Schindler's List
You got to hand it to Spielberg, he can tug at heartstrings. Under absolutely no circumstances you have got to “hand it” to the nazis.
This is a big budget American “based on a true story” film, I shudder to dig into this (I watched Little Miss Sunshine). I think I prefer not to know. Isn’t he the guy from the elevators?
The hero of the film should have been Stern. He’s the guy that is actually working his ass off, quietly doing his accounting and shit, making things happening. The Woz to Schindler’s Steve Jobs. Worse, there apparently a Mietek Pemper who wrote the damn list, who gets written out of the story and doesn’t mind that! Heroes, I say.
Besides the three main characters, the rest of the people kinda blend together. So many characters, so much gruesome stuff happening. It’s hard to keep track, a million is a statistic. This seems intended, I am not complaining.
The main character conflict is between Schindler and the camp commander, the two sides of the same coin. They are so similar, there are even montages of both of them getting ready in the morning and the like. Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos. Not like Göth, the nihilist. He has no soul to sell to the devil.
I hope the point is not that Schindler might be a believer in God, so he doesn’t consider Jews as animals. Göth doesn’t care, as evidence by his maid. Both also treat woman as sex objects, as Schindler is caught in the act by his damn wife and she is unfazed by this. Plus, she divorces him after the war, it seems the promises of fidelity were bunk.
The secretary scene is just great, hilarious. Those small humorous scenes are fleeting and brief, as they should. Usually they are sandwiched between horrifying imagery, for good measure.
I think the most powerful image for me is the doctors killing their patients while they thank them with their eyes. That is pure emotion, an absolute horror.
Still, all in all, this could have used some more gravitas.
The main reason I don’t trust Spielberg is that he is just a complete centrist. How can this very same director team up with a literal fascist to film Saving Private Ryan? How is this a thing?
How does one goes from this, or Indiana Jones literally punching Nazis, to asking John Milius to write Saving Private Ryan? Do we really need both fascist and anti-fascist points of view? Goddamn it!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.