BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Schindler's List (not an ark now is it?)

  
 
Tryphena Absent
21:49 / 01.12.02
I've decided to moan incessantly about this film recently and Persphone reminded me that I haven't full blown gone off on Barbelith yet so...

Schindler’s List is entirely too problematic to start from a specific point. Primarily it’s a bad film but its subject matter creates a hundred more problems. I’ll start with the movie itself and stop before I can continue with the criticisms that come from all manner of directions.

This is a film that attempts, through use of colour, to place a line between the past and present. Theoretically it would have made more of a statement had they switched the colour around so that the present was the less pronounced of the two periods. However we have to assume that Spielberg in doing this was also trying to draw a line between representation and fiction. He fails. This film is based on a true story and thus it is always going to be a representation. The black and white simply indicates that he wishes it to be a serious film. Schindler’s ‘breakdown’ at the end only emphasises the hypocrisy of fictionalising something that could be representative. Why bother debating the role of Schindler, his personality? It's unimportant.

The girl in red we see in the background tries to bring us in to the crowds we see throughout the film and allows us to focus on the endless shots of people being pushed around. She’s stolen straight out of German cinema. It makes me mad, such a blatant rip off without any concession to the original film.

The spectator is placed with the Jews but never with the Nazis, we do not face the Jews, the camera is never placed against them. We mostly take on the role of omniscient observer when we watch the movie. The use of handheld cameras at times gives the film the feel of documentary and it certainly isn’t one. Our omniscience simplifies the actions of that time because it allows us to understand what is happening in the film. From the point of view of representation it’s incredibly problematic because this is fiction.

I have more to say but it generally falls under the title of over-culturally theorised so it probably doesn’t suit this forum. Basically I’d like to know your opinion of this film? Agree, disagree, have more to say? Does anyone actually think this is a good movie not as a representation but just taken on its own?
 
 
Linus Dunce
23:32 / 01.12.02
I think it's an average movie. I'm not clear on your problems with colour, handheld cameras and the point of view, and why it's so outstandingly offensive. Is it that these narrative devices are used in a film with such a serious and tragic subject? What do you think of, say, Welcome to Sarajevo or No Man's Land?
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
00:19 / 02.12.02
The use of handheld cameras at times gives the film the feel of documentary and it certainly isn’t one.

Mm. But is that really the import of handheld here? I didn't think so. It could be that Woody Allen's trying to make all his films news docos too... I think it's just a tool, not particulary a news-invoking thing...

Black and white doesn't always equate to seriousness, either, I think. Greater contrast, maybe, occasional cheapness, but I don't think that it's necessarily a clue to desired gravitas.

None of which is particularly about the film at hand. But I think it's applicable...

You're also making a lot of assumptions about Spielberg's directorial intent. Do you know how he approached it? Not that he can't fight back for himself, but I'd like something to bounce off.
 
 
paw
01:50 / 02.12.02
jean luc godard hates this film and while my memories shit i think it is partly to do with the reasons you mention.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
08:43 / 02.12.02
I think the problem with the use of black-and-white is that it locates the action of the film firmly in the past, which might indicate to the audience that such things could never happen 'here, in this day and age'. It is a distancing device to some extent.
 
 
Jack Fear
11:45 / 02.12.02
jean luc godard hates this film...

Yeah, and Jean-Luc Godard would know, wouldn't he? I mean, Godard is such an exemplar of high-minded, emotionally-connected populist filmmaking.
 
 
Persephone
12:13 / 02.12.02
You're also making a lot of assumptions about Spielberg's directorial intent.

Let's see if I can get this all down in one go... ack, halting already... what I think, or feel, about this movie is all wound up in assumptions about Spielberg's directorial intent, so be warned. Take the last scene when Schindler breaks down crying about how many people he hasn't saved. My instant reaction was that this was a load of self-indulgent crap. I distinctly felt that this was a feint of some kind on the director's part... a ploy to further heroize Schindler, having done a hugely heroic thing refuses to be crowned so to speak (like Caesar). And it was ...a foray into emotion, emotional tourism which I think I will not be able to explain. And all this has to do with what I know about Spielberg --not because I'm his bedpal or because I follow what he says in interviews, but just because I've seen his films. I think that Spielberg is insanely talented as regards putting together visual images on a screen, but I think his ...inner vision is very, very limited. That's the set that he got to play with in this life, and of course he wants what he hasn't got --that's human nature. Schindler's List is the unhappy result of this, and I don't suppose that I fault him for trying. It does just bother me that the public --including most of the intelligent people I know-- will swallow the thing whole, and possibly because it's to do with the Holocaust ...which makes Spielberg's choice look like just another shrewd move... which is an awful thing to say.

And I do think that in this case, for a director of Spielberg's resources, black and white is a clue to desired gravitas. But not gravitas achieved. So yeah, doesn't always equate to seriousness.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
12:24 / 02.12.02
It does just bother me that the public --including most of the intelligent people I know-- will swallow the thing whole, and possibly because it's to do with the Holocaust ...which makes Spielberg's choice look like just another shrewd move... which is an awful thing to say.

See, this is what I think it boils down to. And I agree. It's come up for discussion before, kinda - I think it's less Spielberg's technique, but rather the loaded expectations/preconceptions of the subject matter that influence people so much.
 
 
Utopia
13:16 / 02.12.02
And the effect it has on the audience is that you feel manipulated. Speilberg, being really heavy-handed with the B/W, breakdown, girl in red doesn't >>lead<< the audience through the plot, or let them find their own way; he forcefully pushes them through it. It is, in my opinion, similar to melodrama, which is quite crap. Schoolteachers like this movie. It takes the responsibility of teaching the subject matter off their shoulders...and puts it on Speilberg's.

Godard is such an exemplar of high-minded, emotionally-connected populist filmmaking.
He's not, thank God. Those terms would describe what Speilberg intended to be with SL, and, so far, it is agreed here that he failed. Sure Godard's work is inaccessible (referring to his later work, folks, like Eloge de l'amour, which attacks SL) but at least he's not trying to force feed emotion to the masses.

Thank you all for not turning this into a forum about the holocaust itself. Many people cannot make the distinction between this movie and the actual time setting.
 
 
Linus Dunce
13:45 / 02.12.02
Utopia --

Even so, I would argue that judgement of this film has been based on Spielberg's incomplete mastery of certain narrative techniques more than anything else. Would people have these issues if the film had been directed by somebody other than the man responsible for escapism such as CE3K, Jaws, ET cetera? As for "force-feeding emotion to the masses," I think this is rooted in his and his main audience's cultural background -- they are, after all, not European.

I also think you're being very unfair to teachers, unless you can find some that just played the film and then went straight on to the Cuban missile crisis while the tape was rewinding.

Thank you all for not turning this into a forum about the holocaust itself. Many people cannot make the distinction between this movie and the actual time setting.

And thank you, Utopia, for not beating your wife.
 
 
Jack Fear
13:52 / 02.12.02
Godard [is] not [an exemplar of high-minded, emotionally-connected populist filmmaking], thank God.

Sigh.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother...

To rephrase my point for the irony-impaired: Jean-Luc Godard dissing Steven Spielberg for not being more like... oh, say, Jean-Luc Godard, does not seem to me to be a valid criticism.

In fact, to me it sounds pissy and self-serving. But then, I never went to film school, so what the fuck do I know?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
14:44 / 02.12.02
I'd certainly agree that you're being pushed through the plot by this film but I think the real problem is that he's presenting the movie as a testimony and that's demonstrated by the people speaking at the end. When watching Schindler's List I can't help but feel that it is entirely fictional and especially the scene Persphone mentions. It's a Spielberg moment, a Hollywood moment as someone in my lecture put it. It's about as far removed from what actually happened as you could get while still retaining the subject matter... well OK maybe not.
 
 
Linus Dunce
15:11 / 02.12.02
But it is fiction. And it is Hollywood.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
15:17 / 02.12.02
Yes but a film should make fiction, erm, entirely fictional. I don't really know how to express that any better. It's just that Spielberg seems to, erm, phrase (?) this as a serious film and attempt to leave that fantastic element behind in doing so. I really get the impression that this is meant to be a representation of an event that happened.
 
 
Jack Fear
15:20 / 02.12.02
But it is fiction.

Well, yes and no. Oskar Schindler was a real guy, after all, and the events of the story are ostensibly based on fact: but the movie was based less on the facts of Schindler's life than on Thomas Keneally's book of the same name, which made no claims at being a history. And the credits for the film read "based on the novel by Thomas Keneally" (my emphasis).
 
 
Linus Dunce
16:28 / 02.12.02
OK, maybe I was being too succinct.

It's just art. As Jack pointed out, it's a film based on a novel, itself in turn inspired by the actions of a real person. But even if it's based on personal experience, a movie can only be edited footage of actors at work. I think, despite the generally-accepted view that Spielberg presented SL as documentary, the girl in the red dress and the monochrome stock only underline his distinction between the real world and his work. It's not an exact reconstruction of specific real-life incidents -- no film, book, painting, photograph, hologram, sound recording or play can be. OK, the movie is not great, some of the narrative and dialogue grates, but to criticise on the level we have been is to criticise it for being what it is -- a movie.
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
16:31 / 02.12.02
It's been a good few years since I saw it, watched it on telly and wasn't overly impressed. The only thing I didn't like was the scene at the end, the horrible horrible 'I could have saved one more life with this ring!' stuff which was out of character both for the book and the more saintly Schindler that Spielberg wanted to portray (I've got a feeling that his 'indiscretions' like drinking and adultery were either whitewashed or minimised for the film) and could not have been more blatant if Spielberg had walked behind him with a sign saying 'give me my Oscar now you bastards!'

The scene with the survivors putting the pebbles on his grave works a lot better.
 
 
Mourne Kransky
20:40 / 02.12.02
Whatever its problems, Ralph Fiennes was excellent as the concentration camp Kommandant and the little girl in the red coat was shockingly effective, sharpening the focus after the grey misery piled upon dark foreboding. Given the problem of maintaining any narrative suspense, I remember being fairly hooked throughout. Wouldn't want to watch it again, though.

I guess the triumph over ambiguity in the Schindler character came straight from Kenneally but Liam Neeson expressed it well.
 
 
paw
03:36 / 03.12.02
i *think* Godard is pissed with the way Spielberg has 'hollywoodised' real life events. he sees the film as turning a particularly horrifying period of history into a spectacle conforming to hollywood narrative and shot conventions, a commodity, entertainment to put bums on seats, provoke cheap sentiments and make money, no matter whether the emotions the audience feels are compassion or horror, "du Max Factor" as the director called the film. I think also you have to understand that Godard seems to be using Spielberg as a symbol for all that he sees wrong with hollywood. This is what 'In Praise of Love' is about in part, how, as he see's it, hollywood is taking real life events from another culture and turning it into hollywood/americanised product. Look behind all his bile and hatred of current american film and you get the impression i think that what Godard is really pissed off about is how hollywood crushes world cinema and as he would see it unique artistic innovation by imposing it's films and it's production aesthetic as the world wide 'standard'. his argument is, it seems to me, on some levels simplistic in regards to what he seems to be implying about the industry(money they want to make by making 'emotional' films = bad, american culturalimperialst scum etc.) but i can see where he's coming from. The man's passionate it seems to me about all cinema and hates the way an art form has, in his eyes, been retarded by classical hollywood production techniques that have not moved on from when he was a cahier critic 50 years ago and was in love with american cinema and directors like nicholas ray. I understand what you are saying Ignatius in regards to the films fictionality. If he used the documentary style nature of the film to make things more realistic and hence ram home the message that the nazi's were scum and this should never be allowed to happen then fair enough. In this case didactic film making is i guess o.k. and if it stops some young or old person from being a bigot even better. i need to think about this some more though
 
 
The Monkey
06:34 / 03.12.02
Re Godard: while his critique is viable in that "hollywood" cinema does cling to a series of programs and convention, a lot of that bile about globalization doesn't really deal well with the fact that consumption of hollywood films is a two-way street: there are consumers on the ground that like that gross sentimentality and programmatic plot-flow, and elect to spend their cash there. His critique of American films as mawkish and cheaply sentimental also belies the fact that most of the cinema produced external to the US is just as predictable...Bollywood is the best example, but the same is true for the local film industries of the Middle East, Russia and the ex-Soviet States, China, Souhteast Asia, etc. There is a retrograde filtration process where only certain films made east of the Bosphorous and south of the Equator actually make it back to a critiquing European audience, creating a sort of sampling bias.
 
 
Utopia
14:01 / 03.12.02
Ignatius J: Yes, it's unfair to group all teachers into that category, but that was pretty much my intro to this movie. And had I a wife I'd be sure not to beat her.

Jack Fear: I now understand what you're saying about Godard's criticism (your unrelenting sarcasm sometimes clouds your message). I see nothing wrong with an artist criticising practices in his field that he doesn't agree with. I think that by saying Godard is simply criticising Speilberg for not being Godard is an overstatement, and throws away his particular opinion without really considering it. After all, many people here are echoing Godard's opinion; why is it OK for "Devil_Horns666" to express this view but not Godard?

Iggy J once again: Interesting point: why crit fiction for being fiction? Subject matter. Does an artist have the right to "ham up" history just to make entertainment? Or is Speilberg's take on the subject similar to that of a history textbook author (since neither can accurately recount actual events, Schindler's emotional state, etc), therefore letting him off the hook (?).

Irony-impaired. Yeah, we dumped that shit in Boston, right after the tea.
 
 
Jack Fear
14:24 / 03.12.02
I see nothing wrong with an artist criticising practices in his field that he doesn't agree with.

I would argue that Spielberg and Godard, though they are both doing nominally the same thing ("making movies"), are really not doing the same thing at all, any more than, say, Rubens and Mondrian. It's useless to critique a Mondrian painting by the same criteria you'd use for a Rubens, and useless, I think for Godard to criticize Spielberg with his own indisyncratic criteria.

Different ends. Different means.

Sean McG:
...Godard seems to be using Spielberg as a symbol for all that he sees wrong with Hollywood. .... Look behind all his bile and hatred of current American film and you get the impression i think that what Godard is really pissed off about is how Hollywood crushes world cinema and as he would see it unique artistic innovation by imposing its films and its production aesthetic as the world wide 'standard'.

And then he turns around and does the same thing. Godard offered up his standard, his manifestoes, and (although the hipsters and the flipsters dug it and still do), Joe Lunchbox (or, en français, "Jean Sac-du-Petit-Dejeuner") stayed away in droves. I wouldn't go so far as to attribute his rage entirely to professional jealousy: but he sets himself up as a prophet, bringing God's own word and then getting pissed off when the infidels do not turn from their sins.

In all of this, though, he's forgetting that any work of rt has tobe judged for what it is: I'm not saying Schindler's List is a perfect movie—it isn't, and there are a number of shamelessly manipulative moments, one of which (the shower sequence) is almost laughably brazen and not a little callous—but it is effective and moving overall, and the performances are solid.

In fact (and I know I'm in the minority here), I thought the epilogue at the real Schindler's grave was the worst thing about it: bringing the actual survivors into the scene and matching them with their portrayers just reeked of self-importance, to me. Better, I think, to let the story speak for itself, and save your statistics for the press kit.

At any rate, it's a damn sight better than Amistad, which is so ideologiucally ropey that it makes me squirm—two hours of black folk in chains waiting for Whitey to give them their freedom.
 
 
Linus Dunce
19:19 / 03.12.02
Does an artist have the right to "ham up" history just to make entertainment?

One person's hamming up is another man's dramatic device and yet another man's (well, probably the same man's) way of getting the thing paid for and distributed. I think a lot of criticism (not necessarily here) of Spielberg's SL is based on misunderstanding of US culture. Would this movie have had as many problems if it had been made by an "un-Hollywood" director? I don't think so. Casting the net a little wider, was Picasso's Guernica that great a painting? Mm.

BTW, Yeah, we dumped that shit in Boston, right after the tea: Y'know, I had you down for one of us dissolute Europeans. :-)
 
 
The Natural Way
08:09 / 05.12.02
Um, Jack:

"It's useless, I think for Godard to criticize Spielberg with his own idiosyncratic criteria."

Err, but that's all ANY argument is. All any disagreement is. If Godard finds Spielberg's stuff aestheticaly and ideologicaly unsound...well, he'll have his reasons - he'll have a perspective, an argument. And we can choose whether or not we agree or disagree. I'm not sure what your point is.

If I don't like the popular film 'A Fighting Alan', is my opinion invalidated due to my "idiosyncratic criteria"?

I can't work out if I'm being thick here.
 
 
Jack Fear
12:48 / 05.12.02
If you don't like it, that's one thing: but proclaiming it a "bad movie" or a "failure" is another.

The central question for any critic is: Does this work of art do what it sets out to do, on its own terms? Measuring Mondrian against Rubens, to return to an earlier example, makes no sense: the ends and the means are so different that it's impossible to draw any meaningful parallel.

Criticism has nothing to do with comparison: there are no baselines for art. And it's got very little to do with taste, either. There are a great many well-made, immaculately-constructed movies that I despise, and a few stumble-footed failures for which I have an inexplicable affection.

Godard seems to be mistaking his personal taste for a baseline indicator of quality—which, I think, oversteps the boundaries of legitimate criticism and encourages egregious leaps of logic: "I didn't like it, therefore it's crap, and everybody who disagrees with me is a fool and a dupe."
 
 
The Natural Way
13:31 / 05.12.02
Oh, right, I see what yr saying. In that case: yes, yes, yes. I'm not a massive Mozart fan (yet. Who knows?), but that doesn't mean he's a bad musician.
 
 
deja_vroom
14:01 / 05.12.02
I always thought that the choice of using black/white was purely aesthetic, playing with the contrast and brightness etc. Which was absolutely ace, given that the film has a terrific look. But this theory fails when I'm confronted w/ the little girl in red.

So - the colors mean something more than the result of an aesthetic decision, and the conclusions one can draw from this (that Spielberg's intention was to set his story in an unacessible past that would never happen again, for instance) will be varied.

With my theory bitch hat on, I have to say I think he was trying to make us see the events through the eyes of Bureaucracy (the Nazi machinery of which Schndler was part of): Stamping a seal on a document being equal to shooting an old Jew in the head. Shades of undistinguished black and gray representing the normalcy, tediousness and lack of emotional drive behind the atrocities commited by the Germans. When the little girl in red appears to Schindler, it's the first time he gets a hint that what's happening around him is a nightmare, something not supposed to be.
That's how I see the use of color in this film. As for the end, where Schindler starts crying that he could have saved more people, it made me cringe. Utterly unnecessary, and cheapened the whole thing.

To me the greatest strenght of this film was the atmosphere it created, of a nightmare within the real world, with a whole bunch of rules that contradict everything we consider to be sane and humane: remember the jewish architect being shot in the head while a german soldier sips from a cup of tea, not even bothering to look at the scene taking place a few meters away from him.

I've heard people saying that some of the acts commited by the nazis in the movie were purposefully exaggerated, that something like that "could never have happened". Bullshit. If you read some book about life in nazi concentration camps, you'll see that the film is indeed very, very soft. I'll add more when memory helps - it's been a while since I watched it.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
15:57 / 05.12.02
the little girl in the red coat was shockingly effective, sharpening the focus after the grey misery piled upon dark foreboding

Oh, come on...the little girl in the red coat was *hilarious*. I was just waiting for her to turn round,reveal herself to be a deformed dwarf and twat the nearest Nazi in the throat with a cleaver.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
18:25 / 05.12.02
I actually thought it was a great film, and that the use of black'n'white was more an aesthetic/cultural thing than anything else- you remember those recent documentaries where they had the colour footage of Hitler et al.? You KNOW they were real, but somehow they didn't seem so. Which is why I thought the "red coat" part worked pretty well.

The bit that pissed me off was the last couple of minutes, with the genuine survivors in colour. That, to me, defines "patronising"... not knocking THEM at all, but surely at that point Spielberg's saying "and just in case you don't believe me, then..." whereas if you didn't, then a bunch of colour footage of people AIN'T gonna convince you. And if you were a dyed-in-the-wool Holocaust denier bastard, then you're not gonna have sat through the three hours. That was the point when he seemed to lose faith in his own movie, succumbed to Spielbergian sentimentalism (which I think he'd managed, remarkably, given the subject matter, to steer free of for most of the film), and, I think, cheapened it as a result.
 
  
Add Your Reply