neeson, captured so glamorously by Janusz Kaminiski’s richly versatile black-and-white cinematography, presents Oskar as an amalgam of canny opportunism and supreme, well-warranted confidence. Mr. Spielberg does not have to underscore the contrast between Oskar’s life of privilege and the hardships of his Jewish employees.

Taking over a kitchenware factory in Cracow and benefiting from Jewish slave labor, Oskar at first is no hero. During a deft, seamless section of the film that depicts the setting up of this business operation, Oskar is seen happily occupying an apartment from which a wealthy Jewish couple has just been evicted. Meanwhile, the film’s Jews are relegated to the Cracow ghetto. After the ghetto is evacuated and shut down, they are sent to Plaszow, which is overseen by a coolly brutal SS commandant named Amon Goeth.

Goeth, played fascinatingly by the English stage actor Ralph Fiennes, is the film’s most sobering creation. The third of its spectacularly fine performances comes from Ben Kingsley as the reserved, wary Jewish accountant who becomes Oskar’s trusted business manager, and who at one point has been rounded up by Nazi officers before Oskar saves him. “What if I got here five minutes later?” Oskar asks angrily, with the self-interest that keeps this story so startling. “Then where would I be?”

As the glossy, voluptuous look of Oskar’s sequences gives way to a stark documentary-style account of the Jews’ experience, “Schindler’s List” witnesses a pivotal transformation. Oskar and a girlfriend, on horseback, watch from a hilltop as the ghetto is evacuated, and the image of a little girl in red seems to crystallize Oskar’s horror.

But there is a more telling sequence later on, when Oskar is briefly arrested for having kissed a young Jewish woman during a party at his factory. Kissing women is, for Oskar, the most natural act in the world. And he is stunned to find it forbidden on racial grounds. All at once, he understands how murderous and irrational the world has become, and why no prisoners can be safe without the intervention of an Oskar Schindler.

The real Schindler saved more than a thousand Jewish workers by sheltering them in his factory, and even accomplished the unimaginable feat of rescuing some of them from Auschwitz. This film’s moving coda, a full-color sequence, offers an unforgettable testimonial to Schindler’s achievement.

The tension in “Schindler’s List” comes, of course, from the omnipresent threat of violence. But here again, Mr. Spielberg departs from the familiar. The film’s violent acts are relatively few, considering its subject matter, and are staged without the blatant sadism that might be expected. Goeth’s hobby of playing sniper, casually targeting his prisoners with a high-powered rifle, is presented so matter-of-factly that it becomes much more terrible than it would be if given more lingering attention.

Mr. Spielberg knows well how to make such events truly shocking, and how to catch his audience off guard. Most of these shootings are seen from a great distance, and occur unexpectedly. When it appears that the film is leading up to the point-blank execution of a rabbi, the director has something else in store.

Goeth’s lordly balcony, which overlooks the film’s vast labor-camp set, presents an extraordinary set of visual possibilities, and Mr. Spielberg marshals them most compellingly. But the presence of huge crowds and an immense setting also plays to this director’s weakness for staging effects en masse. “Schindler’s List” falters only when the crowd of prisoners is reduced to a uniform entity, so that events no longer have the tumultuous variety of real life.

This effect is most noticeable in Schindler’s last scene, the film’s only major misstep, as a throng listens silently to Oskar’s overwrought farewell. In a film that moves swiftly and urgently through its three-hour running time, this stagey ending — plus a few touches of fundamentally false uplift, most notably in a sequence at Auschwitz — amounts to a very small failing.

Among the many outstanding elements that contribute to “Schindler’s List,” Michael Kahn’s nimble editing deserves special mention. So does the production design by Allan Starski, which finds just the right balance between realism and drama. John Williams’s music has a somber, understated loveliness. The soundtrack becomes piercingly beautiful as Itzhak Perlman’s violin solos occasionally augment the score.

It should be noted, if only in passing, that Mr. Spielberg has this year delivered the most astounding one-two punch in the history of American cinema. “Jurassic Park,” now closing in on billion-dollar grosses, is the biggest movie moneymaker of all time. “Schindler’s List,” destined to have a permanent place in memory, will earn something better.

“Schindler’s List” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes violence and graphic nudity. Schindler’s List

Directed by Steven Spielberg; written by Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Thomas Keneally; director of photography, Janusz Kaminski; edited by Michael Kahn; music by John Williams; production designer, Allan Starski; produced by Mr. Spielberg, Gerald R. Molen and Branko Lustig; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 185 minutes. This film is rated R. Oskar Schindler . . . Liam Neeson Itzhak Stern . . . Ben Kingsley Amon Goeth . . . Ralph Fiennes Emilie Schindler .

The Truth Must be Told

Your contribution supports independent journalism

Please take a moment to consider this. Now, more than ever, people are reading Geller Report for news they won't get anywhere else. But advertising revenues have all but disappeared. Google Adsense is the online advertising monopoly and they have banned us. Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have blocked and shadow-banned our accounts. But we won't put up a paywall. Because never has the free world needed independent journalism more.

Everyone who reads our reporting knows the Geller Report covers the news the media won't. We cannot do our ground-breaking report without your support. We must continue to report on the global jihad and the left's war on freedom. Our readers’ contributions make that possible.

Geller Report's independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our work is critical in the fight for freedom and because it is your fight, too.

Please contribute here.

or

Make a monthly commitment to support The Geller Report – choose the option that suits you best.

• $25.00 here
• $50.00 here
• $75.00 here
• $100.00 here
• $250.00 here

0 0 votes

Article Rating

11 Comments

Oldest

Newest Most Voted

Inline Feedbacks

View all comments

michaelofsydney

6 years ago

I still have a copy of Schindlers Ark which was the original name of the book. The Keneally’s lived across the road. Apparently the US publishers insisted on the name change. Great great book

0

Kenn Daily

6 years ago

Here are more old movies from the 1940s
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR-BpMMmtBAOz5A83wZh2iw/videos

0

Steve

6 years ago

Reply to  Kenn Daily

Thank You. Here’ s some music to enjoy while watching or otherwise – ladies first!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuZpniJPrZw&list=RDyuZpniJPrZw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDlKb2cBAqU&list=RDzDlKb2cBAqU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpmOTGungnA&list=RDVpmOTGungnA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kgd-0LOQRgA&list=RDKgd-0LOQRgA&t=1

And on a very sad note but good accounts or the holocaust – Last Train to Auschwitz & Escape from Sobibor-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_12BEj1eRI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4R53qvwbag

0

A Miller

6 years ago

A good movie and a very good reminder.
You can rent it for 50cents on Amazon right at the moment. You can stream it for no extra charge on your Netflix subscription. Or, you can get a low priced (best option) Very Good used copy (to keep) for 5 to 8 bucks on Amazon or Ebay also.

0

R. Arandas

6 years ago

I never really watched this film before, but I’ve heard it was deeply moving and powerful.

0

Dave

6 years ago

Reply to  R. Arandas

You owe it to yourself as a free person to see it. Just be sure there are no children around. Freedom is a precious liberty!

0

Lamarr01

6 years ago

Schindler’s List is powerful cinema but I don’t believe Oskar Schindler was a hero. He picked out Jews being sent to the concentration camps who either had a skill or were able to pay a bribe. His transformation from a casual profiteer into a “selfless hero” was brought about by the realization Germany was losing the war and there would be war crimes and other ramifications.

0

D

Underzog

6 years ago

This “Schindler’s List” film has a fatal flaw. They got the ending wrong. When Oskar Schindler got the Schindler Juden to his place in Czechoslovakia, he was afraid that his fellow Nazis were going to make a last ditch attempt to exterminate them. What Schindler did was he bought some weapons and trained the most able bodied Jews in how to use them so there would have been a ;pitched battle if the Germans tried to kill Schindler’s Juden as a hail mary pass. Someone adapting the book too the screen omitted this salient fact because it was not politically correct. This never should have been done and history should not so be altered as to satisfy the dictates of cultural communism; i.e., pc dogma.

0

livingengine

6 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-Bg66YJZeM

0

knightsstrength

6 years ago

1984 George Orwell – Full Movie
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fCZBnUt6rZ0

0

michaelofsydney

6 years ago

Lets do the math shall we.
Earning $99 per hours x 3 (a few) hours per day is $297
Multiplied x 7 (7 days in a week) is $2079
Multiplied x 4 weeks gives a final total of $8316
I calculate tax at 25% which leaves $6137
You claim to have earned $14,523 in the four week period working a few hours per day.
Even if you pay no tax (sounds like a Google operation), you still come up short.

0