It is tempting to think of Steven Spielberg's magnificent but flawed Schindler's List as the triumphant culmination of his more serious films. His adaptation of Thomas Keneally's novel Schindler's Ark (1982, published in America as Schindler's List) is, in these terms, merely the same type of work he made of Alice Walker's The Color Purple and J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, only at a higher level. But it would belittle Schindler's List to regard it in this way. Over more than a decade, Spielberg has thought a great deal about, and taken first-class advice on, the making of this film. He has, moreover, learnt some of the important lessons from the essential memoirs of Auschwitz-Birkenau death-camp (especially those of Primo Levi) and, more audaciously, he has attempted to incorporate the best cinematic account of the Holocaust, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, into his own rendering. This, then, is much more than just a “serious” Hollywood film.

If Schindler's List is flawed, that is primarily a consequence of relying too heavily on Keneally's “novel”. Keneally's Schindler's Ark glibly assimilates an unimaginable past in a breathtakingly untroubled manner. One need only contrast this with the many moments of pained hesitancy in Levi's writing—when either his memory fails him or he suddenly distrusts his ability as a wordsmith to re-create his own history—to gauge the gulf between Keneally and Levi. Spielberg cannot possibly bridge this divide, although he has taken on board Levi's distinction in Moments of Reprieve (1986) between creating stories in “heightened” colour as opposed to unembellished “accounts”. Levi felt that he needed to be a “story-teller”, so that his words lived on the page, but this task was always in agonized tension with the absolute necessity of justly “accounting” for those who could no longer speak for themselves. Spielberg has, up until now, been a colourful “story-teller”, yet he has attempted in Schindler's List to produce a quasi-documentary monochromatic “account”.

More than in any other popular film, Spielberg in Schindler's List has struggled to turn into images that which was thought to be unrepresentable. We see, re-created, the kind of dwarfish cubbyholes that families—and especially children—were forced to use in the ghettos and camps to prevent them from being rounded up for the cattle trucks. We see them scurrying into pre-prepared hiding places in false walls and floors, pianos, cupboards, even latrines and sewers. The detail is staggering, but it is also reminiscent of similar scenes in E.T. or Jurassic Park. Since completing Schindler's List, Spielberg has spoken a great deal about the kind of adolescent anti-Semitic bullying that he suffered until his late teenage years. As his films are obsessed with people (often children) leaving comfortable homes only to encounter strange, incomprehensible forces, then it is possible to read Spielberg's biography back into his more accomplished popular movies such as Duel or Jaws. Such is the split in Schindler's List between Spielberg's autobiographical drive—which results in his remaking his own preoccupations in a multitude of forms—and his restrained impersonal “account”.

On one level, of course, Spielberg already has a compelling story in the figure of Oskar Schindler, a womanizing Sudeten German industrialist, who saved over 1,100 Jews from the gas chambers of Auschwitz who were on his “list” as a specialist workforce. Beginning with an enamel-ware factory in Krakow, staffed by local Jews, Schindler ended up in October 1944 relocating his workforce to a bogus armaments factory in Brinnlitz on the Polish-Czechoslovakian border. Keneally's fictionalization of Schindler's prodigious act of bravery—which included a visit to Auschwitz to release 300 women and children—provides both the inspiration and much of the story-line for Spielberg's film. Where the film improves on Keneally, however, is that it questions the unspoken and unquestioned arrogance in Keneally's “story”: that it can facilely remake the most intimate thoughts and horrific details of history. Schindler's List fails only when it, too, becomes a seductive and self-confident narrative at the cost of any real understanding of the difficulties inherent in representing the ineffable.

Not that Schindler's List surrenders entirely to this arrogance, and Steven Zaillian's shrewd screenplay is, as a result, a much greater achievement than the novel. Much of the film makes outstanding use of hand-held cameras, and Janusz Kaminski's largely impeccable cinematography goes so far as to triumphantly reproduce the Podgorze Ghetto in Krakow, the slave-labour camp in Plaszow, and, astonishingly, even Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Only the great Polish filmmaker Andrej Wajda, whom Spielberg consulted, has come close to this kind of cinematic reconstruction. Never before has the full panorama of genocide been given such a didactic yet popular form. That the ghettoization of the Jews in Krakow led to their enslavement in Plaszow, and their inevitable death in Auschwitz-Birkenau, is astonishingly illustrated in all its bureaucratic horror. Schindler's hastily typewritten “list” of the saved (drawn up with his accountant Itzhak Stern) is rightly seen to be only a part of a much larger “list”, typed up just as arbitrarily, of those condemned to die.

Much of the pre-publicity for Schindler's List has emphasized the extent to which Spielberg chose to film, where possible, in Poland. Krakow was left virtually undamaged during the war, and so Spielberg was able to forego his Hollywood studios and instead have as his backdrop the actual landscape of suffering. Schindler's List, to be sure, does have a genuine European feel to it, not least because nearly all of its impeccable cast of actors are non-American. In a further bid at authenticity, many of the actors are the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors or local Poles whose parents witnessed, to some degree, the events of the film. But this deliberate blurring of the borders between cinema and history generates a good deal of unease in the film. On the one hand, the film is framed by brief opening and concluding contemporary scenes, in colour, which undermine its over-riding claims to documentary truth. Schindler's List is, after all, not merely a film within a film, but it is also based on a version of a story within a story. Many elements of the film's visually authoritative interpretation of history have, significantly, been challenged by Schindler's understandably embittered widow, Emilie (whose story has not yet been told). Such interventions help us realize that the events of the film are not always quite as straightforward as either Spielberg or Keneally would have us believe.

The unresolved tension between this film's flawed sense of its own limitations and its all too evident powers of lavish historical reconstruction takes many forms. Spielberg (interestingly, for a seemingly neutral rendering) is not unselfconscious about his debt to other films and filmmakers. For example, in the switch from the opening scene to the film proper, present-day sabbath candles are transformed into the smoke of a 1940s railway engine; this key image, moving from God-given redemption to mankind's degeneration, is reminiscent of David Lean. More importantly, the opening ghost-like disappearance of the Jewish family who leave a set of empty chairs—which shrewdly become the absence addressed by the rest of the film—is the first of a number of notable references to Lanzmann's Shoah. If Levi's matchless humility is the yardstick for written accounts of the Holocaust, then Shoah is the cinema's equivalent of Levi's memoirs. And any serious cinematic account of the Holocaust which ignores Lanzmann does so at considerable peril.

At just over three hours long, Schindler's List is a mere third of the length of Lanzmann's unsurpassed documentary based on eye-witness accounts. Above all, and this is a substantial achievement, Schindler's List is a self-conscious and popular rejoinder to those who, like Lanzmann, emphasize the absolute impossibility of finding appropriate images to represent the past. In Shoah, an elderly Polish peasant shows how, as a boy, he used to slice his hand across his throat when the cattle-trucks passed through his village to indicate that those inside were heading to their deaths. In Schindler's List, a child actor imitates this scene, and we witness it once again through the eyes of those in the cattle-trucks.

But who is to say whether the privacy of unspeakable memory or its public expression in words and images is to be encouraged? Whereas Shoah is intellectually scrupulous and does not try to represent history in a facile series of cinematic tropes, Schindler's List attempts to give virtually every aspect of the apparatus of genocide a cinematic equivalent for consumption by a mass audience.

But even Spielberg, at times, is forced to recognize the limits of what can and cannot be achieved on the screen. In one of the most telling episodes of the film, the 300 women and children supposedly destined for Schindler's Brinnlitz haven find themselves mistakenly diverted to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They are brought to a delousing bath-house and made to take a shower. Like the women in the film, we are not sure if they are being locked into a real shower or not. Spielberg dwells a good deal over this scene, and the audience is horrified less by the actual events than by the thought that absolutely nothing is going to be left unshown in this film. Such is the fragility of Schindler's List that it is hard to tell whether this is a moment of welcome self-consciousness, or the limit of an overweening appetite. In the end, mere water flows from the shower-heads, and we remember Schindler himself dousing the cattle-trucks with hosed water in Plaszow (much to the amusement of the watching SS dignitaries) and the sensible Stern melting ice into water as he journeys in a cattle-truck with Schindler's men to Brinnlitz. Thankfully, such redemptive or baptismal images are few and far between in the film—although they dominate the ending with, to say the least, unfortunate consequences.

To be fair, Spielberg undoubtedly avoids the worst excesses of all other Hollywood versions of the Holocaust. Much potential crassness is eschewed by the welcome lack of individualization of the mass of Jews in the film. In a virtuoso exception to this rule, Spielberg, just for a few moments, gives a young girl in the Krakow ghetto a red dress, to indescribable effect. At its best, Schindler's List manages to tell a dozen horrendous stories with very little descriptive baggage. This fails only when there are set-piece scenes and individuals become representative types, or when Schindler is feebly psychologized (he's competing with his father). On a few occasions, the ensemble acting becomes a little sentimental and unreal. Only then are we reminded that everyone is slightly too cheerful and healthy-looking in this film and that not even women would be quite so helpful to each other when starving to death.

None the less, for the most part, Schindler's List is a triumph of architectonics and its three central characters, Schindler (Liam Neeson). Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) and Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) are superb. The tension between the story of Schindler's enigmatic compassion and the wider mechanics of genocide is judiciously held in balance. Much of the strength of the film also derives from its impeccable pace. From the leisurely opening scenes in occupied Krakow—where Schindler is indistinguishable from the SS men in the night club—to the brutally frantic liquidation of the ghetto, the main characters are deftly woven into and out of the broader topography of death.

Neeson's Schindler is just the right combination of inscrutability and ebullience. He begins as a potential Nazi (with an over-sized and ever-present Swastika on his lapel), and ends the film bundled into a car dressed in concentration-camp stripes. That neither the book nor the film can fathom this extraordinary journey is precisely what makes his story so compelling. Schindler throughout is a tabula rasa on which both the potential for good and for evil can be inscribed. For this reason, he is not always the central focus of the film. When Amon Goeth, the homicidal commandant of Plaszow concentration camp, appears, about half-way through the film, there is a subtle shift of emphasis away from Schindler. This is largely because Spielberg follows Keneally a little too closely in thinking of Goeth, who is gloriously played by Ralph Fiennes, as Schindler's dark double. Goeth and Schindler are both womanizers and drunkards, both ride horses and, in their different ways, have the lives of Jews in their hands. They are also meant to have a similar physique, which is emphasized in the film by camera angles which, ambiguously could refer to either of them. The problem with this interpretation of Schindler, however, is that the more the depths of Goeth's evil become apparent, the more Schindler is transformed into his benign counterpart. By the end of the film, Schindler, in response to Goeth, is in danger of becoming something of a Christ-figure (even to the extent of giving a final crypto-Sermon on the Mount in Brinnlitz).

Schindler's sentimental deification results in Goeth re-emerging as the sort of post-Vietnam degenerate who would not have been out of place in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (based on Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”). Goeth is Kurtz-like precisely because he is a cultured beast who once, presumably, acted like a Schindler. This inevitable shift from the victims to the perpetrators of genocide takes place on a number of levels in the film. One key dimension is the horrific and stunning use of music. At the end of the unforgettable liquidation of Krakow, an SS officer begins to play “either Mozart or Bach” in a deserted Jewish house. We not only have George Steiner's essays encapsulated in this moment but, at the same time, a reference to the kind of post-Vietnam decadence (which also took a musical form) depicted so memorably in Apocalypse Now. The authentic re-creation of Oskar Schindler is, in these episodes, forgotten or, more accurately, transfigured into something else.

By the end, Schindler's List veers dizzily between crass sentimentality in a tearful scene with Stern and its more usual self-conscious restraint. At its worst, the Schindlerjuden descend from on high to the Promised Land as if they were the cast of The Sound of Music. But this penultimate scene (taken ham-fistedly from Wajda's Korczak) is contrasted in the last frames of the film with a poised encounter with actual Schindlerjuden, which echoes Shoah. The gulf between the unbridgable loss of history and what we see on the screen once again takes precedence as the impossibility of fully ending any account of the Holocaust is skillfully realized. A film that can encompass such a massive range of possibilities is clearly a magnificent, if frustrating, accomplishment. That it is, unquestionably, the best film on this subject within its particular set of conventions is the measure of Spielberg's outstanding achievement.