Schindler's list

Schindler's List (original title: Schindler's List) is an American film 1993 historical drama based on the historical fiction novel Schindler's Ark by Australian writer Thomas Keneally. Directed and co-produced by Steven Spielberg, with a script by Steven Zaillian, the film recounts a period in the life of Oskar Schindler, an ethnic German businessman who saved more than a thousand Polish Jews from dying in the Holocaust during World War II, using them as workers in their factories. Leading roles are played by Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as SS officer Amon Göth, and Ben Kingsley as Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern.

Since 1963, ideas were being considered to recreate the story of Schindler's Jews on film. Poldek Pfefferberg, who was one of those Jews, made it his vital mission to tell the story of Schindler. Steven Spielberg became interested in the facts after Sid Sheinberg, director of Universal Pictures, sent him a critical review of Schindler's Ark. The Universal production company bought the rights to the novel, but Spielberg, who did not see himself prepared to direct a story about the Holocaust, tried to pass the project on to other directors before finally deciding to direct it himself.

The filming of the film took place in Krakow, Poland, over 72 days in 1993. Spielberg filmed in black and white and gave it a documentary tone in order to give the story realism. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski wanted to give the images in the film a sense of timelessness. John Williams composed the award-winning soundtrack and violinist Itzhak Perlman performed the main theme.

The premiere of Schindler's List was held on November 30, 1993 in Washington D.C. and in theaters in the United States on December 15. Considered by many to be one of the greatest films in cinema history, Spielberg's film was also a hit with audiences, grossing $321.2 million worldwide. It was awarded seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score, as well as many other honors—including seven BAFTAs and three Golden Globe Awards. In 2004 the United States Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry and in 2007 the American Film Institute included it in eighth place on its list of the hundred best American productions in history.

Plot

In Krakow, during World War II, German occupying troops have forced Polish Jews to live in seclusion in a ghetto. Businessman Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), an ethnic German and member of the Nazi Party, arrives in the city determined to make his fortune and begins by bribing various officers of the German armed forces and the SS. Likewise, he acquires a factory to produce enameled tableware. To help him run the business, he hires Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), a Jewish accountant who has contacts in the black market and the local Jewish business community and who helps him finance the factory. Schindler is on friendly terms with the Nazis and enjoys some wealth and social status as "Herr Direktor" while Stern takes care of the administration. Both hire Jewish employees because their wages are lower due to German imposition and because Stern seeks to save his people from deportation to concentration camps by turning them into essential workers for the German war effort.

SS officer Amon Göth (Ralph Fiennes) is assigned to Krakow to oversee the construction of the Płaszów concentration camp and when it is finished, he orders the liquidation of the city's Jewish ghetto. Schindler witnesses the brutality of his eviction, in which many people are shot and killed, something that affects him deeply. He pays particular attention to a girl wearing a red coat as she flees from the Nazis, whose lifeless body he sees shortly after among a pile of corpses. Despite everything, Schindler tries to maintain a cordial relationship with Göth and the SS, for which he uses flattery and bribery. The German officer is a sadistic man who brutally treats his maid Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz) and likes to randomly shoot Płaszów inmates from the balcony of his villa. Witnessing the horror that surrounds him, Schindler decides that instead of getting rich he will try to save as many Jewish lives as possible. In this effort to protect his workers, he convinces Göth to allow him to build a subcamp next to his factory.

When the Germans begin to lose the war, Göth is ordered to send the Jews of Płaszów to Auschwitz. It is then that Schindler asks him to take his workers to a new munitions factory in his hometown of Brunnlitz. The officer agrees by delivering a large bribe. The businessman and his accountant Stern draw up "Schindler's list", which includes the names of his 850 employees, who will travel to the new factory and thus escape death in Auschwitz.

However, the train carrying the women and children ends up in Auschwitz-Birkenau by mistake. Schindler is forced to bribe the camp commandant, Rudolf Höß (Hans-Michael Ehberg), with a bag of diamonds into releasing them. Already in the new factory, the employer forbids the SS soldiers to enter and encourages his Jewish workers to celebrate the holy day of the Sabbath. Over the next seven months, Schindler spends most of his fortune bribing the German military and buying finished ammunition from other companies, as he refuses to let the factory produce weapons. In 1945 he runs out of money, but by then the Germans have been defeated and the war in Europe is over.

As a member of the Nazi Party with connections in high places, Schindler must flee before the advancing Red Army. The SS guards have been ordered to kill all the Jewish workers, but the employer dissuades them by telling them that they can return to their families as men, rather than murderers. He says goodbye to his workers and prepares to leave for the West with the intention of surrendering to the American troops. The Jews give him a document explaining his role in saving lives and a gold ring with an inscription from the Talmud: "Whoever saves a life saves the whole world." Schindler is excited, but also embarrassed because he believes that he could have saved even more lives. At dawn the next day, a Soviet soldier arrives at the factory and announces to the workers that they have been released. They all leave immediately and walk to the nearest town.

After a few scenes featuring the execution of Amon Göth and a review of Schindler's life after the war, the black-and-white footage gives way to a color scene of Schindler's real Jews today paying tribute to his savior in Jerusalem. Accompanied by the actors who give them life in the film, each one leaves a stone on the businessman's grave. In the last scene, actor Liam Neeson places a pair of roses.

Main cast

Liam Neeson is Oskar Schindler

Ralph Fiennes is Amon Göth.

Ben Kingsley is Itzhak Stern.

Northern Irish actor Liam Neeson auditioned early in the project to play Schindler and was hired in December 1992, after Spielberg saw him perform in Anna Christie on Broadway. Warren Beatty took part in a script reading, but Spielberg was concerned that he could not disguise his accent and that he also carried "star baggage". Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson expressed interest in the title role, but the director preferred to tell with a lesser-known actor like Neeson so that the performer's fame wouldn't overshadow the character. It seemed to Neeson that Schindler enjoyed fooling the Nazis and was seen as a bit of a buffoon: "They didn't take him seriously and he took advantage of it. ». To help him prepare for the role, Spielberg showed Neeson some footage of Time Warner president Steve Ross, a man with a charisma that the filmmaker compared to Schindler's. He was also able to find a recording of Schindler—who had died in 1974—speaking, which Neeson studied to correctly imitate his intonation.

Ralph Fiennes was cast as Amon Göth after Spielberg saw his performances in the films A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia and Wuthering Heights (1992). About his auditions, the filmmaker said that "I saw sexual evil. It's all a matter of subtlety: there were moments of kindness in his eyes and right after that an icy look.” Fiennes had to put on thirty pounds for the part, watched old newsreels and talked to Holocaust survivors who met the real Göth. About his portrayal, the actor said: "I got close to his pain, inside of him is a broken and miserable human being. I don't know what to think of him, I feel sorry for him. It's like a dirty, battered doll that I was given and that I got to feel." Doctors Samuel J. Leistedt and Paul Linkowski of the Free University of Brussels describe Göth's character in the film as a classic psychopath. Fiennes resembled Göth in SS outfit so much that when the survivor Mila Pfefferberg met him, she trembled with fear.

The character Itzhak Stern, played by Ben Kingsley, is a conjunction of accountant Stern, factory manager Abraham Bankier, and Göth's personal secretary Mietek Pemper. The character serves as Schindler's alter ego and conscience. Kingsley was a well-known actor because he had won the Best Actor Oscar for playing Mahatma Gandhi in the 1982 film.

In total, there are 126 speaking characters in the film and thousands of extras were hired during filming. Spielberg cast Israeli actors for the Jewish characters and Polish performers for their Eastern European physical appearance. The German actors they were reluctant to wear SS uniforms, but some of them ended up thanking Spielberg for the cathartic experience of working on the film. Halfway through shooting, the director conceived the epilogue, in which 128 survivors pay tribute at the Schindler's grave in Jerusalem. To do this, the producers rushed to locate Schindler's Jews halfway around the world and gather them to film the scene. Finally, the cast was made up of:

Production

Development

Poldek Pfefferberg, one of Schindler's Jews, made it his vital mission to get the story of his savior out. In 1963 he tried to get the film production company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to make a biopic with a script by Howard Koch, but the deal fell through. In 1982 Australian writer Thomas Keneally published his historical novel Schindler's Ark, which he had written after a chance meeting with Pfefferberg in Los Angeles in 1980. Sid Sheinberg, then president of MCA, sent director Steven Spielberg the review of the book that had been published by the New York newspaper. Times. The filmmaker, who is Jewish, was fascinated by Schindler's story and asked if it was not a joke: "I was drawn to the paradoxical nature of the character" and wondered: "What could drive a man like this to take all the money he had and put it into saving those lives?" Spielberg expressed enough interest that Universal Pictures bought the rights to the novel. In his first meeting with Pfefferberg, Spielberg told him he would start shooting in ten years. In the final credits of the film Pfefferberg appears as a consultant under the name Leopold Page.

The liquidation of the ghetto of Krakow in March 1943 is recreated in the film in a sequence of 15 minutes

Spielberg did not believe he was yet mature enough to tackle a Holocaust film, and the project was left "on his guilty conscience". So he tried to pitch the film to director Roman Polanski, who turned it down. Polanski's mother was murdered in Auschwitz and he had survived the Kraków ghetto. This filmmaker would end up shooting his own film on the subject, the praised The Pianist (2002). Spielberg also offered the project to directors Sydney Pollack and Martin Scorsese, who was attached to it until 1988. Despite everything, Spielberg was not convinced to leave the film in Scorsese's hands, thinking that "he would have missed an opportunity to do something for my children and my family about the Holocaust". Thus, he offered Scorsese to direct in his place the new version of Cape Fear (1991). Billy Wilder expressed some interest in to direct the film as a tribute to his family, since most of them had died during the Holocaust.

Steven Spielberg finally decided to direct the project when he realized that Holocaust denial was gaining traction. With the rise of the neo-Nazi movement after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was concerned that people seemed too accepting of intolerance, as was the case in the 1930s. Sid Sheinberg gave the project the green light on one condition: that Spielberg direct before Jurassic Park (1993). About this the filmmaker said: "I knew that once I directed Schindler's List , I would not be able to make Jurassic Park ". The production received a modest budget of 22 million dollars because films about the Holocaust were often unprofitable. In addition, the director did not receive any salary because he believed that it was unethical to accept it and that the film would be a commercial failure.

In 1983, Keneally himself had been hired to adapt his novel for film. The writer delivered a 220-page script that focused on Schindler's romantic relationships, although he himself admitted that he did not condense the story enough. For this reason, Spielberg hired Kurt Luedtke, author of the screenplay for Out of Africa (1985), although he resigned four years later because he considered Schindler's change of heart too incredible. During his time directing the film, Scorsese hired screenwriter Steven Zaillian and when he returned a 115-page script, Spielberg thought it was too short and asked him to expand it to 195 pages. Spielberg wanted the story to be more Jewish-focused and for the businessman's transition to be gradual and ambiguous, not a sudden revelation or epiphany. He extended the scene of the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto because he "really felt that the sequence had to be something very hard to witness".

Shooting

Steven Spielberg, director and co-productor The list of Schindler (Photo 2012)

El rodaje arrancó el 1 de marzo de 1993 en Cracovia, Polonia, con una duración prevista de 75 días. El equipo rodó en los lugares en los que sucedieron los hechos reales o muy cerca de estos, aunque el campo de Płaszów tuvo que ser recreado en una cantera abandonada cercana porque desde el lugar del campo original eran visibles numerosas edificaciones modernas. Las escenas del interior de la fábrica Emalia de Schindler se rodaron en una factoría similar en Olkusz, mientras que sus exteriores y las vistas de su escalera son la auténtica fábrica. Al equipo de la película no se le permitió hacer un rodaje prolongado o construir decorados en los terrenos de Auschwitz, por lo que levantaron una réplica muy cerca de la entrada.

On the other hand, there were some anti-Semitic incidents during the filming. It was the case of a woman who, seeing Ralph Fiennes dressed in an SS uniform, blurted out that “The Germans were lovely people. They didn't kill anyone who didn't deserve it." Anti-Semitic graffiti was put up near the filming locations, while actor Ben Kingsley nearly got into a fight with an elderly German-speaking businessman who insulted Israeli actor Michael Schneider. Despite everything, Spielberg recounted that "the German actors attended the Jewish holiday of Passover, wore kippahs on their heads and uttered haggadah while the Israeli actors explained their meanings. And this family of actors sat at the same table and race and culture were left behind."

Filming Schindler's List was very emotional for Steven Spielberg because the subject matter forced him to recall passages from his childhood, such as the anti-Semitism he had to face. He was surprised that he did not cry when he visited Auschwitz, but that he was filled with indignation. The director was one of many crew members who couldn't bring himself to witness the filming of the scene in which elderly Jews are forced to run naked in front of Nazi doctors who are selecting those who will be sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. Spielberg commented that he felt more like a reporter than a filmmaker: he designed the scenes and then watched the events unfold, like a spectator rather than a filmmaker. Several actresses suffered anxiety attacks during the scene in Auschwitz. the shower, including a woman who had been born in a concentration camp. Spielberg, his wife Kate Capshaw, and their five children lived in a rented house on the outskirts of Kraków during filming. The director later thanked his wife "for rescuing me for 92 days straight... when things got too unbearable." Actor Robin Williams phoned him to encourage him, given the drama of filming the film In addition, Spielberg spent several hours every afternoon editing Jurassic Park, a film that was scheduled to premiere in June 1993.

In some scenes the director wanted the German and Polish languages to be spoken to recreate the feeling of being in the past. In fact, he initially considered making the film entirely in these languages with subtitles, but decided that "reading requires a lot of attention. It could have been an excuse to take your eyes off the screen and look elsewhere."

Photography

Influenced by the 1985 French documentary Shoah, Spielberg decided to dispense with the usual storyboarding and film as if he were creating a documentary. Forty percent of the footage was shot handheld, and the low budget meant that shooting was forced very quickly. Spielberg believes this gave his film spontaneity and immediacy. He also dispensed with the use of a steadicam, high shots, and zoom., "everything that I could consider a safety net".

The decision to make the film almost entirely in black and white contributed to the documentary style of the images, compared by the film's cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to German Expressionist cinema and Italian Neorealism. Kaminski also said that his intention was to give the film an impression of timelessness, so that viewers "couldn't tell when it was made". Spielberg decided to use black and white to simulate authentic documentary footage of the time. Pictures director Tom Pollock asked him to shoot on a color negative, in order to allow color VHS copies of the film to be created and sold, but the director refused because that would have "embellished the facts".

Soundtrack

John Williams, a regular Spielberg collaborator, wrote the original score for the film. The composer was amazed by the film and thought it was going to be too much of a challenge. He told Spielberg, "You need a better composer than me for this movie," and the director replied, "I know. But they're all dead!" Itzhak Perlman performs the main theme on violin. Recalling Schindler's List , Perlman said he found it amazing how authentic everything Williams had written sounded and that he had agreed to participate as soon as it was proposed to him because the theme of the film was important to him as a Jew and that in that way he could contribute to making the story known and felt anew.

In the scene where the Nazis liquidate the ghetto, the popular song Oyfn Pripetshik —“In the kitchen”, in Yiddish: אויפֿן פּריפּעטשיק— is sung by a children's choir. It was a song that Spielberg remembers being sung often by his grandmother Becky. The clarinet solos also heard in the film were performed by Giora Feidman. John Williams won the Academy Award for Best Score for The Schindler's List, his fifth statuette.

Spanish dubbing

Themes and symbolism

The film explores the theme of good versus evil and casts its protagonist as "the good German", a popular character in American cinema. While Amon Göth is portrayed as evil personified, Schindler gradually evolves from support Nazism for rescuer and hero. Another theme, redemption, is also introduced as Schindler, an unscrupulous businessman who walks on the fringes of respectability, becomes a father figure responsible for saving the lives of more of a thousand people.

The girl in red

Although the film is shot almost entirely in black and white, it features a striking red coat worn by a young girl during the brutal eviction from the Krakow ghetto. Schindler later sees her corpse, recognizable by the red garment. Spielberg said the colored note was meant to symbolize how the highest-level members of the US government knew the Holocaust was happening and did nothing to prevent it. "It was as obvious as a girl dressed in a red coat, walking down the street, and yet nothing was done, like bombing the German railways. Nothing was done to stop it... the annihilation of European Jews [...] So that was my message in including color in that scene." IGN's Andy Patrizio notes that the moment Schindler sees that As a girl, this is the moment when he changes his point of view, "never again would he look indifferently from his car at the smoke and ashes of the piles of burning corpses." Professor André H. Caron, of the University of Montreal, he asks if red symbolizes "innocence, hope, or the red blood of the Jewish people being sacrificed in the horror of the Holocaust".

The girl was played by Polish Oliwia Dąbrowska, who was three years old when she filmed the scene. Spielberg asked Dąbrowska not to see the film until she was of legal age, but she saw it at the age of eleven and was "appalled". After revisiting the film as an adult, she was proud to have been in it. Although not intended, the character is similar to Roma Ligocka, a girl from the Krakow ghetto who wore a red coat and who, unlike the girl in the film, survived the Holocaust. After the film's release, she wrote and published her own story, The Girl in the Red Coat: Memoirs. According to a 2014 interview with family members, the Girl in the Red Coat was inspired by the Krakow resident Genya Gitel Chil.

Candles

The film opens with a scene of a family celebrating the Sabbath. Spielberg said that "to start the film with the lighting of the candles... It would be enriching, to start with a normal celebration of the Sabbath before the atrocities against the Jews are unleashed". When the color of the flame fades in the opening moments, gives way to a world in which smoke symbolizes the bodies being burned at Auschwitz. Only at the end, when Schindler encourages his workers to celebrate the Sabbath, do the images of the candle flame regain their candor, something Spielberg says represents "a glimmer of color and hope". Sara Horowitz, director of the Koschitzky Center of Jewish Studies at York University, sees those candles as symbolic of the Jews of Europe, murdered and then cremated in crematoria. The two scenes are like a parenthesis from the Nazi era, marking its beginning and its end. He points out that it is normally the woman of the house who lights the Shabbat candles, although in the film it is the man who lights them, demonstrating not only the subservient role of women, but also the submissive position of Jewish men towards the Aryans, especially Göth and Schindler.

Other symbolisms

For Spielberg, the film's black-and-white presentation represented the Holocaust itself: "The Holocaust was life without light. For me the symbol of life is color. That is why a Holocaust film should be in black and white." Historian Robert Gellately opines that the film as a whole should be seen as a metaphor for the Holocaust, in which sporadic violence escalates in a crescendo of death and destruction. It also draws a parallel between the situation of the Jews in the film and the debate in Nazi Germany between using them as slave laborers or outright exterminating them. Alan Mintz, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, added that water is used in the film as a liberating element and gives as an example the scene in which Schindler waters a train full of victims waiting for their transfer with a hose, and also the Auschwitz sequence in which the women receive a shower of truth instead of being gassed.

Premiere

Schindler's List was released in U.S. theaters on December 15, 1993. By the end of its theatrical release on September 29, 1994, it had grossed $96.1 million. in earnings in the United States and $321.2 million worldwide. In Germany, where it was shown in five hundred theaters, the film was seen by more than one hundred thousand people in its first week alone, and in total six saw it. millions. It was one of the most viewed films of that year in that country and on the entire planet.

The Spielberg film aired on American television for the first time on NBC on February 23, 1997. The film's showing was made without commercial breaks, it was the third most watched broadcast of that week and the most viewed film seen on NBC since the broadcast of Jurassic Park in May 1995. On Israeli public television it could be seen on Yom HaShoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day—in 1998.

The DVD of Schindler's List was released on March 9, 2004 with a double-sided disc edition that divided the film into two halves. Among the special contents was a documentary presented by Spielberg. A limited special edition was also sold that contained, in addition to the film, a copy of Keneally's novel, the Williams soundtrack on CD and a photo album titled Schindler's List: Images of the Steven Spielberg Film, all housed in a plexiglass box. The Laserdisc gift set was a limited edition that included the soundtrack, the original novel, and an exclusive album As part of the 20th anniversary, the film was released in high definition on a Blu-ray disc on March 5, 2013.

Thanks to the success of his film, filmmaker Steven Spielberg created the Shoah Survivors Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organization with the goal of building an archive of filmed testimonies from as many Holocaust survivors as possible in order to preserve their stories. The director continues to finance this foundation. Spielberg also used the proceeds from the film to finance several documentaries, such as Remembering Anne Frank (1995), The Lost Children of Berlin (1996) and The Last Days (1998).

Reception

Critical Opinions

Schindler's List was acclaimed by critics and audiences alike. On Rotten Tomatoes it has 96% positive reviews out of 85 reviews and the critical consensus for this site website says that "Schindler's List combines the abject horror of the Holocaust with the humanism of Steven Spielberg to create the director's dramatic masterpiece." Americans like presenter Oprah Winfrey and then-President Bill Clinton they urged their compatriots to watch it. Many world leaders also watched it, and some met Spielberg in person. CinemaScore reported that viewers gave it the highest grade of A+.

Stephen Schiff of The New Yorker called it the best historical drama about the Holocaust, a film that "will take its place in cultural history and stay there." Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times described it as Spielberg's best, "brilliantly acted, written and directed", as well as ranking it among his top ten favorite films of 1993. Terrence Rafferty, also in The New Yorker , admired its "narrative and visual audacity, as well as its direct emotionality." He singled out the performances of Neeson, Fiennes, Kingsley and Davidtz, which he felt deserved special praise, noting the shower scene in Auschwitz as "the most terrifying sequence ever filmed". In his film guide published in 2013, Leonard Maltin gave the film four stars, the maximum, for being "an amazing adaptation of Keneally's novel that looks and feels like something Hollywood hasn't done before." He also describes it as "the most intense and personal film made by Spielberg to date". James Verniere of the Boston Herald noted the restraint and lack of sensationalism of the film and defined it as "a very important to the field of study of the Holocaust". In his review for the New York Review of Books, British critic John Gross stated that his doubts about an overly sentimental story "were totally misplaced. Spielberg demonstrates a firm moral and emotional understanding of the subject. The film is an outstanding achievement". Alan Mintz points out that even the film's biggest detractors admired the "visual brilliance" of the fifteen-minute ghetto liquidation sequence, which he found "realistic and shocking". He is also of the opinion that the film has done much to restore the memory of the Holocaust, which should not be forgotten even if its survivors are dying and thus the direct links with the catastrophe disappear. The film's premiere began a public debate in Germany about why there were no more Germans to help.

The film was also criticized negatively, more by academia than by the mainstream press. Sara Horowitz commented that much of the activity seen in the ghetto is financial transactions such as loans, black markets, or concealment of wealth., something that perpetuates the stereotype of Jewish life. He also points out that, although the representation of women accurately reflects Nazi ideology, their low status and the relationship between violence and sexuality are not adequately explored. Brown University Omer Bartov comments that the strong and physically imposing characters of Schindler and Göth overshadow the Jewish victims, who are for the most part small, slippery and frightened, so that this is merely a scenario for the fight of good against evil. Horowitz also stresses that the absolute dichotomy of good vs. evil in the film totally ignores the fact that most of the perpetrators of the Holocaust austo were ordinary people and in that it does not explore how the German people rationalized their knowledge of or participation in the Holocaust. Writer Jason Epstein commented that the film gives the impression that if people were smart enough or lucky enough, he could survive the Holocaust, although this was not actually the case. Spielberg responded to criticism of the scene in which Schindler breaks down in tears at his farewell by stating that it was necessary to convey a sense of loss and give the viewer an opportunity to grieve together as well. with the characters.

Opinions of other filmmakers

Schindler's List was also very well received by other professionals in the film industry. Director Billy Wilder wrote to Spielberg to say, "They couldn't have found a better man. This film is absolute perfection." Roman Polanski, who turned it down, later said, "I certainly couldn't have done a better job than Spielberg because I couldn't have been as objective as he was." been an influence on his 1995 film, Death and the Maiden. The success of Schindler's List led director Stanley Kubrick to abandon his own Holocaust project, Aryan Papers, which would have been about a Jewish boy and his aunt who survive the war by hiding across Poland and pretending to be Catholics. When its screenwriter Frederic Raphael said that Spielberg's film was a good representation of the Holocaust, Kubrick commented: "Do you think it's about the Holocaust? The Holocaust was the murder of more than six million people. Schindler's List is about 600 who survived"—actually, Schindler saved more than 1,200 Jews.

French director Jean-Luc Godard accused Spielberg of using his film to make money from a tragedy while Schindler's widow, Emilie Schindler (1907–2001), lived in poverty in Argentina. Thomas Keneally claimed that he never he was rewarded for his contributions. German filmmaker Michael Haneke criticized the sequence in which Schindler's workers are accidentally sent to Auschwitz and meet in the showers: "There's a scene in that film where we don't know if it's from the showers water or gas comes out of the field. You only do something like that with a naive audience like the American one. It is not a proper use of the form. Spielberg wanted to do it well, but he was stupid ».

The film was attacked by Claude Lanzmann, director of a documentary on the Holocaust, Shoah, who defined Schindler's List as a "kitsch melodrama" and a " distortion" of the historical truth because in his opinion "fiction is a transgression, I am totally convinced that the representation [of the Holocaust] should be prohibited." Lanzmann also attacked Spielberg for showing the Holocaust through the eyes of a German, stating that "it's the world upside down." He complained saying that “he thought that there was a before and after the Shoah, and that after the Shoah, certain things could no longer be done. Spielberg did them anyway."

Reaction of the Jewish community

At a 1994 symposium on the film organized by The Village Voice magazine, historian Annette Insdorf described how her mother, a concentration camp survivor, felt gratitude that the Holocaust story had finally It was told in a big movie for the whole world to see. Hungarian Jewish writer Imre Kertész, also a Holocaust survivor, believed that it was impossible to portray life in a Nazi concentration camp to someone who had not experienced it firsthand. While praising Spielberg for bringing the story to a mainstream audience, he felt that the final tribute scene in the Jerusalem cemetery ignored the terrible aftermath experienced by the survivors and implied that they suffered no emotional trauma. Rabbi Uri D. Herscher found the film as an "attractive" and "uplifting" display of humanism. Norbert Friedman noted that, like other survivors of the tragedy, he reacted with a feeling of sympathy for Spielberg that he normally reserved for other survivors. Albert L. Lewis, Spielberg's childhood rabbi and teacher, described the film as “Steven's gift to his mother, to his people and in a sense to himself. He is now a complete human being ».

Awards and distinctions

Schindler's List was included in several lists of the greatest films in cinema history, such as the one compiled for Time magazine by critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel, the list drawn up in 1995 as a result of a survey by Time Out magazine and the hundred essential films of the century in the opinion of Leonard Maltin. The Holy See included it among the 45 best films of History. A British Channel 4 poll in 2005 named Schindler's List the fourth best film of all time. Berardinelli, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel considered it the best film of 1993. The United States Library of Congress considered it "culturally significant" and therefore selected it for preservation in its National Film Registry in 2004. Spielberg won the Directors Guild Award for Best Director and also the Directors Guild Award for Best Director. Producers, this one shared with Branko Lustig and Gerald R. Molen. Steven Zaillian was honored with the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

The celebrated film also won Best Picture from the National Board of Film Critics, as well as Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor—Fiennes—and Cinematography from the National Society of Film Critics. The New York Film Critics Circle also gave it its awards for Best Film, Best Supporting Actor -Fiennes- and Best Cinematographer. For its part, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association awarded it Best Picture., Best Cinematography —shared with The Piano— and Best Production Design. In the rest of the world, Spielberg's film received countless awards and distinctions.

Oscar Awards:

Golden Globe Awards:

Disputes

Schindler Memorial Plate at the Emalia factory in Krakow

When the film aired free-to-air on US television in 1997, it was the first to be rated 17+ only, according to an age rating that had been created earlier that year. Congressman Tom Coburn said that by showing the film, NBC had brought television "to a historic low, with full frontal nudity, violence and desecration", adding that it was an insult "to all decent people". Attacked by both Republicans and Democrats, Coburn apologized, saying, "I meant well, but obviously I made a mistake in how I said what I wanted to say." He clarified his opinion by stating that the film should have been aired at a later time when there would not be "a large number of children watching it without parental supervision".

In Germany, controversy also arose over the television premiere of Spielberg's film on the ProSieben channel, as the Jewish community protested because they wanted to broadcast it with two commercial breaks of 3-4 minutes each. Ignatz Bubis, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said that "it is problematic to interrupt a film like this with advertisements." A similar criticism was leveled by Jerzy Kanal, president of the Berlin Jewish Community. Therefore, the chain promised to reduce the inclusion of advertising and was forced to accompany the broadcast with two documentaries, showing "the daily lives of Jews in Hebron and New York before the film and Holocaust survivors after it".

In the Philippines, chief censor Henrietta Mendez ordered three scenes showing sexual intercourse and female nudity to be cut for theatrical release. Spielberg refused to do so and therefore to allow the film to reach Philippine theaters, something that meant that the country's senate demanded the abolition of the board of censors. President Fidel V. Ramos himself intervened to order that the film be shown without cuts for everyone over fifteen years of age.

According to Slovak filmmaker Juraj Herz, the scene in which a group of women mistakes the showers for a gas chamber is taken directly, shot by shot, from his film Zastihla mě noc (1986). Herz wanted to sue, but could not afford the lawsuit.

The song Yerushalayim Shel Zahav —Jerusalem of Gold— is featured on the film's soundtrack and plays towards the end of the film. This caused some controversy in Israel because the composition—written in 1967 by Naomi Shemer—is generally considered an informal hymn to Israel's victory in the Six-Day War. In Israeli copies of the tape, the song was replaced by Halikha LeKesariya — A Walk to Caesarea — written by Hannah Szenes, a poet and World War II resistance fighter. World War.