Steven Spielberg’s film addresses a specific episode of World War II: the one in which an industrialist and member of the Nazi party saved more than a thousand Jews from the death camps by hiring them in his factory. “Schindler’s List” left its mark on its time, sparking reflections and controversies around the representation of the Holocaust in fiction. Explanations.
What is “Schindler’s List” about?
The film tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist and member of the Nazi Party who, during the Second World War, saved more than a thousand Jews from the death camps by making them work in his enamel and munitions factory. This ambiguous character, known as a party-goer, a pleasure-seeker and a war profiteer, had at his disposal, above all, a cheap workforce. But when “his Jews”, as he called them, and as they called themselves, were to be transferred to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, he used his connections with the Nazi notables he financed, squandering his fortune with large-scale bribes, to “buy” his workers and save them from death.
How did the film come about?
Schindler’s List would probably never have existed if the Australian writer Thomas Keneally had not crossed paths with Leopold Page, real name Poldek Pfefferberg, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust thanks to Oskar Schindler, who became a travel goods merchant in the United States. When the writer’s leather briefcase had just given up the ghost, he bought a new one in Leopold’s shop. The two men began to talk, and Leopold told him the incredible story of Oskar Schindler.
Leopold Pfefferberg, a former factory worker, had dozens of documents, photos and articles about the man in his possession, which he had collected while following producer Martin Gosch. He had managed to convince him to take an interest in the story, but the film project had ultimately fallen through. From this meeting and these archival treasures, Thomas Keneally wrote a book, Schindler’s Ark , published in 1982, for which he won the prestigious Booker Prize. It was from this book that Spielberg based the screenplay for his film, Schindler’s List .
What do we know about the filming?
The film, which was budgeted at $23 million, began shooting on February 24, 1993 in Krakow and continued until May, while at the same time the special effects for Jurassic Disclaimer Park were being finalized in Los Angeles. The filming involved 30,000 extras and required the use of 18,000 costumes.
Steven Spielberg set the sets for this monumental production a few steps from the camp in the Plaszów district, in a quarry, where the forced labor camp created after the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto in March 1943 was reconstructed. This is where SS Amon Goeth, played by Ralph Fiennes in the film, expresses all his sadism, cruelty and madness. Steven Spielberg also shot scenes near the Auschwitz camp.
How is the film received by the public?
The film was a huge public success, grossing $321 million worldwide – it should be noted that Steven Spielberg refused to take a salary, which he said would have been “blood money” . In France, it attracted more than 2.6 million cinema-goers. When it was broadcast on American television on Sunday, February 23, 1997, the film attracted a record audience of 65 million viewers, twice as many people in one evening as when it was released three years earlier in the United States. Schindler’s List also received twelve Oscar nominations, winning seven, including Best Picture and Best Director.
What controversies surround “Schindler’s List”?
To rewatch Schindler’s List is, inevitably, to delve back into the controversy launched by Claude Lanzmann : he published in the March 3, 1994 edition of Le Monde , at the time of the French release of the film, an article entitled “Holocaust, the impossible representation.” The director of Shoah (1985) asked himself in particular: “How can [Steven Spielberg] say what the Holocaust was by telling the story of a German who saved 1,300 Jews, since the overwhelming majority of Jews were not saved?”
The director continues further: “The Holocaust is first of all unique in that it builds around itself, in a circle of flames, the limit that must not be crossed because a certain absolute of horror is untransmittable: to claim to do so is to be guilty of the most serious transgression. Fiction is a transgression, I deeply believe that there is a prohibition on representation.” The following day, in the columns of Le Figaro , the Israeli historian Tom Segev, agrees: “My greatest criticism is of an ethical nature. I think that the Holocaust does not need to be dramatized, it is a tragedy in itself and that is enough for us. Any artistic treatment of the Holocaust is thus doomed to failure. Apart from documentary, I do not see what could be useful and fair.”
Another controversy concerns the representation of the Polish population. Claude Lanzmann’s documentary already showed them as complicit or indifferent to the genocide. In Spielberg’s film, they are again represented as cruel, insulting in particular the Jews when they entered the Krakow ghetto.
Finally, one scene has been widely criticized, that of “the shower” and the unbearable uncertainty of this convoy of women (Schindler’s workers) wrongly directed to Auschwitz. They look in terror at shower heads from which beneficial water will finally come out. Do we have the right to make the gas chambers a source of suspense?
What other fiction films address the Holocaust?
Before and after Spielberg, other filmmakers have tried their hand at representing the Holocaust. Starting with Kapò , by Gillo Pontecorvo, very harshly received by Jacques Rivette in Les Cahiers du cinéma, who, in an article entitled “De l’abjection”, published in 1961, criticized in particular a choice of staging “The man who decides, at that moment [the one where Emmanuelle Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on barbed wire, editor’s note], to do a tracking shot to reframe the corpse in a low angle, taking care to register the raised hand exactly in an angle of his final frame, that man is entitled to nothing but the deepest contempt.”
La Vie est belle , by Roberto Benigni, Grand Prix at Cannes in 1998, was also coolly received by some titles ( not by Télérama ). For Libération : ” La Vie est belle appears as a film paralyzed by a subject that is entirely beyond it” ; according to Le Monde : “It is difficult to forgive Benigni for several of his sleights of hand. The director seeks to replace History with memory” ; and finally for Les Cahiers du cinéma : La Vie est belle is “an anodyne and out-of-the-box film”. More recently, there was The Pianist , directed by Roman Polanski and centered on the life of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a famous Jewish pianist whose music is appreciated by a German officer who helps him survive. The film received the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2002 and was generally acclaimed by critics. And finally, in Cannes in 2015, László Nemes made an impression with his film Son of Saul , whose camera closely follows a Sonderkommando, convinced that he has found his son dying among corpses. The film won the Grand Jury Prize, and was described, by Claude Lanzmann himself, as an “anti- Schindler’s List.”