Schindler's List

365 Films

Entry #19

Schindler’s List (1993)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

For the six of you who are still reading this thing, you may have noticed that I adopt a somewhat flippant tone for these entries.  There is no rational explanation as to why that is, I can only say that I gotta write 365 of these so let me have this one little outlet for entertaining myself, please.  That philosophy is all well and good until you come upon an entry like Schindler’s List where even the very mention of the title sends a seismic tremor of chills down my spine.  The tricky thing in writing about Schindler’s List is that I saw the film when I was ten, in the late winter of 1994.  The film had just won its seven academy awards (including best director and best picture) and Spielberg had, only a year prior, tore his way into my subconscious with the mammoth Jurassic Park.  I’m not sure if this lets me off the hook but as a ten-year-old, I had no real concept of the holocaust or World War II in general.  I had a vague notion of this film being historically significant, but at the time, I was more interested in seeing the new project by the guy who made the Jeff Goldblum-fights- dinosaurs-movie.  Its success at the Oscars merely corroborated these pieces of evidence.  We had to see this film.  What’s tricky about seeing it as such a young age is that you quickly and methodically wish to banish about 90% of its images out of your mind as soon as you leave the theatre.  All the arguments in the ensuing years about the validity of cinematic representation of atrocities go right out the window.  By that point, it’s too late, you’ve been scarred and the last thing you feel like doing is re-visiting the nightmare.  Obviously, the experience of watching a film doesn’t come within a hare’s breath of what millions of real life people suffered through and still experience to this day, but I was ten and incredibly self-absorbed.   That being said, the over-whelming nature of the film and the mythic status it has obtained as an act of remembrance instead of a film with characters and a story, make it incredibly hard to judge it with concrete aesthetic assessments.  I have only seen the film three times in my entire life (at the most its been four).  Therefore I will fail in offering you any kind of contextualization or interpretation of the film in cinematic history.  The best I can do is tell you that if The Last of the Mohicans was my “welcome to the party” introduction to the world of movies for grown-ups (I can’t say Adult Films, now can I?), Schindler’s List was when the shit got real.  From this point on, there was no turning back.  I learned that while movies have the power to entertain and delight; they also have the power to induce intense bouts of sobbing followed by curling up into a fetal position on the floor.