SOURCE: White, Armond. “Toward a Theory of Spielberg History.” Film Comment 30, no. 2 (March 1994): 51-8.

1.

“Witnessing,” a term repeated in the most doctrinaire reviews of Schindler's List, actually happens only once in the movie. Steven Spielberg “witnesses” the tribute he has arranged in which survivors of the WWII Holocaust file past the gravesite of Oskar Schindler. It is a perfectly situated affirmation of the gratitude and humanity that a group of people express toward a man who saved their lives. The profound optimism—the goodness—of human experience has always been the subject of Spielberg's greatest art: Close Encounters of the Third Kind ('77), The Color Purple ('85), E.T. ('82)—each an ebullient fantasy. But there's no awareness of this sensibility in the widespread hurrahs for his latest drama.

Typically far from the mark is David Denby's praise of Spielberg's “anger”—imputing a petty vengefulness to the motives of the most benevolent filmmaker of all time. The tendency to turn Spielberg into Moshe Dayan (a Scheherezade into a sabra) suggests other frightening reasons for the movie's praise. With Schindler's List critics have reduced Spielberg's art to a hegemonic tool for promoting mainstream historical interest—an implicit policy as pervasive as the refusal of white critics to see the meaning in a Black story like The Color Purple. That film is Spielberg's most audacious feat of “witnessing”—a poetic act of revelation rather than partisan reportage. But the critical line on Schindler's List misrepresents Spielberg's artistry.

As a piece of witnessing, Schindler's List is almost as disingenuous as the Oscar-baiting statements Spielberg has made about growing up, expressing his Jewishness, etc. He gives in to contemporary social and historical mawkishness by pretending a special significance here. It's the typical middlebrow equation of solemnity with seriousness. Spielberg's skills see him through, but Schindler's List is weakest as history, strongest at evoking the emotionality of the events depicted. Of all the techniques he employs—fast cutting, chromatic shifts, emotive lighting—the most specious is the pretense toward documentary realism. It's a desperate, unoriginal tactic for a fabulist-stylist who became a legendary filmmaker by always surprising the audience, freighting a dinosaur theme park with ethical comment, putting irony into a kid's fascination with Mustang fighter planes.

Similarly, Schindler's List is a dream of the Holocaust. But its newsreel trope is too literal-minded; in the age of Hard Copy, audiences' need for an authenticating format can devolve into an ahistorical thirst for atrocity as spectacle. To look past the poetry in Spielberg's Holocaust is to see less in it. When Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski chose to shoot in black and white, they conformed to a somewhat fallacious theory that this particular historical event could not be adequately rendered in color. Spielberg's claim “I have no color reference for that period” forgets William Fraker's zesty re-creations in 1941 and Allen Daviau's luminous Empire of the Sun images in favor of newsreel “reality.” Kaminski's b&w, a superlatively achieved combination of documentary style, natural light, and dramatic stylization, actually serves a banal, reverential function. (Only the shifts to color for scenes of religious ritual, shots of the little girl in the red coat, and the final scene in Israel attest to Spielberg's postmodern interest in activating viewers' consciousness, and to his still-estimable creativity.)

If the film falters, if the director is anywhere untrue to his gifts, it's in the pretense to b&w realism. This confuses his private, inventive use of mythology with an absolute historical reality. Recreating the shock of genocide and discrimination, Spielberg adds nothing to the understanding about how pogroms happened within European political history. This may seem sufficient to those who simply want the fact of the Holocaust confirmed, but it is, imaginatively, a small accomplishment.

2.

Never forget that Steven Spielberg proved himself a serious artist long before he took 35mm b&w cameras to Poland for Schindler's List. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ('89) addressed history intelligently, elegantly: revisionism and fun in one. Crossing the globe with newfound respect for previously dominated cultures (Indy's Western belief in museum curatorship is opposed with his father's Faith), Spielberg opened up his view-finder to wonder. He gave serious attention to the WWII era and the fascist thrall of Nazism in personal, original ways. Although critics have been reluctant to admit that the farcical tone of the Indiana Jones trilogy and 1941 ('79) were worthy of their admiration, those movies went to the heart of the pop imagination.

Spielberg accomplished a postwar, postmodern miracle in those films—criticizing the political gestalt of the virtuous, victorious, prosperous West with the pop ethos of Hollywood fantasy, the tradition of which he is the truest heir. Schindler's List may fulfill an obligation Spielberg felt as a Jewish American—and tributes from industry Jews such as Billy Wilder suggest he has kept a faith with the Jewish founders of the industry. But that's a false, biased assumption. 1941's devotion to the pre-WWII sense of pop culture as wild, racist, naïve—unmandated except by the principles of capitalism and pleasure (i.e., Americanism; i.e., Hollywood)—shows Spielberg shrewdly deflating cultural sovereignty at every turn; indeed, he opens the film with an impious spoof of Jaws ('75).

1941 astutely turned homey, U.S. imperialism (and the world's subordination to it) into a satirical jamboree—a first, important step toward changing popular attitudes about Hollywood prerogative. Spielberg made the change memorably in The Last Crusade's inspired incident wherein Adolf Hitler autographs Indy's father's personal diary. It unexpectedly summed up the psychic, historical weight that the fascist legacy exerted on the pop imagination. (An indestructible Nazi insignia is a significant “Never Again” motif throughout the trilogy.) Such clever business didn't necessarily identify Spielberg as Jewish, or as a history scholar, but it evidenced the wit, the political preoccupation, and the sensibility of an auteur.

3.

Spielberg is the rare Hollywood plenipotentate not to settle for the status quo practices of the industry—until now. That means Schindler's List, rather than being his greatest work, is actually, in some poignant, infuriating way, his most compromised. Surely an artist who works unfettered—and magnificently—in the Hollywood system, who can portray an industrialist's saintliness (and dedicate that sacrifice to the late Warner Bros. president Steve Ross), is aesthetically at home in genres that define the emotional life in hugely popular, sentimental terms.

In fact, the terms by which The Last Crusade can be recognized as a great work of humane and artistic contemplation were explicated 30 years ago by Andrew Sarris's manifesto “Toward a Theory of Film History” in The American Cinema. Sarris's important distinction between expressive art and sociological entertainment is the kind of critical clarity that advocates of Schindler's List have almost completely muddled. Reviews of that film, whether pro or con, aggravate the current disaster of debased popular taste. As Sarris prophetically suggested, Schindler's List is being foisted upon us tendentiously. It's this decade's Gandhi.

It isn't only Spielberg's integrity that these Schindler's List reviews demean through he's-finally-grown-up cliché or he's-still-trivial myopia. Schindler's List itself has been misread, misunderstood, “appreciated” (which is to say, trivialized) for the wrong qualities. It's as if obviousness were an artistic advance. The Nation provided the best twist: “Spielberg has in fact converted his incapacity into the virtue of restraint.” Can the man who directed the most splendid, heartfelt Hollywood entertainments of the past 20 years accept that praise, that dismissal of his life's work, as reasonable? Do critics who think Spielberg incapable of passion and intelligence genuinely credit Schindler's List's historicity?

Answers may lie in that widely disapproved climax when Nazi businessman Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) has delivered 1,100 Jewish political prisoners to safety after protecting them under the ambivalent wing of capitalist patriarchy. He confounds the Nazi régime's extermination plan by insisting that his workers are essential to its wartime productivity. The ploy is expounded throughout the film in a number of deceptions and a series of last-minute rescues culminating, once the Allies reach Poland, with Schindler releasing his workers. In response, the grateful Jews with mostly middle-class skills who have toiled as laminators, machinists, and foundry workers, forge a ring for Schindler out of their gold teeth-fillings and he accepts it with a tearful speech. Though the contrite language is plain, it's a Shakespearean cry of humility. It's also the most purely Spielbergian moment in the film.

Not to dismiss several memorable scenes that imaginatively convey surprise, shock, pathos, but Schindler's expression of gratitude transcends the familiar catalog of misery. It's a concretely plausible show of decency. Until then, Neeson's performance is rather opaque. Schindler's transformation is only revealed in this speech: materialist Schindler, a vain, devious man, holds to a bourgeois sense of reason, but his apology and self-accusation redeem it. Critics who reject this scene as overly sentimental fail to understand how it works morally—like the climaxes of all Spielberg's films. It is a spiritual moment. Spielberg avoids the insulting concept of a great man's noblesse oblige; Schindler's humbling becomes a sign of grace bestowed upon his beneficiaries and the audience of moviegoers who observe its reenactment.

For two decades now, Spielberg has explored the emotional, thus spiritual, essence of movie spectacle. Audiences have often been right there with him, recognizing and appreciating moments of grace. The box-office success of The Color Purple proved the public's readiness for advanced Hollywood fiction, and Spielberg's radical deployment of generic tropes. Critics' aesthetic awareness should have been excited by this sign of the director fulfilling a fragmented public's hunger for unifying emotional revelation; making a successful Hollywood movie about a Black lesbian confirmed Spielberg's auteurist consistency as a crowd-pleaser par excellence.

Think back: A grown man's trepidation intercut with the slapstick tragedy of a drive-in Road Runner cartoon—The Sugarland Express ('74); a panicked mother distilling her frustration through artful renditions of mountains—Close Encounters; a Japanese sailor weeping at the (mistaken) thought he has demolished Hollywood—1941; elderly sisters regaining paradise and innocence by playing paddycake—The Color Purple; a lonesome boy's sensory remembrance of his father's aftershave lotion—E.T.; a woman's bicycle race to proclaim the fragility of her love without waiting for the (unseen) response in kind—Always ('90); and a group of adult orphans finding themselves in the moment they pay tribute to a woman who cared for them—Hook ('91). These scenes are among the many trenchant episodes in Spielberg's cinema that critics have rejected as fanciful. Lacking sensitive, imaginative eyes, they can't recognize Spielberg's poetic distillation of human experience, his respect for emotion as the evidence of spirituality. The plots that get dismissed as utopian optimism are sincere expressions of a generous sensibility that constantly redefines human experience in pop terms.

The Holocaust-movie concept of Schindler's List gets in the way of Spielberg's visionary expression; it keeps some from seeing Schindler's speech as remarkable. Despite epiphanic scenes directed with Spielberg's impeccable narrative rhythm (a boy's quick life-saving game with luggage left in a street), his experiential mystery (the unkillable factory worker), and multilayered visual splendor (the snowy-ashy nighttime arrival at Auschwitz), they fit into a construct that is, frankly, less compelling than Spielberg's usual working through fiction to claim the essence of a moment or expand its meanings.

4.

No scene in Schindler's List is as great as the letters sequence of The Color Purple, which explored narrativity in popular dramatic, rather than academic, terms. Working in montage, Spielberg combined the story's Southern U.S. setting with images of Africa that illustrate a series of letters sent to Celie (Whoopi Goldberg) by the sister, Nettie (Akosa Busia), from whom she has long been separated. One startling cut from Celie, in Georgia, looking behind her, to a shot of an elephant coming through the trees in Africa, conveys her engrossed, transported interest. The parallel construction is similar to the letters sequence of John Ford's The Searchers in the way the story moves forward in two directions at once, but it's more culturally and politically enlightened. The Color Purple serves a timely social function by metaphorically connecting Celie, an uprooted descendant of slaves, with a newly revealed heritage—a fresh and by no means common Hollywood endeavor. The letters sequence, a genuine act of deconstruction, was itself an auteur's demonstration of rare heroism. It showed how the dissemination of history—witnessing—involves practices of imaginative rendering as well as historical recall: a leap of faith as extraordinary as Oskar Schindler's.

This great sequence provides the movie with a modern, multicultural purpose; the action in the African scenes implies the historic intrusion of Western industry and Christianity. Crosscutting between African musicians and an American chain gang of Black prisoners chanting a work song sums up one of the American holocausts. Spielberg's transitions epitomize the social displacement and cultural continuity of diaspora. It may not be his personal story or that of white and Jewish film critics, but it is emotionally and historically comprehensive.

Advancing from the political conservatism of The Searchers, Spielberg explores the communication of ideas and history that is central to the modern awareness of ethnic representation and the uses of pop culture. His methods are so ecstatically vivid that critics mistook this for condescension. It was anything but. In The Color Purple Spielberg attempted a first—applying Hollywood's entire fictional apparatus to create a romance about African Americans, all the while adhering to the pop-feminist politics that marked Alice Walker's novel as a modern work. The Color Purple is the most successful example of the Eighties' interest in cultural signs and signifiers of African-American and Hollywood history that there is in mainstream American cinema, and is the quintessential example of Spielberg's sophistication. He expanded on it in The Last Crusade's self-reflexive, accordion-like compression of the Indiana Jones series' play with history, anthropology, and colonialist lore (not for nothing do the recurrent religious rituals in Schindler's List involve play with light).

A degree of this postmodernism may inform Schindler's List, including the impulse to change American movies' anti-German conventions. But it has been further submerged by hegemonic criticism that turns the director's vision of the Holocaust back into a more conventional, vague view of history. This is why the pseudo-documentary style—so less inspired than the pop didactics of The Color Purple—is suspicious. The b&w austerity claims an objective truth, whereas the Technicolor, symphonic The Color Purple—daring to present Black Southern life as something other than Walker Evans docutragedy—challenged audience preconceptions. At the top of his game, Spielberg counteracts conventional social mythology through a revivifying of genre; the docudrama pretext of Schindler's List loses that narrative anchor.

Acclaim for Schindler's List presumes that only now does Spielberg show an interest in history; it still denies his interest in revisionism. In truth, reviewers are congratulating Spielberg for making a historical movie that, unlike The Color Purple and The Last Crusade, does not disturb their view of the past or upset their perspective on pop culture. The films' few detractors resent (as they resented The Color Purple) his powerful spiritual-political suasion.

5.

For those who know Spielberg's work, Schindler's List seems less expressive than Close Encounters, E.T., The Color Purple, The Last Crusade, 1941, and Empire of the Sun ('87) because its story is circumscribed, not by the factual requirements of history or Thomas Keneally's book but by the culture industry that has accumulated around the subject of this century's European Holocaust. The surreal, visionary Empire of the Sun and the hellzapoppin 1941 seemed more personal reimaginings of the Second World War partly because their child's-eye-view is Spielberg's unique, legitimate purchase on human experience.

Unfortunately, much of Schindler's List fits prescribed Holocaust lore, the kind of thinking Pauline Kael once ridiculed in the phrase “Nazi junkies.” A pornography of suffering—and revenge—that sneaks into movies on this subject can be read between the lines of the film's rapturous notices. (Spielberg told the New York Film Critics Circle their reviews “were not like reviews, they were like personal essays.”) Even the waterfall of acclaim for Ralph Fiennes's charismatic performance as Commandant Amon Goeth smacks of Nazi-junkie masochism. Dreamy-eyed Fiennes could be one of the stars of the porn film Mein Cock, but his acting is not more skilled than Ben Kingsley's nuanced portrait of bookkeeper-listmaker Itzhak Stern.

Like E.T., the other film on which Spielberg eschewed storyboarding, Schindler's List pares down the director's visual dynamics. Though this pleased his detractors, he ought to remember that their objection to his style is basically a distaste for what makes movies exciting. One moment in the film has a legitimate cinematic thrill: the sequence when mothers are separated from their children epitomizes Spielberg's genius for connecting emotional purposes to compositional vectors. As with the Orphans of the Storm separation of the sisters in The Color Purple, this scene recalls Griffith's command of primal emotions and narrative vigor. The Spielberg twist (and plus) comes with the very Hollywood principle of “proportion.” A single mother separated from a child is usual. (It was acted definitively by Madge Sinclair and Leslie Uggams in Roots and has since been used as a bogus, dull cliché in Sophie's Choice.) But 200 mothers running after their abducted children belongs to a most powerful artistic vision. It's a moment in which Spielberg has successfully reimagined the terror of the Holocaust in an original way. In that scene, the literal rush of emotion kills you without the nicety of taste and “truth.” It is passion made essential, kinetic, made into cinema.

Call that scene a magnanimous gesture. Its primacy is the kind of thing most Hollywood directors can't do or do badly, and so turn Hollywood filmmaking odious. Spielberg is often cursed by a critical establishment that can't see the difference between his élan and a hack's blatancy. Those mother-child emotions needn't be trivialized or disdained—Spielberg employs them honestly (familial emotions are not simply manipulated but well understood), and his sense of Hollywood inflation contains a sensible assessment of the Holocaust experience. He restores dignity to the undignifying effect of a pogrom wherein individuals are reduced to faceless numbers, routed en masse. Spielberg's insistence on primal emotions in this scene ranks with Gillo Pontecorvo's at the climax of The Battle of Algiers; the masses become undeniably human despite the effort to dehumanize them.

Complaints such as Leon Wieseltier's in The New Republic and Frank Rich's op-ed in The New York Times that Schindler's List celebrates the 1,100 Jews Schindler saved without a thought for the 6 million killed is fatuous mathematics and narrowminded ethics. They miss the fundamental fact that the movie interprets the mass experience of Jewish oppression. It's not a story of individual suffering, and Spielberg would be as fraudulent as Nazi junkie Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa) if he pretended to describe that torment singularly. He relays the Holocaust as it comes to him: as a people's tragedy. The little girl in the red coat who triggers Schindler's compassion is a perfect Spielberg symbol for humanity, but he reenacts “personal” Jewish history without specific differentiation. Schindler and Goeth stand apart as stylized, slightly awestruck visions of the German Other—angel and devil portrayed as ambivalent human extremes. But the Jews are ennobled when called upon, in the end, to display nobility as opposed to piously asserting it.

Not even Spielberg's personal Holocaust interpretation has satisfied those “Never Again” drumbeaters who want a movie that parcels out sanctimony and guilt. That's the other side of the hegemony Spielberg dangerously plays into when he affects “seriousness” and “realism.” Such naïve Holocaust politics beg to be misconstrued; Schindler's List might have been an even stronger movie if it clarified itself as a version of history rather than a document of the real thing. All those awards showered on the film but not on the man who made it directly show a higher regard for the subject than for the artistry.

But Schindler's List is best experienced as something other than a Holocaust history. Steven Zaillian's script is not nearly as politically sophisticated as the John Milius-Larry Gross outline of genocide and racism in Walter Hill's Geronimo. Zaillian's lucid charting of events—from ghetto mandate to prison transport to Schindler's factory ruse—is substituted for any analysis of class or the dialectic of policy vs. experience that brings a political history to life. Spielberg rivals The Garden of the Finzi-Continis in early scenes that show middle-class Jews shocked into awareness of their third-class status, but the complexity of ethnic oppression is never focused except to be simplified as mundane evil, cut off from social/political design.

Certainly the way Spielberg emphasizes emotion and morality is about as fine as Hollywood has ever managed on this subject. But it has led to some gross, polemical exaggerations. David Denby's claim that “rage brings out [Spielberg's] intelligence” projects the critic's own responses onto the film's political reticence; Schindler's List has nothing like Kurosawa's informed, masterfully tempered anger in Rhapsody in August—a view of WWII critics chose to ignore. Even Swing Kids was politically savvier: director Thomas Carter used the Third Reich era as an analogy to contemporary cultural racism. Swing Kids brought home to the era of hiphop censorship the dilemma of fascism—politics as people commonly perceive and practice it—in terms Schindler's List achieves only once: when Nazi troops storm a Jewish apartment building, ransacking homes while one soldier sits at a piano and delights his comrades with his playing. “Bach? Is it Bach? No, Mozart!” Spielberg slyly mocks the Germanic tradition in that instant—a demonstration of the political uses of art, flirting with post-WWII skepticism without resorting to mere castigation. That brief, brilliant moment touches on the tension between culture and nationalism that is a guiding principle of Spielberg's creative intelligence.

6.

Schindler's List falls into the not-always-artful but often sanctified tradition of Holocaust movies even though Spielberg enhances that tradition by finding a story that is hopeful rather than accusatory and despairing. He returns the “favor” Spike Lee paid in Malcolm X—when the Ku Klux Klan rode off into a bright, full E.T. moon—by emulating Lee's modern-day documentary coda. And as usual, Spielberg does the unexpected. The memorial sequence of Schindler Jews and their offspring laying stones on Schindler's grave carries the moral conviction Lee hoped to get from Nelson Mandela's appearance at the end of Malcolm X. Lee's polemicism failed because he never showed a simple connection between the living Mandela and the dead Malcolm X. However, Schindler's List is very much about the connection between a member of the Nazi party and the European Jews. Victims and victimizers all discovered a spiritual commonality. The European Holocaust was but one of history's atrocities, and Hollywood's dealt with it before. The real-life evidence of gratitude, of love given and returned, testified to in the coda is something new and overwhelming. Spielberg's intuitive dramatization of boundless ecumenical faith, hope, and charity extends, as always, to the way he updates Hollywood genres to meet the most contemporary emotional needs.

Now that Spielberg has played his trump card, it will be interesting to see if critics respect him when he goes back to the subjects he knows best.