Excerpted Conversation from "Schindler's List: Myth, Movie, and Memory"
Village Voice, 29 March 1994, 24-31

PARTICIPANTS
   
Wanda Bersnen director, National Jewish Archives of Broadcasting, The Jewish Museum
Richard Goldstein The Village Voice
J. Hoberman The Village Voice
Ken Jacobs filmmaker and professor of film, The University of Binghamton
Gertrud Koch professor cinema studies at Columbia University
Art Spiegelman author, Maus
James Young professor of English and Judaic Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Annette Insdorf Chair, film division, School of Arts, Columbia University

Jacobs:

It is a movie, and movies are made like this. I don't think there is any point during this movie when you are not aware of watching a movie. It is all done in movie terms and clichés, music.... It's saturated with movieness. But people don't go to see the other films that deal with these events without trying to represent them. And they don't speak about them, they don't get together to discuss them. Those movies are left in limbo, they're ignored. Janet Maslin titles her review "Imagining the Holocaust To Remember It." She expects moviemakers to create in the common terms of realism-kitsch, a graspable picture of intractable reality. I'm not defending the film. I don't care for the film. I don't respect it. But I think that he is doing what people are asking him to do, they are asking him to make a movie that is comprehensible, that works in movie terms, works in a language they understand, and he has given it to them. It seems a little strange to me to attack him for fulfilling that function, where if he did something else you would be ignoring him.

Goldstein:

I think that most works of popular history, maybe most works of popular art, if they are reality-based at all, have an authoritarian aspect that is inherent in the process of taking dramatic forms that are very accessible, almost so that they are transparent, and applying them to situations that are inevitably more complicated than the forms.....

Insdorf:

Schindler's List has to be seen in at least two contexts. The first is political, and reminiscent of Andrzej Wajda's Korczak: it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival right after Jewish cemeteries were desecrated at Carpentras, and the critical response in France focused on the missing anti-Semitism in the film. Similarly, Schindler's List opened on the heels of studies like the Roper Organization Poll, which revealed how at least 22 per cent of the U. S. doubted that the extermination of the Jews ever took place. Second, I think there was a bit of surprise among critics that Spielberg had pulled it off—that he made an adult work of art. Many of us were expecting him to simply apply the techniques of Jurassic Park to the Holocaust, but were pleasantly surprised that he transcended his reputation for a glib, feel-good approach.

Hoberman:

Well, to come back to what you said, and this is something you had to deal with in your book: Right from the start, right from the moment that Adorno made his all-purpose pronouncement that poetry was impossible after Auschwitz, there has been a problem with representation. How do you show these events? I wonder if the reason why Schindler's List is so pleasing—I mean this is not a movie that is causing people anguish—is because Spielberg somehow circumvented this problem of rperesentation.

....

Spiegelman:

Kingsley is an oddly deracinated choice for the central Jewish character in the movie. Actually, these Jews are slightly gentrified versions of Julius Streicher's Der Sturmer caricatures: the juiceless Jewish accountant, the Jewish seductress, and, most egregiously, the Jews bargaining and doing business inside a church. It's one of the few scenes that wasn't even borrowed from the novel. Spielberg has long had a Jewish problem. The Jewish "magic" that leaped out of the Lost Ark at the end of his first Raiders movie was all the wrath of hell melting down the villains with a supernatural nuclear bomb. Schindler's List refracts the Holocaust through the central image of a righteous gentile in a world of Jewish bit players and extras. The Jews function as an occasion for Christian redemption. Incidentally, in the spirit of full disclosure, as someone pointing out Spielberg's Jewish problem, I must confess that I have a Spielberg problem. It dates back to his producing An American Tail, the animated cartoon about Jewish mice who escape the Cossacks/catsacks in what I perceived as a horrible appropriation from Maus. That said, I feel secure that my unhappiness with this film would remain intact if I thought it had been made by Martin Scorsese or anyone else.

Jacobs:

This thing in the church happens early in the film when the Jews are relatively free to operate. And they desecrate the church; they desecrate the holy water; they give all the reasons why Christian Europe has to get rid of Jews, again cast out the money changers. The incident operates in the logic of the narrative to bring on and justify all that follows.

Hoberman:

I am struck by the fact that at the same time that Spielberg introduces the scene in the church, he represses the real Schindler's actual interaction with the Jewish underground. I mean Schindler took a trip to Budapest in 1943, where he contacted various Zionist agents. There's even a suggestion that Jewish organizations were funneling him money. After all, the outcome of the war was still in flux. Schindler himself has been simplified in such a way to make him a figure of tremendous comfort, and also to minimize whatever connection he would have had with other forces, including Jewish forces, that were in play during the war.

Jacobs:

What's bothering some of us is that this is a trendy movie—it's sexy psychopath season—about a kind of Jekyll and Hyde character split between the two major male characters. It is finally a movie about styles of manhood, and how one deals with one's lessers. Jews function as background and pawns of this dramatic contest. Apparently the film is being shown to kids as a way of making them feel more for Jews, right? I rather expect that what many kids will get from this is another example of a glamorous guy with a perfect complexion consuming screenspace and attention... a commandant, who does what he wants and gets what he wants and goes to his end standing tall.

Goldstein:

Actually what we have been presented with are examples of teenagers seeing the movie and regarding the Nazis as the men. The teenagers laughing in the theater in Oakland, and egging the Nazis on... maybe there was a reaction to their horror at seeing images of abjection that are in their souls, that are in their collective memory as well. Maybe the minimalization, the colloquialization of the Holocaust, makes it possible for people outside the experience historically to connect with similar experiences. Of course, then you could have the reaction formation of identifying with the aggressor. And so you can have actually an anti-Semitic reaction to that memory, which is, of course, a big problem and a horrible specter, but maybe what is going on is the film touched them too closely.

Jacobs:

This movie is like New Jack City, you pop away who is in your way, you're on top of it, and swim in women.

Koch:

Well, that's very interesting, because the film links together in a very old-fashioned way issues of sexuality and manhood. I mean, always the mistresses all around the place. And before violence breaks out, you almost always have some love scenes. It becomes very clear with the mistress and the Nazi commander Goeth, who are depicted as a kind of presentation of sexuality and violence.

Insdorf:

I don't think we are remembering other aspects of the film. It is easy to simplify Schindler's List into merely the aggrandizement of the Goeth character. But for me the most devastating moment in the film occurs in the ghetto when a little Jewish boy working for the nazis sees an older woman and blows the whistle on her; only when he realizes that he knows her does he show the Jewish woman where to hide. Now, that moment struck me as the most emotionally violent one in the film. Spielberg was suggesting that the capacity to go from thoughtless cruelty to decency or heroism is not limited to Oskar Schindler. If, in your opinion, this film is about a site of passage to manhood, I can't forget that scene. Why is it in there, if not to expand on the notion of heroism?

Spiegelman:

That is probably why Spielberg changed the scene from the book in which the Jewish boy is a teenager or young man, and not a seven- or eight-year-old kid. The savior is an innocent child.

....

Young:

The image of the child in Holocaust literature and film has been very common. And it is also very common, as it turns out, in memorials around the world. Mostly because the victim often needs to be represented as a child, that is somebody without a past, who can't be blamed now for his or her own murder.

Bersnen:

So, it is like the perfect victim?

Young:

In a way, it is the victim ideal. And often Jews as victims in the Holocaust are remembered in memorials, museums, literature, and emblematized by the child, the historyless child. That is, there is no explanation yet for the death of the child.

Spiegelman:

This is one of the reasons it was imperative for me, in making Maus, to portray my father "warts and all" as a central figure enmired in reality, not reducible to being an innocent. Survival musn't be seen in terms of divine retribution or martyrology.

Jacobs:

Spielberg says the SS threw babes out of windows and shot them like skeet. But he wouldn't show so terrible a thing, not even stage it using dolls. So this unpleasant truth doesn't reach the audience. But why not for a moment stop turning out these crazy-making counterfeit-reality movies, and do it with dolls, obvious stand-ins for the real thing. Like Art's drawings of mice, alluding to, indicating without attempting to re-present.

Spiegelman:

I have difficulty understanding where he draws his aesthetic lines, why he categorizes that image as taboo even though he comfortably re-creates scenes of Jews being crowded into gas chambers and shows naked actors paraded by for a selection. The problem of re-creation for the sake of an audience's recreation is a fundamental one that he's never worried about.

Jacobs:

For instance, the Jewish girl that Goeth takes in as his housemaid. Out of nowhere, for no reason—who needs it—we have this scene where he circles around her, we circle around her, we look at her, her wet nipple against the cloth. We are drawn into this thing, into the sadistic scene, circling for what? I mean, these are kicks, these are psychopathic kicks, okay, that the film is offering people.

Koch:

To go back to this question of where the film asks us to identify. When it comes to a highly emotional film like, let's say, a horror film, it's often shot from the sadistic—the killer's—point of view. For example there are problems with the Goeth character and its link to a negative image of Jewish women. I mean, you have a sequence where a Nazi gets attracted to a Jewish woman, and another where Schindler kisses a Jewish girl who brings a birthday cake. It is a kind of mirroring and it refers to the phantasmagoric danger of being seduced by a Jewish woman.

Hoberman:

Annette, in your book you pointed out that American treatments of the Holocaust are typically simplistic and emotionally manipulative. I don't know if one could consider them the Schindler's List of 1959, but I remember from my childhood that the Diary of Ann Frank [sic] and Judgment at Nuremberg got a tremendous amount of attention. These movies were taken very seriously.

Insdorf:

Ultimately it hasn't changed that much. After defending Schindler's List, even I have to acknowledge that it is simplistic, that it is emotionally manipulative. I take exception, for example, to a scene like the burning of the corpses being accompanied by intrusive music—with the addition of choral voices. It falls into the same traps I discussed in my book vis-à-vis Judgment at Nuremberg and The Diary of Ann Frank [sic] when you have images bursting with emotion, schmaltzy music is, at the very least, redundant. On the other hand, Spielberg chose a very particular story to tell, and that story carries with it an invitation to certain conventions. Oskar Schindler himself was a larger-than-life figure, who did indeed save over 1100 Jews. How? By manipulation. By a showmanship (not unlike Spielberg's) that knows—and plays—its audience, but in the service of a deeper cause. Spielberg grounds his version of this true story in details that convey not only Schindler's heroic stature, but what he was protecting. I read Steven Zaillian's script and it begins quite differently from the film. Spielberg added the Jewish sabbath candle whose smoke moves us into the past. The film tells us from the outset the context in which we will watch Schindler's tale—Jewish ritual, continuity, and survival—and true to his terms, the last shot has the title "Fewer than 4000 Jews are left in Poland. More than 6000 descendants of the Schindler-juden exist today." He set his terms and fulfilled them.

Spiegelman:

Actually, the last title is "For Steve Ross."

Insdorf:

You're right. But his choice of detail goes beyond some of the choices made in films like Diary of Ann Frank [sic] or Judgment at Nuremberg, which were a bit more primitive in terms of observing melodramatic conventions of the 1950s. For example, in Zaillian's script, you see Schindler almost immediately in the mirror of his hotel room. But as I watched the beginning of the film, I couldn't see Schindler's face. In the hotel, it's not shown at all; in the nightclub his face is covered, and it's not till the very end of that sequence that we finally get to see him. I choose to interpret this as narrative strategy. It insists upon the mystery of this man, which will never be unveiled in the course of the film. Shindler's List never purports to explain why Schindler did what he did. To Spielberg's credit, he doesn't try to offer a simplistic explanation of this rather transcendent decency. Instead, his strategy tells me that the hero will reveal very little, including his motivation.

Hoberman:

I just want to ask why does it strengthen the movie that Schindler's motivations are never speculated on?

Insdorf:

Because it is an honest acknowledgement that we cannot penetrate the mystery of this man's decision. Neither Zaillian nor Spielberg claims to know any more about Schindler's motivation than Orson Welles and herman Mankiewicz explained Rosebud in Citizen Kane.

BACK TO COURSE SYLLABUS