| Schindler's List | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Steven Spielberg |
| Produced by | Steven Spielberg Gerald R. Molen Branko Lustig |
| Screenplay by | Steven Zaillian |
| Based on | Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally |
| Starring | Liam Neeson Ben Kingsley Ralph Fiennes Caroline Goodall Jonathan Sagall Embeth Davidtz |
| Music by | John Williams |
| Cinematography | Janusz Kamiński |
| Editing by | Michael Kahn |
| Studio | Amblin Entertainment |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
| Release date(s) | 30 November 1993 (DC) 1 December 1993 |
| Running time | 195 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English Hebrew German Polish French |
| Budget | $22,000,000[1] |
| Box office | $321,000,000 |
Schindler's List is a 1993 American film about Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg, and based on the novel Schindler's Ark by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally. It stars Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as Schutzstaffel (SS)-officer Amon Göth, and Ben Kingsley as Schindler's Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern.
The film was a box office success and recipient of seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Score, as well as numerous other awards (7 BAFTAs, 3 Golden Globes). In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked the film 8th on its list of the 100 best American films of all time (up one position from its 9th place listing on the 1998 list).
Contents |
The film begins in 1939 with the German-initiated relocation of Polish Jews from surrounding areas to the Kraków Ghetto shortly after the beginning of World War II. Meanwhile, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), an ethnic German businessman from Moravia, arrives in the city in hopes of making his fortune as a war profiteer. Schindler, a member of the Nazi Party, lavishes bribes upon the Wehrmacht and SS officials in charge of procurement. Sponsored by the military, Schindler acquires a factory for the production of army mess kits. Not knowing much about how to properly run such an enterprise, he gains a close collaborator in Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), an official of Krakow's Judenrat (Jewish Council) who has contacts with the Jewish business community and the black marketers inside the Ghetto. The Jewish businessmen lend Schindler the money for the factory in return for a small share of products produced. Opening the factory, Schindler pleases the Nazis and enjoys his newfound wealth and status as "Herr Direktor", while Stern handles all the administration. Schindler hires Jewish Poles instead of Catholic Poles because they cost less (the workers themselves get nothing; the wages are paid to the SS). Workers in Schindler's factory are allowed outside the ghetto, and Stern falsifies documents to ensure that as many people as possible are deemed "essential" to the German war effort, which saves them from being transported to concentration camps, or being killed.
SS-Lieutenant (Untersturmführer) Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) arrives in Kraków to oversee construction of the new Płaszów concentration camp. Once the camp is completed, he orders the final liquidation of the ghetto and Operation Reinhard in Kraków begins, with hundreds of troops emptying the cramped rooms and arbitrarily murdering anyone who protests or appears uncooperative, elderly or infirm. Schindler, watching the massacre from the hills overlooking the area with his mistress, is profoundly affected. He nevertheless is careful to befriend Goeth and, through Stern's attention to bribery, Schindler continues to enjoy SS support and protection. During this time, Schindler bribes Goeth into allowing him to build a sub-camp for his workers, so that he can keep his factory running smoothly and protect them from being randomly executed. As time passes, Schindler acts on information provided by Stern to try and save as many lives as he can. As the war shifts, Goeth receives orders from Berlin commanding him to exhume and destroy the remains of every Jew murdered in the Kraków Ghetto, dismantle Płaszów, and ship the remaining Jews—including Schindler's workers—to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
At first, Schindler prepares to leave Kraków with his fortune. He finds himself unable to do so, however, and prevails upon Goeth to allow him to keep his workers so that he can move them to a factory in his old home of Zwittau-Brinnlitz, in Moravia away from the Final Solution, now fully underway in occupied Poland. Goeth eventually acquiesces, but charges a massive bribe for each worker. Schindler and Stern assemble a list of workers who are to be kept off the trains to Auschwitz.
"Schindler's List" comprises these "skilled" inmates, and for many of those in Płaszów camp, being included means the difference between life and death. Almost all of the people on Schindler's list arrive safely at the new site. The train carrying the Jewish women is accidentally redirected to Auschwitz. The women are taken to what they believe to be the gas chambers; they then weep with joy and immense relief when water falls from the showers. The day after, the women are shown waiting in line for work and being inspected by the camp physician, Dr. Josef Mengele. In the meantime, Schindler rushes immediately to Auschwitz. Intending to rescue all the women, he bribes the camp commander, Rudolf Höß, with a cache of diamonds in exchange for releasing the women to Brinnlitz. However, a last minute problem arises just when all the women are boarding the train. Several SS officers attempt to hold back the children and prevent them from leaving. Schindler, however, insists that he needs their hands to polish the narrow insides of artillery shells. As a result, the children are released. Once the women arrive in Zwittau-Brinnlitz, Schindler institutes firm controls on the SS guards assigned to the factory, forbidding them to enter the production areas. He permits and encourages the Jews to observe the Sabbath. In order to keep his factory workers alive, he spends much of his fortune bribing Nazi officials and buying shells from other companies, meaning he never actually produces working shells for the seven months his factory is in business. Later, he surprises his wife while she is in the village church during mass, and tells her that she will now be the only woman in his life, a concession he had refused to grant previously. She goes with him to the factory to assist him. He runs out of money just as the Wehrmacht surrenders, ending the war in Europe.
As a Nazi Party member and a self-described "profiteer of slave labour", in 1945, Schindler must flee the advancing Red Army. Although the SS guards have been ordered to liquidate the Jews of Brinnlitz, Schindler persuades them to return to their families as men, not murderers. In the aftermath, he packs a car in the night and bids farewell to his workers. They give him a letter explaining he is not a criminal to them, together with a ring secretly made from a worker's gold dental bridge and engraved with a Talmudic quotation, "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." Schindler is touched but deeply ashamed, feeling he could have done more to save many more lives, such as selling his car, and selling his Golden Party Badge could have saved one more. Weeping, he considers how many more lives he could have saved as he leaves with his wife during the night.
The Schindler Jews, having slept outside the factory gates through the night, are awakened by sunlight the next morning. A Soviet dragoon arrives and announces to the Jews that they have been liberated by the Red Army. The Jews walk to a nearby town in search of food.
After a few scenes depicting post-war events and locations, such as the execution of Amon Goeth by hanging for war crimes and a brief summary of what eventually happened to Schindler in his later years, the film returns to the Jews walking to the nearby town. As they walk abreast, the black-and-white frame changes to one in color of present-day Schindler Jews at Schindler's grave site in Jerusalem (where he wanted to be interred).[2] The film ends by showing a procession of now-elderly Jews who worked in Schindler's factory, each of whom reverently sets a stone on his grave—a traditional Jewish custom denoting deep gratitude or thanks to the deceased. The actors portraying the major characters walk hand-in-hand with the people they portrayed, placing their stones as they pass. (Ben Kingsley is accompanied by the widow of Itzhak Stern, who died in 1969.) The audience learns that, at the time of the film's release, there were fewer than 4,000 Jews left alive in Poland, but more than 6,000 descendants of the Schindler Jews throughout the world. In the final scene, Liam Neeson (although his face is not visible) places a pair of roses on the grave and stands contemplatively over it.
The film concludes with a statement, "In memory of the more than six million Jews murdered"; the closing credits begin with a view of a road paved with headstones culled from Jewish cemeteries during the war (as depicted in the film), before fading to black.
Poldek Pfefferberg was one of the Schindlerjuden, and made it his life's mission to tell the story of his savior. Pfefferberg attempted to produce a biopic of Oskar Schindler with MGM in 1963,[3] with Howard Koch writing,[4] but the deal fell through. In 1982, Thomas Keneally published Schindler's Ark, which he wrote after he met Pfefferberg. MCA president Sid Sheinberg sent director Steven Spielberg a New York Times review of the book. Spielberg was astounded by the story of Oskar Schindler, jokingly asking if it was true. Spielberg "was drawn to the paradoxical nature of [Schindler]... It was about a Nazi saving Jews... What would drive a man like this to suddenly take everything he had earned and put it all in the service of saving these lives?" Spielberg expressed enough interest for Universal Pictures to buy the rights to the novel, and in early 1983 Spielberg met with Pfefferberg. Pfefferberg asked Spielberg, "Please, when are you starting?" Spielberg replied, "Ten years from now."[3] (In the end credits of the film, Pfefferberg is credited as an advisor, under the name "Leopold Page.")
Spielberg was unsure of his own maturity in making a film about the Holocaust, and the project remained "on [his] guilty conscience". Spielberg tried to pass the project to director Roman Polanski, who turned it down. Polanski's mother was killed at Auschwitz,[5] and he had lived in and survived the Kraków Ghetto. Polanski eventually directed his own Holocaust film, The Pianist, in 2002. Spielberg also offered the film to Sydney Pollack,[4] and Martin Scorsese, who was attached to direct Schindler's List in 1988. However, Spielberg was unsure of letting Scorsese direct the film, as "I'd given away a chance to do something for my children and family about the Holocaust." Spielberg offered him the chance to direct the 1991 remake of Cape Fear instead.[4] Billy Wilder expressed interest in directing the film "as a memorial to most of [his] family, who went to Auschwitz."
Spielberg finally decided to direct the film after hearing of the Bosnian Genocide and various Holocaust deniers.[3] With the rise of neo-Nazism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he worried that people were too accepting of intolerance, as they were in the 1930s. In addition, Spielberg was becoming more involved with his Jewish heritage while raising his children.[6] Sid Sheinberg greenlit the film on one condition: that Spielberg make Jurassic Park first. Spielberg later said, "He knew that once I had directed Schindler I wouldn't be able to do Jurassic Park."[4]
In 1983, Thomas Keneally was hired to adapt his book, and he turned in a 220-page script. Keneally focused on Schindler's numerous relationships, and admitted he did not compress the story enough. Spielberg hired Kurt Luedtke, who had adapted the screenplay of Out of Africa, to write the next draft. Luedtke gave up almost four years later, as he found Schindler's change of heart too unbelievable. During his time as director, Scorsese hired Steven Zaillian to write the script. When he was handed back the project, Spielberg found Zaillian's 115-page draft too short, and asked him to extend it to 195 pages. Spielberg wanted to focus on the Jews in the story. He extended the ghetto liquidation sequence, as he "felt very strongly that the sequence had to be almost unwatchable." He wanted Schindler's transition to be gradual and ambiguous, and not "some kind of explosive catharsis that would turn this into The Great Escape."[4]
Liam Neeson auditioned as Oskar Schindler early in the casting process and was cast in December 1992, after Spielberg saw him perform in Anna Christie on Broadway.[4] Warren Beatty participated in a script reading, but Spielberg was concerned that he could not disguise his accent and that he would bring "movie star baggage".[7] Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson expressed interest in portraying Schindler.[4] Neeson felt "[Schindler] enjoyed fookin' [sic] with the Nazis. In Keneally's book it says he was regarded as a kind of a buffoon by them... if the Nazis were New Yorkers, he was from Arkansas. They don't quite take him seriously, and he used that to full effect."[8] To prepare for the role, Neeson was sent tapes of Time Warner CEO Steve Ross, who had a charisma that Spielberg compared to Schindler's.[9]
Ralph Fiennes was cast as Amon Goeth after Spielberg viewed his performances in A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Spielberg said of Fiennes' audition that "I saw sexual evil. It is all about subtlety: there were moments of kindness that would move across his eyes and then instantly run cold." Fiennes put on 28 lbs to play the role. He watched historic newsreels and talked to Holocaust survivors who knew Amon Göth. In portraying him, Fiennes said "I got close to his pain. Inside him is a fractured, miserable human being. I feel split about him, sorry for him. He's like some dirty, battered doll I was given and that I came to feel peculiarly attached to." Fiennes looked so much like Amon Göth in costume that when Mila Pfefferberg, a survivor of the events, met him she trembled with fear.[10]
Overall, there are 126 speaking parts in the film. Thirty thousand extras were hired during filming. Spielberg cast children of the Schindlerjuden for key Hebrew-speaking roles and hired Catholic Poles for the survivors.[4] Often, German actors playing the SS would come to Spielberg and say, "Thank you for letting me resolve my [family] secrets by playing in your movie."[7] Halfway during the shoot, Spielberg conceived the epilogue where 128 Schindlerjuden pay their respects to Schindler's grave in Jerusalem. The producers scrambled to find the people portrayed in the film.[4]
Shooting for Schindler's List began on March 1, 1993 in Kraków (Cracow), Poland, and continued for seventy-one days.[3] The crew shot at the real life locations, though the Płaszów camp had to be reconstructed in a pit adjacent to the original site, due to post-war changes to the original camp. The crew was forbidden to enter Auschwitz, so they shot at a replica outside the camp.[9] The Polish locals welcomed the filmmakers. There were some antisemitic incidents; anti-Semitic symbols scrawled on local billboards near shooting locations.[4] An elderly woman mistook Fiennes for a Nazi and told him "the Germans were charming people. They didn't kill anybody who didn't deserve it",[10] while Kingsley nearly entered a brawl with an elderly German-speaking businessman who insulted Israeli actor Michael Schneider.[11] Nonetheless, Spielberg stated that at Passover, "all the German actors showed up. They put on yarmulkes and opened up Haggadas, and the Israeli actors moved right next to them and began explaining it to them. And this family of actors sat around and race and culture were just left behind."[11]
"I was hit in the face with my personal life. My upbringing. My Jewishness. The stories my grandparents told me about the Shoah. And Jewish life came pouring back into my heart. I cried all the time."
Shooting Schindler's List was a deeply emotional time for Spielberg, as the subject matter forced him to confront elements of his childhood, such as the antisemitism he faced. He was furious with himself when he did not "cry buckets" while visiting Auschwitz, and was one of many crew members who did not look on during shooting of the scene where aging Jews are forced to run naked while being selected by Nazi doctors to go to Auschwitz.[9] Several actresses broke down when filming the shower scene, including one who was born in a concentration camp.[7] Kate Capshaw and Spielberg's five children accompanied Spielberg on set, and he later thanked his wife "for rescuing me ninety-two days in a row...when things just got too unbearable." Spielberg's parents and his rabbi visited him on set. Robin Williams called Spielberg every two weeks to cheer him up with various jokes,[3] because there was very little humor on set. Spielberg also ordered various episodes of Seinfeld on VHS to watch in his hotel room after shooting each day.[7] Ironically, Jerry's watching of Schindler's List in a theatre became the plot of a later episode. Spielberg forwent a salary, calling it "blood money", and believed the film would flop.[3]
Spielberg used German and Polish language in scenes to recreate the feeling of being present in the past, and used English to emphasize dramatic points. The director was interested in making the film entirely in German and Polish, but decided "there's too much safety in reading. It would have been an excuse to take their eyes off the screen and watch something else."[7]
Spielberg decided not to plan the film with storyboards, and to shoot the film like a documentary, looking to the documentaries The Twisted Cross (1956)[12] and Shoah (1985) for inspiration. Forty percent of the film was shot with handheld cameras,[13] and the modest budget of $25 million meant the film was shot quickly over seventy-two days. Spielberg felt that this gave the film "a spontaneity, an edge, and it also serves the subject." Spielberg said that he "got rid of the crane, got rid of the Steadicam, got rid of the zoom lenses, [and] got rid of everything that for me might be considered a safety net."[9] Such a style made Spielberg feel like an artist, as he limited his tools for a film he felt didn't have to be commercially successful.[6] This matured Spielberg, who felt that in the past he had always been paying tribute to directors such as Cecil B. DeMille or David Lean.[11] On this film, his shooting style was purely his own. He proudly noted that in this film, there were no crane shots.[4]
The decision to shoot the film mainly in black and white lent to the documentary-style of cinematography, which cinematographer Janusz Kamiński compared to German Expressionism and Italian neorealism.[9] Kamiński said that he wanted to give a timeless sense to the film, so the audience would "not have a sense of when it was made."[9] Spielberg was following suit with "[v]irtually everything I've seen on the Holocaust... which have largely been stark, black and white images."[14] Universal chairman Tom Pollock asked Spielberg to shoot the film in a color negative, to allow color VHS copies of the film to be sold, but Spielberg did not want "to beautify events."[9] Black and white did present challenges to the color-familiar crew. Allan Starski, the production designer, had to make the sets darker or lighter than the people in the scenes, so they would not blend. The costumes had to be distinguished from skin tones or colors being used for the sets.[14]
John Williams composed the score for Schindler's List. The composer was amazed by the film, and felt it would be too challenging. He said to Spielberg, "You need a better composer than I am for this film." Spielberg replied, "I know. But they're all dead!"[15] Williams played the main theme on piano, and following Spielberg's suggestion, he hired Itzhak Perlman to perform it on the violin. In the scene where the ghetto is being liquidated by the Nazis, the folk song Oyfn Pripetshik (or Afn Pripetshek) (Yiddish: אויפֿן פּריפּעטשיק)" is sung by a children's choir. The song was often sung by Spielberg's grandmother, Becky, to her grandchildren.[16] The clarinet solos heard in the film were recorded by Klezmer virtuoso Giora Feidman. Williams won an Academy Award for Best Original Score for Schindler's List, his fifth win.
Although the film is primarily shot in black-and-white, red is used to distinguish a little girl in a coat. Later in the film, the girl is seen among the dead, recognizable only by the red coat she is still wearing. Although it was unintentional, this character is coincidentally very similar to Roma Ligocka, who was known in the Kraków Ghetto for her red coat. Ligocka, unlike her fictional counterpart, survived the Holocaust. After the film was released, she wrote and published her own story, The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir (2002, in translation).[17] The scene, however, was constructed on the memories of Zelig Burkhut, survivor of Plaszow (and other work camps). When interviewed by Spielberg before the film was made, Burkhut told of a young girl wearing a pink coat, no older than four, who was shot by a Nazi officer right before his eyes. When being interviewed by The Courier-Mail, he said "it is something that stays with you forever."
According to Andy Patrizio of IGN, the girl in the red coat is used to indicate that Schindler has changed: "Spielberg put a twist on her [Ligocka's] story, turning her into one more pile on the cart of corpses to be incinerated. The look on Schindler's face is unmistakable. Minutes earlier, he saw the ash and soot of burning corpses piling up on his car as just an annoyance."[18] Andre Caron wondered whether it was done "to symbolize innocence, hope or the red blood of the Jewish people being sacrificed in the horror of the Holocaust?"[19] Spielberg himself has explained that he only followed the novel, and his interpretation was that
This partial climax in the film may have been influenced by the final scene of Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, an entire black-and-white film which shows a few moments of color at the end to put an exclamation point on Rublev's spiritual change. This is a far more likely influence on Spielberg than the suggested Lars von Trier's film, Europa, was in relation to this approach.
Although she has no speaking part, the little girl is noted on the Internet Movie Database as the "Red Genia". Her portrayer, Oliwia Dabrowska, was born in Krakow on 28 May 1989 and later appeared in only one other movie.
The beginning features a family observing the Shabbat. Spielberg said, "to start the film with the candles being lit...would be a rich bookend, to start the film with a normal Shabbat service before the juggernaut against the Jews begins." When the color fades out in the film's opening moments, it gives way to a movie in which smoke comes to symbolize bodies being burnt at Auschwitz. Only at the end do the images of candle fire regain their warmth when Schindler allows his workers to hold Shabbat services. For Spielberg, they represented "just a glint of color, and a glimmer of hope."[4]
The film opened in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto on December 15, 1993. The film grossed $96.1 million in the United States and over $321.2 million worldwide.[21] In Germany, over 5.8 million admission tickets were sold.
The film was released to DVD on March 9, 2004. The DVD was available in widescreen and fullscreen editions, both being a DVD-18 disc with the feature film beginning on side A and continuing on side B, along with the special features, which include a documentary introduced by Steven Spielberg. Also released for both formats was a limited edition gift set. The laserdisc gift set was a limited one, with only 10,000 copies manufactured. Besides the DVD, the set included the film's soundtrack, the original novel, and an exclusive photo booklet.[22] Similar to the Laserdisc set, the DVD gift set included the widescreen version of the film, the original novel, the film's soundtrack on CD, a senitype, and a photo booklet titled Schindler's List: Images of the Steven Spielberg Film, all housed in a plexiglass case.[23] The set has since been discontinued.[24]
Schindler's List won seven Oscars at the 66th Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes were nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor respectively, but did not win.[25] At the British Academy awards, the film won Best Film, the David Lean Award for Direction, Best Supporting Actor (Ralph Fiennes), Cinematography, Editing and Score.[21] Schindler's List won Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture (Drama), Best Director and Best Screenplay, with John Williams awarded the Grammy for the film's musical score.[21]
Schindler's List was warmly received by many of Spielberg's peers. Filmmaker Billy Wilder reportedly wrote a long letter of appreciation to Spielberg in which he proclaimed, "They couldn't have gotten a better man. This movie is absolutely perfection."[26] Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino has commented that Schindler's List left him "shaken" and that "even though I have seen many films about the Holocaust, none up to that point had managed to get at the feeling of what it was like to be in the inside of a concentration camp."[27] Roman Polanski, who had turned down Spielberg's offer to direct the film, later commented, "I certainly wouldn't have done as good a job as Spielberg because I couldn't have been as objective as he was." Polanski has also cited Schindler's List as an influence on his 1995 film Death and the Maiden.[28]
Schindler's List received widespread acclaim from critics. Reviewing Schindler’s List for The New York Review of Books, the leading British critic John Gross wrote: “Suppose the Disney organization announced that it was planning a film about the Holocaust. Spielberg’s films up until now have mostly been fairy tales or adventure stories, or a mixture of both, so I can’t pretend, then, that I approached the film without apprehension. My fears were altogether misplaced. Spielberg shows a firm moral and emotional grasp of his material. The film is an outstanding achievement.”[29]
However, the film was immediately attacked by documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, director of the 9-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah, who claimed that Spielberg had only succeeded in making "a kitschy melodrama." Lanzmann, who believed his own film to be the definite account of the Holocaust, complained, "I sincerely thought that there was a time before Shoah, and a time after Shoah, and that after Shoah certain things could no longer be done. Spielberg did them anyway."[30] Spielberg angrily responded to Lanzmann's criticisms, accusing him of wanting to be "the only voice in the definite account of the Holocaust." He added, "It amazed me that there could be any hurt feelings in an effort to reflect the truth."[31]
The success of Schindler's List persuaded filmmaker Stanley Kubrick to abandon his own Holocaust project, Aryan Papers, which would have been about a Jewish boy who survives the war, along with his aunt, by sneaking through Poland while pretending to be a Catholic.[32] Convinced that no Holocaust film could truly capture the horrors of the real event, Kubrick is alleged to have spoken of Schindler's List, "Think that's about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn't it? The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. Schindler's List is about 600 who don't."[32] Since then, many of the film's detractors—including filmmaker Terry Gilliam—have cited this quote in their efforts to condemn the film.[33]
The film's detractors also include film critic Robert Philip Kolker, who, in his A Cinema of Loneliness, attacked the portrayal of Goeth as "too unrelievedly brutal. He is a psychopath, and psychopathology is too easy a way to dismiss Nazism and its adherents. [...] Ideological elements are so distorted by dreams of power, authority, and manufactured hatred and convictions of necessity, that the majority of a culture gets caught up in the act of killing the demonized other. There were psychotic Germans, to be sure; but Nazism cannot be reduced simply to psychosis. There are scenes in Schindler's List of German officers in a hysterical frenzy of killing that are, perhaps, more accurate than Goeth's unrelenting murderousness, but also bring with them the old Hollywood representations of Nazis as sophisticated gangsters."[34]
Hungarian Jewish author Imre Kertész, a Holocaust survivor, criticized Spielberg for falsifying the experience of the Holocaust in Schindler's List and for showing it as something that is foreign to the human nature and impossible to recur. He also dismissed the film itself, saying "it is obvious that the American Spielberg, who incidentally wasn’t even born until after the war, has and can have no idea of the authentic reality of a Nazi concentration camp... I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life (whether in the private sphere or on the level of "civilization" as such) and the very possibility of the Holocaust."[35]
In 2004, the Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.[36]
Schindler's List featured on a number of other "best of" lists, including the Time magazine's Top Hundred as selected by critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel, Time Out magazine's 100 Greatest Films Centenary Poll conducted in 1995, Roger Ebert's "Great Movies"' series, and Leonard Maltin's "100 Must See Movies of the Century". In addition, The Vatican named Schindler's List among the top 45 films ever made.[37]
The readers of the German film magazine, Cinema, voted Schindler's List #1 the best movie of all time in 2000.[38] In 2002, a Channel 4 poll named Schindler's List the ninth greatest film of all time,[39] and it came fourth in the 2005 war films poll.[40]
The film was extremely well received in Israel, where it is aired on public television every year on Holocaust Memorial Day, unedited, uncensored and without commercial breaks.
Following the success of the film, Spielberg founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organization with the goal of providing an archive for the filmed testimony of as many survivors of the Holocaust as possible, to save their stories. He continues to finance that work.[21] Spielberg used the money from the film to finance several related documentaries, including The Lost Children of Berlin (1996), Anne Frank Remembered (1995), and The Last Days (1998).[21]
| Award[41] | Person | |
| Awarded: | ||
| Best Picture | Steven Spielberg Gerald R. Molen Branko Lustig |
|
| Best Director | Steven Spielberg | |
| Best Adapted Screenplay | Steven Zaillian | |
| Best Cinematography | Janusz Kamiński | |
| Best Art Direction | Ewa Braun Allan Starski |
|
| Best Film Editing | Michael Kahn | |
| Best Original Score | John Williams | |
| Nominated: | ||
| Best Actor | Liam Neeson | |
| Best Supporting Actor | Ralph Fiennes | |
| Best Costume Design | Anna Biedrzycka Sheppard | |
| Best Sound | Andy Nelson Steve Pederson Scott Millan Ron Judkins |
|
| Best Makeup | Christina Smith Matthew Mungle Judy Alexander Cory |
|
According to Slovak filmmaker Juraj Herz, the scene in which a group of women confuse an actual shower with a gas chamber is taken directly, shot by shot, from his Zastihla mě noc (1986). Herz says he wanted to sue, but was unable to come up with the money to fund the effort.[44]
For the 1997 American television showing of the film, at Spielberg's insistence it aired unedited and nearly uncensored, although the sex scene was mildly edited by removing nearly all of the "thrusting". The film was preceded by a recorded introduction by Spielberg himself, explaining why the film was being aired nearly unedited. The telecast was the first ever to receive a TV-M (now TV-MA) rating under the TV Parental Guidelines that had been established at the beginning of that year. Senator Tom Coburn, then an Oklahoma congressman, said that in airing the film, NBC had brought television "to an all-time low, with full-frontal nudity, violence and profanity", adding that airing the film was an insult to "decent-minded individuals everywhere".[45] Under fire from fellow Republicans as well as from Democrats, Coburn apologized for his criticism, saying: "My intentions were good, but I've obviously made an error in judgment in how I've gone about saying what I wanted to say". He said he hadn't reversed his opinion on airing the film, but said it ought to have been aired later at night when there aren't "large numbers of children watching without parental supervision".[46] The film was subsequently rebroadcast a year later on select PBS stations, once again airing unedited and without Spielberg's prologue.
Controversy arose in Germany for the film's television premiere on Pro 7. Heavy protests ensued after the station intended to televise the film separated by two commercial breaks. As a compromise, the broadcast finally included one break, consisting of a short news update and selected commercials (no alcohol and no hygiene products).[47] Since then, subsequent broadcasts in German television did not include commercial breaks.
In the Philippines chief censor Henrietta Mendez ordered three cuts of Schindler's List, due to its scenes that displayed female nudity and sexual intercourse, before it could be shown. As a result of these proposed cuts Steven Spielberg pulled the film from screening in the Philippines. As a result of Mendez's actions, Philippine senators demanded the abolition of the Philippine censors board. Senate justice committee chairman Raul Roco stated "such narrow-mindedness precisely shows the dangers of censorship." Mendez argued that "the sex act is sacred and beautiful and should be done in the privacy of the bedroom."[48]
The song "Yerushalayim Shel Zahav" ("Jerusalem of Gold") is featured in the film's soundtrack and plays during a key moment near the end of the film. This caused some controversy in Israel when the film was released because the song was written in 1967 and is widely known in Israel as a pop–folk song. The song was therefore edited out of the Israeli release of the film and replaced by the song Eli, Eli, which was written by the Jewish Hungarian poet Hannah Szenes in World War II and is more appropriate for the time period and subject matter of the film. No comment stemmed from Spielberg in regards to this Israeli censorship.
Veteran documentary filmmaker and professor Claude Lanzmann also labeled Schindler's List "pernicious in its impact and influence" and "very sentimental".
French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard stated that he holds Spielberg partly responsible for the lack of artistic merit in mainstream cinema and accused Spielberg of using his film Schindler's List to make a profit of tragedy while Schindler's wife lived in poverty in Argentina. This claim is certainly unwarranted given that Spielberg took no profit from the film as he considered it "blood money".
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