Schindler's List: The Hollywoodcaust Film?

First off, I must say that I think Schindler's List is a great film and one of Spielberg's biggest accomplishments. However, as many film critics and other theorists have pointed out, there is an inherent problem in representing the Holocaust on film -- the problem of "representing the unrepresentable," as many have claimed. While I think that these claims sometimes go too far, such as Adorno's infamous statement that "poetry after Auschwitz is blasphemy," I do agree that making a fictional film about the Holocaust can present some problems in terms of Hollywood-izing the atrocities that occurred. For example, since most average American movie-goers prefer not to sit through two hours (or more) of depressing, horrific imagery without any sort of positive or uplifting payoff at the end, there is almost a necessity to create an inspirational Holocaust film, which on its face seems clearly oxymoronic and morally objectionable.

However, given all of these things, I think that Steven Spielberg did a great job of finding a story set during the Holocaust that is both inspirational in some sense (since it involves the saving of a tremendous number of Jewish lives) yet doesn't shy away from the horrors of the genocide that occurred and doesn't fall into the trap of Hollywood-izing the people or events. Instead, Spielberg presents the killings in an amazingly realistic way. For instance, whenever one of the Jewish victims is shot by a Nazi soldier, their body immediately becomes limp and falls to the ground in a shockingly (and subtley) lifeless fashion. Unlike shootings in most Hollywood-produced films, there is no blood splattered everywhere (although there is sometimes blood), no screaming as they fall in slo-mo towards the ground, and no need to shoot the victims over and over again to make sure they're dead. Spielberg even takes this realism of murder one step further, showing that it also doesn't always go as planned, as with the scene where Goeth's gun jams and he is unable to shoot the old man. This more realistic approach to killing is something that makes Schindler's List much more than just a Hollywood portrayal of the Holocaust.

Spielberg also expertly solves another potential problem with cinematic presentations of the Holocaust -- the "impersonal Jews argument," as Nigel Morris describes, where they "end up as extras in their own tragedy." Morris points out how this argument recurs in denunciations of the film, but like Morris, I think that Spielberg actually avoids this issue with the way that he structures the film. As Lester Friedman explains, Spielberg's "sustained interconnection of recurring Jewish characters" makes them "far more than simply marginalized bystanders." Spielberg chooses to introduce and name a number of specific characters at the beginning of the film (from different classes of society, different types of people, etc.) and then follows them throughout the film to finally see their fate at the end, and this technique makes the Jews more human than if they had merely been presented as a nameless mass of victims. Only a director of Steven Spielberg's caliber could portray the Holocaust in such an effective, realistic, and compassionate way. Thus, it is no wonder that Schindler's List is the film that won Spielberg is first Best Director Oscar.