Schindler's List and The Individual

Stanley Kubrick is reported to have disliked Schindler's List because it was a film “about success”, when the Holocaust is about failure. Such unbalanced focus on the positive is the enduring criticism fired at Hollywood itself. Hollywoodization of a Holocaust film would seem to be a serious charge. At face-value, Kubrick's criticism may be damning enough, but Hollywood means more than success simple. When we see the sign Hollywood we think glamour, glitz, trappings... a superficiality to be despised, whatever remains to be praised.

You will find no glamour in the three and a quarter hours of Schindler's List. Shot in stark black and white, the film is first and foremost a document of atrocities during WWII. Much of the film is shockingly bleak footage of ordinary people being treated worse than cattle. It is a testament to Spielberg's film-making that all of these scenes are shocking. After all, the average person has seen someone get shot in the head countless times before. Bodies pile up in modern films at a much greater rate than the most problematic Shakespeare melodrama. What is a body on a cart, to us?

At the dramatic centre of the film, Spielberg presents us with a harrowing twenty minute sequence of the liquidization of the Jewish ghetto. Here, Spielberg uses one splash of colour to show a little girl in a red coat. It is a little sign of hope. We are then shown several people finding clever hiding places, almost all of them ultimately futile. We get brief relief when a mother and girl are “saved” (for the concentration camps) by a little boy who is working for the Nazis. Then we see the little girl in the red coat, dead on a cartful of bodies, and all hope dies. Seeing her, Oskar Schindler realises, along with us, that each of the victims is an individual human being. It is this moment that persuades Schindler to save as many people as he can. It is powerful use of image to tell the story, simple but clever film-making.

Spielberg does more than show that the Holocaust is a tragedy for the Jews. He shows that it is a tragedy for humanity, and he does this by showing the tragedy of the worst of Nazis. Ralph Fiennes plays a sadistic capricious psychopath, yet one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the film is when we realise that he denies himself his own humanity (specifically, his feelings for a Jewish girl). This scene alone (brilliantly acted) elevates the film way above mere sentimentality. Any film that makes me cry for a Nazi is not as one-dimensional as Kubrick's alleged criticism (if he did indeed say it) implies.

However, in a wider context Fiennes' character does somewhat play into the stereotype that the Nazis were a priori monsters. Of course the real horror of Nazism is that Nazis were for the most part ordinary people. We are not most of us immune to the charms of fascism, so of all criticisms of Schindler's List, this is the one that sticks.

What of Schindler's “Hollywood” heroism? Heroism it is, and the film does dwell too long on his final parting (Was it necessary, even if factually accurate, to show the Jews giving him a ring?), but as a whole the film cannot be said to be “about success”, except in the most glib of terms. The repeated brutality, the many callously killed, those who couldn't find a hiding place, the girl in the red coat, the scenes in the concentration camps... all speak loud of man's failure.

The line of thought goes that Spielberg is too optimistic, too focused on the individual hero, to make a great film about the Holocaust. However, it may be the case that only a director like Spielberg could make a great film about the Holocaust. For the individual is the antithesis of fascism. This simple insight, the beginning of empathy, is what we must remember most of all. Long live, then, the children of Hollywood.