SchinDLer’s List
Spielberg’s masterpiece gets a 25th Anniversary Blu.
film extras 1993 OuT 25 feBRuaRY 4K eXTRas Documentary, Featurettes
Multi-Oscar winner, IMDb top 10 mainstay, a staggering piece of cinematic craft. Few films achieved classic status as quickly as Schindler’s List. Yet, for some, it remains hugely problematic. Can a movie, however carefully created, really depict the unique horrors of the Holocaust? Is mainstream maestro Steven Spielberg the right man for the job? Is the plight of Europe’s Jews best explored via the ‘good Nazi’ who saved 1,200 of the aforementioned?
A quarter century since the film’s Academy Awards sweep, this re-release is the perfect chance to take stock. Not only for its scarcely rivalled emotional power and technical precision, but also for being
– as Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) remarks – “an absolute good”.
On this disc’s main new feature, a recording of the cast and crew Q&A at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, Spielberg admits no other project has given him the same sense of “meaningful accomplishment”. Star Liam Neeson, meanwhile, recalls shooting outside Auschwitz, when
producer Branko Lustig – himself a Holocaust survivor – pointed out the hut where he’d been forced to live.
These are unusually profound stakes for a big-budget studio picture. Watching Schindler’s List is to marvel at how everyone rose to the challenge. Cinematographer Janusz Kamiński shoots with a grainy, handheld aesthetic that brings a sickening authenticity to set-pieces such as the clearing of the Kraków ghetto. Neeson has never been better. Nor, arguably, has the then-unknown Ralph Fiennes, the epitome of casual, institutionalised evil as SS officer Amon Goeth.
As for Spielberg, it’s worth defending his choice of material. Some critics insist images are too crass to convey the scale of an atrocity best left to verbal testimony – as in Claude Lanzmann’s 10-hour doc Shoah – or the shallow-focus photography of Son Of Saul. Yet consider exactly what Spielberg’s images contain: luggage in the street, trestle tables piled with gold fillings, the awful anticipation of women waiting in a shower room. Spielberg wants the detail to stick in the mind, because he’s highlighting the transactional ideology of Nazism, where objects are weighed, counted, listed or discarded. Even businessman Schindler isn’t immune, until he realises the true horror of what counts as an ‘object’.
And consider the sheer logistical effort required here. After all, what is a movie – which requires sets to be built and hundreds of extras to be hired – but a twisted shadow of the action being depicted? Schindler’s List is terrifying because of the apparent ease of recreating the nightmare. Only Spielberg could achieve this so well: the director best attuned to Hollywood’s industrial processes, dissecting this most industrial of evils. Simon Kinnear