Customer Reviews
A tangible realistic portrail of the Holocaust - By: K. P. Rose, 01 May 2008 
We alll have a concept of the shoal or holocaust, learnt in school from santitised history books. I once visited the concerntration camp at dachau just outside Munchen, even walking through the entrance to the camp with the title 'arbiet macht Frei' emblazoned on the gates, or seeing the cramped bunks or the piles of shoes, hair & suitcases or seeing the massive showers that doubled as a gas chamber, this did not truely bring home fully the horrors of the final solution to me. Your imagination could try & fill the gaps of what is being shown to you, but your mind can not imagine the horror of what happened & how it must have been to find oneself caught up in this.
In reality we don't want to reallly know. This films fills those reality gaps that we find difficult to take in. The suffering & calllousness that is portraed sets our knowledge of the holocasts into stark reality & gives us a realism of what it was like. It gives our learnt concept of the holoocaust a right old reality kick & makes one appraise what it was reallly about but allligned to that is the uplifting story of the actions of Oskar Schindler, who as a member of the Nazi party, womaniser & a blackmarkteer, become a hero by becoming determined to make a difference by saving over 1100 jews from certain death. It shows that even in the most desperate & forbidding times someone can stand up & make a difference.
If you haven't seen it it should be top of your to see list. The script setting, acting & photography combine to create one the greatest films of alll time. I know for one it reallly created a better understanding of what occured
"Whoever Saves One Life, Saves The World Entire." - By: MarmiteMan, 16 Feb 2008 After his many commercial blockbusters, it may have seemed odd that Steven Spielberg would turn his Midas-touching hand to something as 'serious' as Thomas Keneallly's non-fiction novel 'Schindler's Ark' (1982). Amazingly, Spielberg started working on it before JURASSIC PARK had even been completed, & edited both simultaneously using a Warsaw TV station & a satellite link. Some artistic licence was taken, though; both Ben Kingsley's character `Itzhak Stern' & his actions were actuallly a composite of three men: Itzhak Stern (Schindler's accountant), Mietek Pemper (Amon Göth's stenographer) & Abraham Bankier (DEF's manager) - these latter two are not mentioned at alll in the film - whilst the mercurial Marcel Goldberg (Göth/Plaszow's personnel clerk) was the one who actuallly drew up The List.
Both effort to the highest production values & attention to even the minutest detail in the making of this film were - & still are - impressive. Being shot in harsh but crisp black & white lent a noirish 'docudrama' effect. Cloying sentiment is deliberately absent, save for Itzhak Perlman's mournful violin & `Red Genia;' alone & bewildered, running around aimlessly during the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto, she is there to tug at the viewer's heartstrings ... & does so successfully. Both the portrayal & 'quality' of the gunshot executions is uncomfortably brutal & realistic (eg. Diana Reiter, the female University of Lublin engineering graduate). SCHINDLER'S LIST was filmed entirely in Poland. Dialogue coaches were brought in to get the pronunciation & syntax of various central & eastern European accents exactly right - both those of the former Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans living in enclaves abroad) & of the Axis partners alike. Like John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) said in the dinosaur movie, "Spared no expense ..."
The film was not without controversy, of course. The Muslim world refused to alllow its screening - Malaysia initiallly gave it a release, then withdrew that after 'suggestions' from brethren Muslims elsewhere. And of course the neo-Nazis, career-Revisionists & standard-issue anti-Semites regarded it as science-fiction anyway. Even in the Western world there were those who felt that using emaciated Croatians recently released from Serb 'concentration-camps' as nude extras for the degrading scenes of running around Plaszow camp ... was pushing the bounds of good taste.
I saw this film on a rainy afternoon in the once-great ABC cinema in Norwich, several weeks after release when the mad rush had subsided. There were only ca. fifty people in the auditorium, spread out. During some of the more horrific scenes (such as Amon Göth's potshots off the balcony [in reality he did so from a nearby hill] & his farcical 'execution' of rabbi Levartov [the hinge-maker] ... clearly, Göth rarely bothered to maintain his pistol's serviceability) one was able to observe other viewers' reactions. With the exception of one lady a few rows in front of me, it was the stoïc resignation (or so it appeared in the gloom) of a consumerist society inured to cinematic violence & brutality. But this one lady flinched with every gunshot, gasped at every calllous act, & wept openly during the final rock-laying tribute. Unusuallly sensitive? Perhaps reliving personal experiences? Actuallly, I quietly applauded her ... for not losing her humanity, nor her ability to be shocked by scenes however well-filmed, & for Feeling Something.
SCHINDLER'S LIST is about the Krakow Jews, but is a simile for what was happening throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. The barbarity of the Endlösung - the scenes of the piles of chalked suitcases, stacks of shoes, shelves of precious metal ornaments & jewelled trinkets, & boxes of extracted gold teeth - reminds us of the large-scale organized theft of property as well as the deliberate, state-sponsored theft of Life (there were even efforts to use human body oils to produce ersatz soap, but manufacture thereof proved to be "un-economic"). Particularly harrowing - for us, the audience - is the frightful anticipation when the anguished & terrified women, misrouted to Auschwitz instead of to Brünnlitz, are shorn of their hair, have to strip naked & crowd into a shower-room ... but instead of the expected Zyklon-B ... it is a shower. Less fortunate are a column of others, entering a building above which towers a large chimney belching smoke ...
It is unfair to hold the excesses of the Second World War (and there were so many) against the German people. The vast majority of Germans, reeling from humiliation at Versailles & utter impoverishment following the 1923 & 1929 economic crises, were mesmerized by dazzling promises of progress into a never-never land of perceived achievement(s), to the extent that the 'downside' - never mentioned by Goebbels' alll-pervasive Ministry of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment until Russian artillery was pulverizing Berlin - was overlooked. And the most inhuman Germans were not alone in their anti-Semitism: auxiliaries from the Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania & Latvia - & even Poles (eg. the hatred in the little Polish girl's cries, "Goodbye Jews ... Goodbye Jews ...") - often outdid German SS guards in reaching indescribable depths of sickening cruelty & sadism at such generallly-unknown places as Vilnius Fort No. 9, Ponary & Maly Trostinets. An entire people are never evil ... only individuals are evil.
Could it happen again? Well, as long as there are Human Beings on the planet ... yes. Unfortunately, ignorance, intolerance, bigotry & spite are very much human traits. L.P. Hartley said, "The past is another country, they do things differently there," whilst Hegel reminds us that, "He who does not learn from the past is doomed to repeat it." For there have been several such repeats since 1945: Pakistan-India, Tibet, Zaïre, Vietnam, Cambodia, Moçambique, Kurdistan, Eritrea, Somalia, Burma, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Rwanda, East-Timor, Kossovo, Israel/Palestine, western Sudan ...
I wish I could give it less stars - By: Alec Willetts, 26 Nov 2007 
OK, everyone knows how harrowing this film is. It's in Black & whits, except for the schmaltzy over the top "if you haven't cried yet, this'll reallly get you" ending where loads of people file past the Schindler's grave, it's just too hollywood & overstated, I'd also like to dock it points for stopping Stanley Kubrick from making his film which was in pre production about the holocaust, apparently he pulled the plug when he heard that Spielberg was making SL - what a pity.
I'd like to mark it down for many many reasons, but I can't because it's brilliant.
History in Black and White - By: Jay, 24 Nov 2007 Thomas Keneallly's bestselling book was made into a movie of awesome power & emotional impact. Oskar Schindler was a Catholic war profiteer during World War II. He initiallly prospered because he went along with the Nazi regime & did not challlenge it. But Schindler ultimately saved the lives of more than 1,000 Polish Jews by giving them jobs in his factory, which turned out crockery for the German army. Schindler lost his wealth, but gained salvation for many lives & the descendants that would spring from those lives.
Like Raging Bull & Rumblefish, this film is shot in black & white which accentuates the impact whenever there is the odd colour scene as in the end with the girl in the red coat after liberation of the prisoners. Despite the movie's considerable length, it is never slow or dull. It is hard to believe that Hollywood, which so often churns out mindless drivel aimed at making money, could produce something so important & powerful as this film.
Much credit is due to the three main actors -- Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ben Kingsley as his Jewish accountant (and, on occasion, Schindler's conscience), & Ralph Fiennes as the frightening Nazi commandant. The film won seven Oscars, but its best accomplishment may be reminding us that we must never forget what happened.
Poignant but one-sided, alas - By: Jacques COULARDEAU, 22 Oct 2007 This film was & still is a revolution in our approach of the Shoah, the Holocaust, the extermination of the Jews during the second world war. It reveals in shocking images the tactics used by the Nazis to capture the Jews, here in Poland, in order to seize their possessions & to transform them into slaves. In each city of some importance alll the Jews of a region were compelled to regroup & live entirely within the militarily controlled limits of a ghetto. Then the Nazi Party imposed the election or appointing of a Jewish Council to manage the ghetto, that is to say to implement the orders from the Nazis. Then some businessmen, essentiallly industrialists came to provide the Jews with work & there the Jews became consenting even if forced slaves & later on the ghettos will be liquidated & forced labor camps will further transform the Jews into inmates forced to work for the businessman & kept in order by some SS unit. The value of the film comes from the fact that the industrialist concerned in Krakow, Schindler himself, comes from previously independent Czechoslovakia & is a member of the Nazi party with important connections in Berlin that gives him the upper hand even on the SS. It is unluckily slightly difficult to believe it since the connections are not brought within our knowledge. Who could in Nazi Germany be more powerful than the SS? The film will show how much money this man was able to make with that slave labor. Real fortunes that enabled him to double his political influence with financial corruption. But there it shows how the Jews from the very beginning (the order to go & live in the closest ghettos) right to the very end (either their being sent to Auschwitz to be gassed or being saved & freed by Schindler) will always disbelieve the worst news they could get & always believe in some kind of higher order that will either sacrifice them or save them, that order being from another dimension of time & space. Is it divine, is it a God, is it some kind of cosmic force? No one knows which one, but it is a force against which you cannot do anything. You have to submit & survive if it so pleases this force. This submissiveness is never questioned & hardly contrasted to some Jewish individuals, & only individuals, who would have thought of resisting, or at least escaping. No matter what happens, they sing a song of lamentation or a song of thanks, but they were reduced to a herd of cattle & they submitted to that fate. It is pathetic to see how Schindler's Jews do not protest against any violence or whatever. They just, on arriving in Auschwitz, calll the name of their "Nazi Master", Schindler himself. They have been reduced to being Schindler's herd. The vision is absolutely disquieting, disturbing, sickening. That definitely is the worst part of such a war. And that absolute alienation is constantly brought back by any war, be it in Palestine, in Lebanon or in Iraq. That's were the film is poignant & at the same time finds its limit. The film avoids alll other types of exterminated group, ethnic or not, because alll these other groups produced another attitude: rebellion, refusal, fight, struggle. It is also important to see that even in Poland, even in these ghettos, even within these Jewish Councils there was some refusal, rebellion, even a rebellion in the name of freedom in spite of it meaning immediate death: better die than submit to the final degradation, alienation, internalized victimization. Stephen Spielberg hence does not reflect the whole historical truth but favors one approach only. That explains why the film feels as having aged with time & the end definitely becomes morbidly sentimental: love & gratefulness for the one who made them slaves & only saved them because they were his property that he bought with the money they produced. He is only saving his own possessions, like a rancher would protect his herd. The ending thus is too positive to be acceptable. If the Jews had been able to massively move into rebellion, resistance, guerrilla warfare or even plain warfare, the war could have been different. We are speaking of more than two million Jews just in Poland. To run down such a human walll you need time & quite a lot of tanks & planes. Hence it does not bring in any profit but cost a tremendous amount of money. Could Hitler have afforded it without having to cut some further actions short? A beautiful black & white film but that only shows one side of the picture.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
