Schindler's List

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Based on the novel
by Thomas Keneally

Spielberg's tour de force was considered payback for the relative failure of his previous work, The Color Purple, another powerful film on social injustice. In Schindler, Spielberg ups the ante by focusing on the book by Thomas Keneally. It is the wartime story of Oskar Schindler, an industrialist profiteer who conspires with the Nazi Empire in Europe to exploit slave labor as part of the war effort. The difference in artistic expression evident in comparing these works makes this perhaps the most interesting study in this survey.

The Book

Keneally, an Irish author, displays a peculiarly Irish style in depicting the tale of Schindler and the plight of his workers throughout their ordeal under the SS persecutions of the 40's. His Irish philosophy permeates the atmosphere, with frequent touches of black humor accentuating the wistful resignation of the ethnic Irishman in accepting the things one cannot change. Schindler, a gregarious and dynamic man, finds a foil in Amon Goeth, the newly-appointed camp commander at Chujowa Gorka. He does his best to act as Goeth's better conscience, trying to mitigate Goeth's excesses in the camp in carrying out orders to liquidate the Jewish community. He appeals to Goeth's greed in finding a subterfuge with which he can continue his slave-labor industry. Only he becomes emotionally involved with his workers, resulting in a personal crusade to spare the condemned people from their imminent fate.
It is the relationship of Schindler and Goeth that enhances the dynamism of the tale. They become extensions of one another as their lives intertwine. The abstract humanity of Goeth provides us with often chilling parodox throughout the story, just as Schindler's ability to detach himself from the atrocities makes him a less-than-sympathetic character up to the end. Yet it is Keneally's storytelling ability that forever reminds us how his subjects are merely far too human.

The Movie

Spielberg, a Jew, approached the movie from his own perspective. In superceding Keneally's subliminal ethnicity, he created a monumental piece to which even Holocaust gives place. Again, as in Apocalypse Now and GoodFellas, the triple-threat team of Liam Neeson as Oskar, Ralph Fiennes as Amon, and Ben Kingsley as Jewish Council leader Isaak Stern used the Keneally work as a launch pad from which Spielberg took them to monumental heights. Though the film won a Best Picture Award, the awesome portrayal by Fiennes seemed too much for the Academy to bear. Having given the nod to Pesci for his psychopathic Tommy De Vito in GoodFellas years before, that seemed to be where the Academy moguls would draw the line. Another point to be commended is the overall depiction of the oppressed workers, who maintained an exhiliarating dignity throughout their ordeal. It was in sharp contrast to the degeneration of the Family Weiss in Holocaust, giving us a more inspirational moral to the story. As an interesting sidenote, Schindler was broadcast by a major network some time later in its unedited entirety. The unexpurgated nudity was, unfortunately unlike Holocaust, old hat by now on 90's TV. The unedited language actually detracted from its inspirational quality in that Goeth, symbolically, is the only one who uses obscene language in the movie. To have spared worldwide audiences his excesses would done little to revoke the artistic license of either Keneally or Spielberg.

For further information on this topic:

The Nizkor Project

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