Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  *

  SCHINDLER’S List contains two dedications. The first reads: “In memory of the more than six million Jews murdered.” The second, less noticed because it comes at the conclusion of the end-title sequence, reads: “For Steve Ross.”

  While some found it incongruous for a film on the Holocaust to be dedicated to the late Time Warner chairman (who died shortly before it began filming), Spielberg saw Ross as an inspiration for the film’s characterization of Schindler. To help Irish actor Liam Neeson capture Schindler’s panache, Spielberg showed Neeson his home movies of the handsome, gregarious Ross, whose personality was a similarly intricate texture of roguish business practices interwoven with lavish generosity. “I always told Steve that if he was fifteen years younger, I’d cast him as Schindler,” Spielberg said. “… After I met Steve, I went from being a miser to a philanthropist, because I knew him, because that’s what he showed me to do.” Inspired by the “pleasure that [Ross] drew from his own private philanthropy,” Spielberg emulated his mentor: “I have my name on a couple of buildings, because in a way that’s a fund-raiser. But eighty percent of what I do is anonymous. And I get so much pleasure from that—it’s one of the things that Steve Ross opened my heart to.”

  It was a sign of Spielberg’s highly sentimental view of Ross that he thought of him as akin to George Bailey, the altruistic building-and-loan officer played by James Stewart in Ross’s favorite film, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. When Ross was dying of cancer, Spielberg made a short film based on the Capra classic, showing him the world as it would have been if he had never lived. “I dreamt this up when we were in Hawaii, filming Jurassic Park,” Spielberg said. “We had [Warner Bros, executives] Bob Daly and Terry Semel as hobos, looking for food in trashcans. Clint Eastwood, instead of being the legend, was a Stuntman, an extra. ([Producer] Joel Silver shoots him—and actually kills him.) Quincy [Jones] was Clarence, the angel. Chevy Chase was God. I was in a mental institution, totally enclosed in a straitjacket, just my fingers free. I was putting together in shaving foam the face of E.T. and not quite knowing what I was trying to express. I said, ‘He came to me … he came to me … he was a six-foot-three E.T.!’”

  The unsentimentalized truth about Ross, according to biographer Connie Bruck, was that “his extraordinary generosity was funded to a great degree by the company; his loyalty, in many cases, endured as long as people were useful to him; and—driven by a compulsion to win—he tended to put his own interest ahead of others, in situations large and small. Not only did Ross not sacrifice himself for the good of others, as did his putative soulmate, George Bailey, but the precise converse was true.”

  Spielberg’s hero-worship blinded him to the mogul’s less attractive qualities and even called his own judgment into question. What did it say about Spielberg that he chose such a dubious character as a role model? The most charitable way to look at it is that he emulated what he found good about Steve Ross and forgave the rest. In much the same way, Spielberg was able to see Oskar Schindler’s extraordinary generosity as redemptive of his many failings and vices. Indeed, it can be argued that only such a man could have succeeded in manipulating his fellow Nazis for such benign purposes. “We had to accept Schindler as he was,” explained one of the Schindlerjuden, Israeli Supreme Court Justice Moshe Bejski. “Because if he wouldn’t be like he was, nobody else of the normal kind of thinking was ready to do what he has done.”

  *

  DURING the hectic three months of production on Schindler’s List in the winter and spring of 1993, Spielberg, in the words of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, “worked from his heart.” Keeping his preplanning to the minimum, often not knowing how he would film a scene until he arrived on that day’s location in Poland, Spielberg plunged into the experience with a controlled emotional frenzy that helped give the film its startling sense of immediacy. All his gifts as an entertainer and technician were put in the service of giving the audience the feeling of being inside the event.

  Schindler’s List gains immeasurably from being shot largely on actual locations, including the streets of Kraków, Schindler’s factory and apartment building, the city’s SS headquarters and prison, and the gate and railroad tracks of Auschwitz (the World Jewish Congress, fearing “a Hollywood Holocaust,” refused to let Spielberg film inside the gate). Because of postwar changes at the site, the Plaszów camp had to be reconstructed by production designer Allan Starski in an open pit adjacent to the original location. The awareness that the events were being filmed at the places where they actually occurred intensified the solemn atmosphere of memorialization. When he first traveled to Poland to scout locations, Spielberg found that “to touch history, to put my hand on 600-year-old masonry, and to step back from it and look down at my feet and know that I was standing where, as a Jew, I couldn’t have stood fifty years ago, was a profound moment for me in my life.”

  Spielberg’s guiding principle was to keep himself open to the raw, unmediated emotion that each scene, each setting, each group of characters provoked in him. It was not the first time he worked without the safety net of storyboards, but this time there was a greater emotional imperative. He wanted this story, in a sense, to tell itself. Approaching it with a profound humility, he functioned more like a “reporter” than like a director: “I can’t tell you the shots I did on Schindler’s List or why I put the camera in a certain place. I re-created these events, and then I experienced them as any witness or victim would have. It wasn’t like a movie.” Spielberg’s decision to forego the conscious process of aesthetic stylization allowed him to tap freely into the mixture of individual and collective emotions that characterizes the subconscious. Accepting the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s Best Picture Award in January 1994, Spielberg said, “After getting back from the location—from which none of us has recovered—I looked through production stills taken by David James. When I came across any still that showed the crew behind the camera, I had no recollection of those images. I knew we were making a movie and that there was a camera, but I had little recognition of the moviemaking experience.”

  “We want people to see this film in fifteen years and not have a sense of when it was made,” Kaminski said. Spielberg hired the young Polish émigré cinematographer both because of his fluency in that country’s language and because of his experience in working at breakneck speed on low-budget features and TV movies, including Class of ’61, Amblin’s 1993 TV movie pilot for an unsold series about the American Civil War. Kaminski approached Schindler “as if I had to photograph it fifty years ago, with no lights, no dolly, no tripod. How would I do it? Naturally, a lot of it would be handheld, and a lot of it would be set on the ground where the camera was not level…. It was simply more real to have certain imperfections in the camera movement, or soft images. All those elements will add to the emotional side of the movie.”

  Handheld cameras, used for about 40 percent of the film, give the crowd scenes a raw, documentary feeling, with quick, spontaneous panning shots and abrupt, jarring crowd movements viscerally imparting an omnipresent sensation of terror and disorientation. What Spielberg called the “passionate urgency” of the filming was dictated in part by the relatively modest budget, which allowed only seventy-two shooting days. “Most scenes we’re shooting in two or three takes, and we’re working real fast,” Spielberg told a visiting reporter. “I think that gives the movie a spontaneity, an edge, and it also serves the subject.” His decision to make the film in black-and-white (aside from a few moments of stylized poetic emphasis and the present-day epilogue) was a crucial factor in giving it a documentary feeling. Resisting Universal chairman Tom Pollock’s entreaties to shoot the film on color negative stock so a color version could be released for the home-video market, Spielberg felt black-and-white was essential because most documentary footage of the Holocaust is monochromatic and “because I don’t want, accidentally or subconsciously, to beautify events”; he may have been influenced in that decision by the criticism
of his lushly romantic visual style in The Color Purple.

  Kaminski accurately described the complex visual texture of Schindler’s List as “a mixture of German Expressionism and Italian Neorealism,” yet Spielberg spoke of his visual strategy in terms of denial. Stylistically, he “got rid of the crane, got rid of the Steadicam, got rid of the zoom lenses, got rid of everything that for me might be considered a safety net.”

  The eloquent simplicity and directness of Spielberg’s visual storytelling in Schindler’s List shows a consummate mastery of the filmmaking craft. Because the emotional effect is so overwhelming, one hardly notices the subtle use of moving camera and the terrifying lighting effects that help communicate the feelings of a group of Jewish women fearing they are about to be gassed in a shower room at Auschwitz. When a crowd of mothers runs hysterically after the trucks bearing their unsuspecting children to Auschwitz, the viewer does not consciously register that the camera is shooting from the point of view of the children racing away from their mothers’ outstretched arms. The liquidation of the ghetto, an astonishing sixteen-minute sequence of boldly contrasting lighting effects, shock cuts, and maze-like choreography of Nazis hunting down their victims, is perhaps the greatest directorial tour de force of Spielberg’s career to date. But it unfolds with the dizzying immediacy of a living nightmare, all played against a small but crucially important focus: the anguished close-ups of Schindler, on horseback, watching helplessly from a nearby hillside. Schindler’s expressions provide the dramatic turning point of the story, demarcating his change from exploiter of “his” Jews to their protector.

  Ben Kingsley has provided a vivid account of the filming of the ghetto liquidation: “Once they started to run in with the handheld cameras and have the tracking cameras as well, the takes were very long and the shock built up in us. Horror after horror after horror—it went on so long before you heard the Klaxon for ‘Cut.’ Bodies, blood, the smell of explosives in the air, and people still running and being told to stop by an AD [assistant director]—but it was like an echo of the SS. Steven wanted to get the truth into the camera, and every time he did I saw he got a tremendous kick. It was as if he was saying, ‘Let them see that. Let them look at that.’”

  What Spielberg found himself feeling during the making of Schindler’s List often left him surprised and shaken. One of his most difficult experiences was filming the sequence of the Health Aktion, in which aging Jews are forced to run naked in circles before Nazi doctors making a selection for Auschwitz. “It was hard on me to be there,” said the director. “I couldn’t look at it, I had to turn my eyes away, I couldn’t watch…. None of us looked. I said to the guy pulling the focus on a very difficult shot, ‘Do you think you got that?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t looking.’”

  Spielberg recalled that when he paid his first visit to Auschwitz during preproduction, he “went expecting to cry buckets, and I didn’t cry at all. I wasn’t sad one bit. I was outraged. I was furious. It was a reaction I didn’t anticipate.” That feeling of smoldering rage suffuses much of the film, helping keep it from succumbing to the temptations of sentimentality. While unfamiliar emotional territory for a Spielberg film, this was not an altogether new feeling for Spielberg himself. His Saratoga High School friend Gene Ward Smith had been surprised by the way the teenage Spielberg “radiated [a] genuine but seemingly inexplicable rage and disgust”; Smith only later realized it was the result of Spielberg’s experiences with anti-Semitic bullies. As Spielberg acknowledged, those still-painful memories of his adolescent “Hell on Earth” came rushing back to the surface when he directed Schindler’s List. But he never lost sight of how much his own experiences, and his imagination, paled before the reality of the Holocaust.

  *

  GIVEN the nature of the subject matter, no representation of the Holocaust, whether concrete or abstract, can be expected to do justice to the memory of the victims. No film, no book, no memorial has ever failed to arouse passionate concern about whether it is appropriate to the subject. There is even a school of thought which holds that the Holocaust is an event so unique in its evil, so incomprehensible in its ultimate meaning, that it is wrong to attempt to depict it. “After Auschwitz,” argued Theodor Adorno, “to write a poem is barbaric.”

  Schindler’s List was rapturously praised by most reviewers. “[L]ike all great works, it feels both impossible and inevitable,” wrote Terrence Rafferty in The New Yorker. “…It is by far the finest, fullest dramatic (i.e., nondocumentary) film ever made about the Holocaust. And few American movies since the silent era have had anything approaching this picture’s narrative boldness, visual audacity, and emotional directness.”

  “This movie will shatter you, but it earns its tears honestly,” Newsweek’s David Ansen wrote in a cover story on the film and its director. “… Confronted with the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the ghastly sight of children hiding from capture in outhouse cesspools, Spielberg never loses his nerve…. Spielberg’s very nature as a filmmaker has been transformed; he’s reached within himself for a new language, and without losing any of his innate fluency or his natural-born storytelling gift, he’s found a style and a depth of feeling that will astonish both his fans and those detractors who believed he was doomed to permanent adolescence.”

  “Mr. Spielberg has made sure that neither he nor the Holocaust will ever be thought of in the same way again,” Janet Maslin declared in The New York Times. “[I]t’s as if he understood for the first time why God gave him such extraordinary skills,” wrote New York magazine’s David Denby, who admitted, “I didn’t think I could be affected this way anymore.”

  But the film aroused equally ardent opposition from a minority of critics who found it, for various reasons, an inadequate representation of the Holocaust. Some objections bordered on the frivolous, such as that of Simon Louvish, whose essay in the British film magazine Sight and Sound derided it as a “Holocaust theme park,” a phrase sometimes used by European critics of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Others raised more fundamental issues. French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, whose austere nine-hour documentary Shoah explores memories of the Holocaust without showing a single frame of historical footage, criticized Schindler’s List for allegedly putting undue emphasis on Jews who were rescued, rather than on the six million who died. “The project of telling Schindler’s story confuses history,” Lanzmann claimed. “All of this is to say that everything is equal, to say there were good among the Nazis, bad among the others, and so on. It’s a way to make it not a crime against humanity, but a crime of humanity.”

  In one of his rare responses to criticism of the film, Spielberg accused Lanzmann of wanting to be “the only voice in the definitive document of the Holocaust. It amazed me that there could be any hurt feelings in an effort to reflect the truth.” Spielberg watched Shoah several times before making Schindler’s List, and it influenced his deceptively dispassionate-seeming, documentary-like depiction of the bureaucratic apparatus of the Holocaust. But he wanted to go further and explore the human dimensions behind what was, in fact, “a crime of humanity” as well as “a crime against humanity.” For a popular filmmaker seeking to influence a far wider audience than Lanzmann’s relatively elite viewership, it was essential to stimulate the audience’s emotions by re-creating events and dramatizing the thought processes of those involved. Neither film should cancel out or overshadow the other; it is precisely because the Holocaust is such a central event in modern history that any attempt at prescribing or limiting its aesthetic treatment is misguided. For artists to shrink from the task of dealing with the Holocaust for any reason is to encourage historical amnesia. The real question in evaluating any dramatic treatment of the Holocaust is that posed by Elie Wiesel: “How is one to tell a tale that cannot be—but must be—told?”

  Too often the terms of the debate were framed in shopworn critical clichés about Spielberg’s artistic personality, ad hominem attacks derisively questioning his intelligence and judgment and finding hi
m inadequate to the momentous task at hand. But the film’s detractors also raised some challenging arguments. Whether or not one agrees with their assessments, the public debate helped focus attention on what Spielberg was attempting in Schindler’s List and how he went about crafting it. In his Holocaust memoir Night, Wiesel recalled his father’s observation that “every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.” The often unanswerable questions raised by Spielberg’s film, as well as those raised by its detractors, are a testimony to the film’s extraordinary emotional influence on audiences throughout the world.

  Defying all box-office predictions by grossing $321.2 million around the world ($225.1 million of it outside the U.S. and Canada),‡‡ Schindler’s List became such a major event in the public consciousness of the Holocaust that it unexpectedly elevated Spielberg to a stature few other filmmakers have ever achieved. The leaders of the U.S., Israel, Germany, Austria, Poland, France, and other countries attended special screenings and held public and private meetings with the filmmaker, treating him as if he were a visiting diplomat on a mission to combat ethnic hatred. Spielberg rose to the occasion, accepting that role with eloquence and humility. The film even received a televised endorsement from President Bill Clinton (of whom Spielberg has been a prominent supporter). After attending the Washington preview of Schindler’s List, Clinton told his fellow countrymen, “I implore every one of you to go see it…. you will see portrait after portrait of the painful difference between people who have no hope and have no rage left and people who still have hope and still have rage.”