by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

Prior to Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg was the most famous film director of all time. He was already credited with creating the first “blockbuster” movie (Jaws), and Alfred Hitchcock famously proclaimed him as the first director who doesn’t see the proscenium arch, that his filmmaking technique is wholly new for the medium and doesn’t belong to the stage plays from before it.  

After Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg was now the most famous film director of all time, but with a new license to direct whatever project he wanted. He was no longer limited to blockbusters, summer fare that would make studios fortunes. He had the street cred and Oscar win to justify anything he wanted to do.

Leading up to Schindler’s List, Spielberg had experimented with “serious” filmmaking with mixed results. The Color Purple pulled its punches and abandoned essential themes from the book that Spielberg was too squeamish for. Empire of the Sun, an overlooked masterpiece, was too ahead of its time for the recognition that it deserved–it was misinterpreted as “overly sentimental” when it was anything but.

Creating Schindler’s List was not without its own difficulties. Studios didn’t get it and didn’t get why he would want to make it. If he was trying to simply make a point about the Holocaust and its history, surely he could just get someone to make a big donation on his behalf? What the suits didn’t understand was that, perhaps for the first time in his career, he felt really compelled to have to tell a story–not just to share with the world an inside look at a horror that films up to this point had largely ignored. He needed to reckon with his own experience being Jewish, something he’d felt conflicted about as a child who’d suffered bullying over his family’s faith and culture.

For those not familiar with the film, it’s about Oskar Schindler (played by Liam Neeson), an amoral war-profiteer who enlists an entirely Jewish workforce for free, at a time when Jews were being rounded up into ghettos, prison farms, and death camps. He uses their free labor to become a very rich man. After witnessing the carnage of the Nazi party, he spends his fortune, all of it, to save as many Jewish lives as he could. But Schindler’s List isn’t some hokey story about some bad man becoming good; it’s about a complicated man living in the gray areas of life who had the courage to do what he did.  

The film’s villain, Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) is the opposite of Schindler. Spielberg frames them as two sides to the same coin. In a montage of them getting ready for their days, they start their mornings the same: they shave; dress in the finest clothing; and eat the best food.  As “enemies” of the story, they are at odds with each other, but they never have an ah-ha moment where they turn on each other. Their battle is on a higher level: when Goeth mindlessly plucks off human lives with a sniper rifle, like some sick game, Schindler is wheeling and dealing behind the scenes to save them from these horrors.

The film, shot in black and white–and minus many of the filmmaking tools he’d used and helped perfect over his decades-long career up until this point–presents an uncompromising view of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews lost their lives in an effort to “ethnically cleanse” and purify Europe. Gone are the crane shots and swelling music and extravagant special effects set pieces that defined him. Schindler’s List feels like an out of body experience for Spielberg, a film in which he gave himself entirely to his creative process. It moves quickly and never has a chance to second-guess itself. Every scene is unbelievably enthralling. The dialogue, the cinematography, the set design, the period costuming–everything is essential.

Perhaps the most essential ingredient of all in Schindler’s List’s success was in its portrayal of violence, something that would later define the serious works of the director. No punches are pulled here. It’s not that the violence is extreme; in fact, the level of actual on-screen death is rather limited. It’s that the brutality is shot in such a realistic, matter-of-fact manner. A gun is fired–not with a cinematic CRACK and KABOOM–but with a puff and an echo of the shot. A body slumps over, and the snow around the dead melts with blood. The film is nearly clinical in its examination of this kind of violence and the mundanity of evil men.

It’s important to note that Schindler’s List is not a movie defined by death, and it’s not a film which revels in its misery. Most of the characters that we meet early on survive all the way until the end when we see them alongside their real-life counterparts. Because Schindler’s List isn’t a movie about death. It’s about survival.

Schindler’s List is not free from showing the very real consequences of violence in something as mindless as war and genocide, exemplified in it’s most famous scene of the little girl in the red coat. When the ghetto is being liquidated and Nazi soldiers are rounding up Jewish citizens to be forced into concentration camps, a little girl roams through the streets, the red of her coat contrasting with the black and white of the film. Schindler watches from above and sees the destruction and horror, but his eyes are focused on the little girl no one else notices. She narrowly avoids being run over, shot, and rounded up, and finally, as the scene ends, makes it to safety. It isn’t until later that we see her dead body dumped unceremoniously atop a pile of other dead bodies. Yes, Schindler’s List is a movie about survival, but unfortunately not everyone survives. And her death hits like a ton of bricks. It’s brutal and awful to see.

Schindler’s List would lead to another masterpiece twelve years later, Munich, in which Spielberg analyzes the complexity of vengeance and the weight it has on someone’s soul.  Spielberg doesn’t purport to have all the answers, but he does use the response to the 1972 Olympics massacre as a larger metaphor for military response as a whole. Not just in something as obvious as Israel and Palestine, but the U.S. and Iraq and Afghanistan. Whereas Schindler’s List is a movie about survival, Munich is about the price of revenge, and how it’s a hunger that can never be sated.