Coursework Six: Hollywood & the Holocaust - A Critique of Schindler's List

The Holocaust is regarded as one of the darkest events in human history, which remains in most of people’s consciousness. During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, one of the diarists, Emmanuel Ringelblum questioned: “Does the world know our suffering? And if it knows, why is it silent?” The word ‘Holocaust’ simply means ‘complete destruction of life, usually by fire’, however since the Second World War, its meaning has been associated with the mass extermination of Jews by German Nazis (Rothlein 2011). Nazi policies towards Jews aimed at killing everyone, whose families were Jewish for the previous three generations.

Many people cannot imagine how terrifying it was to be Jewish during these times. Despite a large number of books that discuss the Holocaust, some people require more evidence on these events and in recent decades they have become a topic acceptable for film. Marc Ferro (cited in Loshitzky 1997)  claims ‘cinema and television modify our vision of History.’ Films are a powerful route into the collective mind and help to shape popular attitudes-social, political, and cultural. Moreover Doneson (2002) claims that ‘film can create and revive memory’, because when it uses ‘Holocaust’ as its main theme, it has a potential to educate, albeit often is an attenuated manner. Consequently an increasing number of filmmakers started to produce various films, which show different dimensions of the Holocaust.

Holocaust film can be defined as ‘a film that captures elements of the earliest persecutions of the Jews in Germany’ (Doneson 2002). Unquestionably the best example of a Holocaust film in the last thirty years is Schindler’s List, directed by Stephen Spielberg in 1994 that has been repeatedly given awards and has received seven Oscars at the Academy Awards ceremony in the same year (Cole 2002). Based on Thomas Keneally’s ‘Schindler’s Ark’, Spielberg’s film can be regarded as an enormous masterpiece, as he draws on ‘historical, literary and filmic representations of the “Holocaust” from the last thirty years’ in making Schindler’s List. Once it was released, almost 25 million Americans in the cinema and 65 million on television have seen ‘Schindler’s List’, which can suggest that the film had an important educative role among the society, because it provided important information on the Holocaust events in Europe (Cole 2002). 

Schindler's List is a film about an individual who has changed the course of history. The main character, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), whose commitments prove that an average single person matters and can change a lot.  The film presents Schindler's transformation, which is the crux of the philosophical call for the responsibility, for an ethical response to the horror of the Holocaust. He is changing from being a loyal and money-driven Nazi industrialist to caring and sensitive person, who decided to build his own camp and to pay for each of Jew, thus sacrificing his own monetary desires and material needs (Kowalski 2008). 

Schindler’s List was produced without pointless special effects, which are a typical feature of Holywood films. Subsequently that film seems more ‘realistic’, which is further reinforced by the fact that Spielberg uses black and white pictures to recall the films and newsreels of the period with which people are familiar. These unique methods make this film more interesting and offer something new to the viewer, a film, which has a character of a documentary, which, via the implication of black and white, was actually filmed ‘at the time’.

Polish Girl screaming 'Goodbye Jews'

What is more, Schindler’s List presented a Holywood interpretation and representation of the Holocaust events in Poland under the Nazi (Doneson 2002). Surprisingly, very often people believe that Spielberg had a very good understanding of this topic (Institute for Historical Review), although there is considerable controversy because there are a number of scenes presenting Polish-Jewish relations with a negative connotation.  That can be illustrated by one of the scenes with Polish people throwing stones at the Jews walking to the new Ghetto, with one little girl screaming at the Jews  “GoodbyeJews!”  The clear implication, rooted in the girl’s evident anger and hate, is that Poles were happy, by and large, to see the Jews rounded up. Another scene has a young boy giving a throat-slitting gesture to a Jewish women looking out of a train that is soon to leave for Auschwitz. The implication is that Polish people were always and largely anti-Semitic and places them in a negative light. It is certainly true that some Poles collaborated with Germans in identifying Jews and there was widespread, low-level anti-Semitism in Poland (and there was across Europe and in the UK). However Spielberg chose not to present any examples of Poles helping Jews. For example, the director might have mentioned someone like Irena Sendler, who ‘arranged for Jewish children to be smuggled out of the Ghetto and for secure places to be found for them with non-Jewish families in Warsaw’ (Paldiel 1993). 

Likewise, Jewish groups were also involved in criticisms of the film not because it presented a moving story of a ‘righteous Gentile’ who helped Jews but rather because the film focused on and popularized an image of the Holocaust with hope and a relatively happy ending in the midst of horror.  In that sense, it was a very typical Hollywood/American film with a message of hope and triumph over disaster.  Jewish groups were quick to point out that that was in no way the normative experience.  For many people, the film represented the only chance to see the Holocaust being presented.  For some Jewish groups this was the problem – these people only saw a film with a message of hope not utter despair and death. Many of these groups argued that Schindler’s List in itself was not problematic if it was seen in a wider context.  In other words, they argued that viewers of this film of hope by Spielberg needed to be seen in the context of other darker films such as Shoah the 1985 French documentary by Claude Lanzmann which took eleven years to make and is largely comprised of interviews with survivors of Chelmno, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Warsaw Ghetto and Treblinka. In particular it contains interviews from the only two people to survive the gas vans of Chelmno. 

Spielberg uses a various number of symbols through the play of colours in the film. Kowalski (2008) identified three scenes in the film, which used different colours to underline the meaning.  These relate to the candles ending the Jewish Shabbat at the start of the film, the girl in the red coat during a clearance of the Krakow Ghetto and the coda of the film when the actors meet survivors of the Holocaust whom they represented in the film.

Beginning Scene showing Jews praying together

At the beginning of the film, the Jewish prayer ends with a candle being snuffed out at the end of the Shabbat. The smoke dissolves into the smoke of a train, arriving with Jews in Krakow.  They are numerous Jews, and we see them in close-up as they approach the Nazi list-takers. Spielberg uses Levinas’s concept of the face in the film, which is a central encounter with otherness that derives directly from what he sees as the negative ‘othering’ of Jews by the Nazi (Kowalski 2008). Again there is an emphasis on the face as a way of representing a real person and, in particular, a good person.  The whole scene revolves around the juxtaposition of real people, via their faces, with their faceless names typed by the Nazis. Thus, their names, which give them identity are separated from their bodies (their faces) and reduced to meaninglessness in the long, endless list of others soon-to-die. Normally, the audience associates names with identity – a person is their name – but in the scene people (the nameless faces) are given names only to be stripped of them as their names are torn from them and put onto paper.  

Girl in a Red Coat-walking among people

Girl in Red Coat- dead

They become no more than letters on a page and, when one recalls the start of the scene, soon to be no more than smoke rising from the chimneys of the crematoria. The film literally comes to life (in bright, primary Technicolor) when Schindler looks over the crowds of the Ghetto and sees one loan girl.  She becomes ‘real’ for Schindler (and the modern audience) when her coat comes alive.  Although at a distance, the coat’s colour jumps from the screen and pulls the eye immediately to her in exactly the same way the audience is meant to understand that Schindler is drawn to her.  At the same time the audience cannot pretend that the red clearly reminds them of the blood which is soon to be shed.  The girl is quite literally wearing a coat drenched in her own blood.  The circle is neatly closed when the coat is seen on a pile of discarded clothing – still red but the audience is left surmising that the red may now indeed be blood.

The coda has echoes of the film Shoah in focusing on the survivors but these are a different type of survivor. According to Loshitzky (1997) Schindler’s List is about survival rather than death, redemption instead of annihilation. These people were saved by the action of an outsider, a ‘righteous Gentile’, a German.  The survivors in Shoah survived in spite of the outsiders (their guards), the Gentiles (who abandoned them) and Germans.  Also, in good Hollywood style, the focus on the survivors is shared with the really important people – the actors and stars of the film.  This blurs the boundary between the reality of the survivors and the dramatized ‘reality’ of the cinema.  Thus, the film fundamentally has a ‘happy’ ending.  This is, after all, Hollywood.  But, in reality, the Holocaust had no happy ending or endings.  Even those who survived were scarred with the horror of their memories, those they left in ditches, stuffed into gas chambers, consumed in crematoria.  The survivors remain haunted by their memories and the guilt of survivors – indeed that phenomenon was only truly identified after the Holocaust. 

Jewish real survivors along with actors

Others who were troubled by the film have be critical about the focus on a ‘righteous Gentile’ who started out as a committed Nazi and only eventually decided to help save some – while still benefiting from the labour of many.  Jewish organisations, among others, have argued that there were numerous other ‘righteous Gentiles’ who from the outset protected Jews often at the cost of their own lives.  Again, the implication is that the film – the media by which many will come to the Holocaust – presents a uniquely distorted version of the Holocaust.

To conclude, Schindler’s List has been a successful Holocaust film, as it was one of the first film productions that became a modern Holywood representation of Jews and Holocaust in the interwar Poland/Europe. Film delivers an interesting message, which shows that a single person (Oskar Schindler) can change the world and save many lives. Undoubtedly Spielberg has achieved his goals through the unique film style of the black and white documentary. Despite Spielberg’s professional approach to the subject matter, he should have considered making the film more objective and reshape the image of the Polish nation a which was presented as being in corporation with the Nazi Germans. Typical Hollywood ‘happy ending’ does not fit into the film, because for most of Jews, Holocaust did not mean the survival, but death, which in the film was not enough emphasised.

References:

COLE, T., 2000. Selling the Holocaust. New York, NY: Routledge. Available from Google Books [Accessed 23rd April 2013]. 

DONESON, J., E., 2002. The Holocaust in American Film. New York: Syracuse University Press. Available from Google Books [Accessed 23rd April 2013]. 

INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW. 'Schindler's List': A Review. Available online:http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n3p-7_Raven.html [Accessed 23rd April 2013]. 

IMDB. Liam Neeson. Available from: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000553/ [Accessed 23rd April 2013]. 

IMDB. Shoah (1985). Available from: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090015/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 [Accessed 23rd April 2013]. 

KOWALSKI, D., A., 2008. Steven Spielberg and Philosophy. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. Available from Google Books [Accessed 23rd April 2013].

PALDIEL, M., 1993. The Path of the Righteous. Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. US: Library of Congress. Available from Google Books [Accessed 23rd April 2013].

LOSHITZKY, Y., 1997. Spielberg's Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Available from Google Books [Accessed 23rd April 2013].

ROTHLEIN, L., KELLY, M., 2011. Holocaust.  Westminster, CA: Teacher Created Resources. Available from Google Books [Accessed 23rd April 2013]. 

Bibliography:

BARTOV, O., 2005. The "Jew" in the Cinema. From The Golem to Don't Touch My Holocaust. Available from Google Books [Accessed 23rd April 2013]. 

HALTOF, M.,2012. Polish Film and the Holocaust. Politics and the Memory. Available from Google Books [Accessed 23rd April 2013]. 

Indelible Shadows. Film and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available from Google Books [Accessed 23rd April 2013]. 

KERNER, A., 2011. Film and the Holocaust. New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films. London: The Continuum International  Publishing Group. Available from Google Books [Accessed 23rd April 2013]. 

Videos: 

Spielberg S., 1993. Schindler's List: "Candle Prayer" Scene. Available from YouTube [Accessed 23rd April 2013].

Spielberg S., 1993. Schindler's List: "Goodbye Jews"Scene. Available from YouTube [Accessed 23rd April 2013].

Spielberg S., 1993. Schindler's List: "Girl in a Red Coat" Scene. Available from YouTube [Accessed 23rd April 2013].

Spielberg S., 1993. Schindler's List: Trailer. Available from YouTube [Accessed 23rd April 2013].