Steven Spielberg, the director of four of the top ten highest-grossing box-office hits in film history, has sold his fantasies to audiences all over the world. But when it came to whether America’s favorite peddler of dreams could be trusted with the adaptation of a true story as important as Thomas Keneally’s bestselling Schindler’s List, all bets were off. When word escaped that the film would be a hefty, 184-minute black-and-white drama with few recognizable actors, predictions started to look bad for the box office, too. From the beginning, it was clear that Schindler’s List would be a different kind of Spielberg film, one that didn’t star killer sharks, friendly aliens, or rampaging dinosaurs. Instead, Schindler’s List tells the story of the corrupt German entrepreneur Oskar Schindler who decided to use his profits to buy the freedom of the 1200 Jews whose labor he had exploited since the beginning of World War II. Audiences quickly devoured the film’s startling images of the Holocaust, transforming Schindler’s List from mere social commentary into a surprise blockbuster. At the same time, Spielberg finally won the praise of critics who had considered his work too frivolous in the past¹. So how did the director everyone knew as a boy at heart manage to make a film with true social significance? And what did it mean for the king of box-office to be the one rewriting history?

No other Hollywood director seems to have mastered the ability to distill a complicated story into a thrilling visual experience quite like Spielberg. Building on the methods of his predecessors, Spielberg created a unique visual style that has the power to transcend language barriers and reach all audiences. A combination of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney, Spielberg belonged to a new breed of film school students, including Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, who synthesized the effective techniques from all cinema that had come before. While he had experimented with socially significant subject matter before in The Color Purple (1985) and Empire of the Sun (1987), Spielberg had diluted the impact of these issues with his showy directorial flourishes. In an interview with Cathleen McGuigan, of Newsweek magazine, Spielberg explained his dilemma with Schindler’s List: "My problem is I have too much command of the visual language. I know how to put a Cecil B. DeMille image on the screen. . . . But I’ve never really been able to put my image on the screen, with the exception of E.T. perhaps. And certainly not until Schindler was I really able to not reference other filmmakers" (qtd. in Ansen 116). With his mastery of cinematic methods, Spielberg knew exactly how to manipulate his audience through visual trickery, but realized that he would need to invent a completely new approach in handling a story of this gravity. His techniques worked perfectly when he was telling spectacular adventure yarns, but he feared they were likely to detract from the subject matter on which he was now concentrating. In many ways, Schindler’s List was unlike anything Spielberg had previously attempted, and he was the first to admit it:

I came to realize the reason I [chose to make] the movie is that I have never in my life told the truth in a movie. My effort as a moviemaker has been to create something that couldn’t possibly happen. . . . That was one of the things I thought: if I’m going to tell the truth for the first time, it should be about this subject. Not about divorce or parents and children, but about this. (qtd. in Ansen 116)

In his Indiana Jones series, Spielberg presented audiences with an exaggerated image of Nazism culled from the pages of pulp action comics. Now, armed with a powerful narrative, Spielberg had the chance to address this suppressed part of his Jewish heritage² while contending with a force far more complicated than the machinations of a few loosely constructed goose-stepping villains.

Many critics and historians question the validity of Schindler’s List as a true representation of the Holocaust, claiming that the choice to retell an anomalous episode with a happy ending detracted from the truly horrific nature of the entire Nazi death machine. As J. Hoberman, a film critic for the Village Voice, put it, Schindler’s List was "feel-good entertainment about the ultimate feel-bad experience of the 20th Century" (qtd. in Brode 240). For many viewers, Schindler’s List represents all or most of the their contact with information about the Holocaust, which means that the redemptive nature of the story could easily obscure the tragedy of the more than six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.

To understand why Schindler’s List-considered by many to be the most successful and influential film about the Holocaust-doesn’t tackle the topic directly, we must realize that Spielberg approached the film as a storyteller, not a historian in the strictest sense of the word. Though Spielberg intended to expose Nazi atrocities in his film, he explained that his goal was "not making a movie about the Holocaust, but about one man who saved lives" (qtd. in Brode 241). By focusing on the specific details of Schindler’s story, Spielberg was able to portray the Nazi businessman’s triumph within the greater context of Nazi anti-Semitism. To its credit, Schindler’s List presents shocking and graphic crimes against humanity, without allowing itself to wallow in the depths of Holocaust grievances. Spielberg does not intend for his film to be the "last word" on the Holocaust. Instead, he gives audiences unfamiliar with the topic a starting point for approaching the century’s most difficult period to comprehend, leaving the work up to them.

Following this notion of the film’s purpose, I think it should be stressed that the "happy ending" and the omission of the most ghoulish aspects of the Holocaust do not trivialize history as some critics attest. Spielberg’s decision to include such horrifying details as on-screen executions and the burning of corpses at Chujowa Gozka does not require that he eliminate redemptive episodes. In particular, I would like to support the film’s controversial shower scene, in which Spielberg engages the viewer in a most unconventional way. When the Schindler women are routed to Auschwitz by mistake, Nazi guards shear their hair, forcing them to disrobe before the camera (at which point, the women are objectified by the cinematic "male gaze"). Naked and frightened, the women are herded into a large shower room, which fits the description of a gas chamber rumored earlier in the film. The camera follows close behind, as we are being pushed along with the women. Suddenly, we are transported back outside to safety as the doors seal the women inside the chamber, forcing the audience to watch as they cling to one another in terror through a window in the door, a perspective shared with the Nazi guards in command.

Once again trapped inside the shower room, the viewer understands how helpless the women feel as they await their deaths. The lights flicker ominously as some of them gasp at the air in an effort to detect poisonous gases. The moment seems to last forever, with the audience completely caught up in the drama. As the showers slowly begin to pour water down on the women, we share their sense of relief. Usually remaining more distanced from the action, Spielberg manipulates his audience with this scene. Many critics think it is unfair for Spielberg to leave out a true representation of murder in the gas chambers³ in favor of this cathartic moment. On the contrary, I would argue that this scene best illustrates the film’s power to make audiences face the horrors of the Holocaust while leaving the responsibility to seek more information in their hands. By forcing us to experience this tense episode as one of the Jewish victims, Spielberg ensures that we will never forget what it felt like to be trapped in their position, while admitting that no one can ever truly comprehend murder in the gas chambers.

Following in the tradition of Italian neorealism and the newsreel footage of the time, Spielberg chose to film Schindler’s List in black-and-white. "The Holocaust was life without light," he told Franciszek Palowski, who published a book on the making of the film. "For me the symbol of life is color. That’s why a film about the Holocaust has to be in black-and-white" (112). Shooting in black-and-white may have earned Spielberg "credibility" for his subject matter, but in doing so, he also sacrificed an important aspect of realism. Put plainly, color existed before the invention of color film stock. To depict the events in black-and-white was to represent them as they are documented, not necessarily as they happened, which of course, was in full color: "[O]ur images of the Holocaust are constructed in black and white, whether from newsreel or photographs, and the film resonates with this existing archive of representation; it places us immediately into that place of memory" (Eley & Grossmann 10). For those of us who did not survive the Holocaust, we can only experience it through these other means of representation. By recreating events in black-and-white, Spielberg prohibits us from experiencing the attrocities as direct participants, reminding us that we can never be more than spectators.

Spielberg had never made a black-and-white film before, though this challenge was just the beginning of the refined approach to filming he used in Schindler’s List: "I didn’t want a style that was similar to anything I had done before. First of all, I threw half my toolbox away. I canceled the crane⁴. I tore out the dolly track. I didn’t really plan a style. I didn’t say I’m going to use a lot of handheld camera. I simply tried to pull the events closer to the audience by reducing the artifice" (qtd. in Ansen 114). The combined effect of the slightly jittery handheld camera and Spielberg’s meticulous attention to detail (which combined the use of authentic Polish locations and props with carefully reconstructed sets, etc.) gives the film a documentary quality. Though Spielberg stresses that his film is an artistic recreation of events, he strove for realism wherever possible⁵. Spielberg admits that his film cannot portray the Holocaust exactly as it happened, though he follows the historical evidence as closely as translating the story into a three-hour movie would allow.

Spielberg deviates from strictly black-and-white cinematography at several key moments in the film, the most striking of which is the appearance of "Red Genia" in the liquidation of the ghetto sequence and her reappearance as one of the dead at Chujowa Gozka. We first spot Genia as Schindler does, from a safe vantage point far removed from the commotion. Schindler and his mistress Ingrid pause during a horseback ride to watch the spectacle from Krzemionki, a hill that overlooks the ghetto. Genia first appears as a tiny, faintly tinted girl wandering alone through the pandemonium below. The camera moves in closer to show Genia weaving oblivious and confused through the violent Nazi soldiers. As Schindler watches, we detect the profound effect the sight of this lost young girl has on him. Like the stray baby carriage caught perilously in the line of fire from the Odessa Steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Genia clearly needs a protector to rescue her from the surrounding violence.

Genia is the film’s secret weapon, an individual character singled out from a great number of sympathetic characters (all of whom Spielberg makes quite familiar through his respectful observation of their unique traits). Three separate writers worked on the screenplay before Spielberg was finally satisfied that he could film it. Keneally began the process by adapting his novel for presentation as a television miniseries. The project moved on to Kurt Luedtke, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Out of Africa. Luedtke was never satisfied with his script, unable to capture exactly what it was that had motivated Schindler’s miraculous transformation⁶. Steven Zaillian, drawn to the film by Martin Scorcese (who had considered directing), discovered that Red Genia could suggest part of Schindler’s change of heart while still leaving his complex psychological decision hidden below the surface. Zaillian convinced Spielberg of the pivotal importance of this scene, comparing Genia’s effect on Schindler to Charles Foster Kane’s mysterious attachment to Rosebud in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, a film Spielberg greatly respected (Brode 230-231). By highlighting Genia’s red coat, Spielberg stresses her importance as a symbol and offers her as an aspect of what eventually motivated Schindler to rescue the Plasow Jews.

The narrative’s final scene, in which the Schindlerjuden present Oskar with a gold ring combines an actual event with the elaborate fictional breakdown of the main character. The ring symbolizes an important transformation for Schindler. As Keneally tells it, "Oskar became very solemn and slowly placed the ring on his finger. Though nobody quite understood it, it was the instant in which Oskar Schindler became dependent of gifts on theirs" (372). This concluding scene strikes many historians as offensively melodramatic⁷, with Schindler breaking from character to dramatically lament over the Jews he was not able to save: "Schindler’s Jews did forge him a ring, and they remained grateful for the rest of their lives. But they did not need or expect him to weep" (45). Though the scene is problematic in the way it misleadingly alters Schindler’s character in the audience’s eyes, it represents the completion of an earlier thread from the film. As Schindler holds his gold Nazi pin in his hands, he realizes that he could have used it to buy the freedom of at least one more life. As offensively sentimental as the scene may be to some viewers, this spoken realization seems to return to Genia, whose innocent life Schindler was unable to save, a missed opportunity for which he will never forgive himself. Though Spielberg does not specifically link Schindler’s "one more life" with Red Genia in this final scene, the artwork under which the film was released completes this unfulfilled goal, depicting innocent young Genia’s hand in Schindler’s saving grasp.

In his review of the film, critic Roger Ebert praises Spielberg for leaving the interpretation of Schindler’s motives for the audience to decide: "What happened to turn [Schindler] from a victimizer into a humanitarian? It is to the great credit of director Steven Spielberg that his film Schindler’s List does not even attempt to answer that question. Any possible answer would be too simple, an insult to the mystery of Schindler’s life" (645). Spielberg does not give his audience easy answers in his film, requiring viewers to debate why Schindler decided to free the Jews as he did. At the same time, Spielberg transforms the difficult subject matter into fare suitable for almost everyone. In doing so, he remains reverent to his delicate theme and never gives in to exploitation. According to Holocaust historian Omar Bartov, the film is valuable precisely because it is able to reach mainstream audiences without oversimplifying or diluting the important historical topic. Bartov admits that, ironically, it was this very quality which irritated scholars on the subject:

Indeed, it seems that the popular success of Schindler’s List makes it especially suspect in some intellectual circles. Conversely, the argument that the film’s ability to attract large audiences is one of its merits is rejected as rooted in a snobbish attitude which assumes that only "we" [historians] can understand the higher forms of representation while the multitude has to be fed with the usual humble and simplistic Hollywood fare. (41-42)

Perhaps the only trait that carries over from Spielberg’s earlier style is his talent in connecting with an audience. Rather than using the superficial directorial devices that enhance traditional Hollywood filmmaking, Spielberg invented a completely new approach. "I’m sort of interpreting history, trying to find a way of communicating that history to people, but I’m not using the strengths that I usually use to entertain people. I have a very strong urge not to bore anybody," Spielberg told Palowski (172). With Schindler’s List, Spielberg proved that, despite his unsurpassed ability to construct a visual narrative, his true forte lies in conveying strong human emotions.

While the average audience member emerges from the movie with an incomplete picture of the Holocaust, he or she has gained a basis on which to begin understanding the troubling events. Before long, survivors and eyewitnesses of the Holocaust will no longer exist to tell their stories. Left only with the documentation which the perpetrators themselves used to selectively record their brutal actions, we must turn to artistic representations to sustain the legacy: "For years, memories of the Civil War were passed down from grandpa to the rest of the family. Then grandpa finally died, and Gone With the Wind took up the Homeric burden of passing the epic along. The same will soon be true for the Holocaust and Schindler’s List. When literal memory ends, cultural memory can begin" (Alter 117). Schindler’s List may not show the actual decimation of the European Jewish population and its culture, but it presents us with a valuable historical/artistic perspective that possesses the power to motivate us towards researching the topic more fully. Every time Schindler’s List introduces another person to the tragedy of our past or broadens their understanding of the Holocaust, Spielberg proves his success. His gift in sharing the stories of so many innocent victims in such an artistically poignant way merely enhances the film’s brilliance.