The 1994 Academy Awards
The Piano, The Remains of the Day, The Fugitive and In the Name of the Father are all excellent films, and each could confidently be held forth as examples of what surpassing art can be accomplished under its particular mode of production. As good as they are, however, the 1994 Oscars belonged to Schindler's List, the strongest mortal lock on Best Picture since ... well, ever, maybe.
I haven't seen the film since it was in theaters, where I saw it at least twice, and so while my memory may not offer me full command of the film, it compensates by being unable to forget so much of it, a magic lantern show of horrific images I don't need to share because I'm sure you have your own. What I remember most strongly, however, was that my instinctive reaction to the film, back in the day, was that it was above criticism. Sitting down today to write this, I hit the same block, and it's mildly terrifying because I know what I think about films that position themselves above criticism, and that's not what I want to think about Schindler's List. But the fact that there are things "I want to think" about the movie only compounds that mild terror, because that makes the film seem almost thuggish.
Except — deep breath — isn't the film almost thuggish?
Isn't it? The whole point of art is to provoke and manipulate — there's no value to something with no effect — and Schindler's List is a gilded truncheon. Think about everything in the movie that doesn't pertain directly to Oskar Schindler's conversion, his awakening. That's where the powerful stuff, all the suffocating Holocaust imagery, is, and it could be appended onto any story besides Schindler's to the same crushing effect. Which isn't to say that the film doesn't marvelously integrate all its elements, or that the movie's worst moments are bald attempts to get some kind of rise out of you.
Except — deep breath — well, they are. If, through meticulous re-creation or a reasonable fascimile thereof, director Steven Spielberg can make us feel like we're watching the Holocaust itself, and make it terrible, it's like a cartoon boxing-glove sucker punch coming straight out of the screen. We're so wired into our movies that something this powerful is practically an IV straight into our vena cava. By marrying Spielberg's unarguable skills as a filmmaker to this Holocaust recreation, and by marrying that to a complicated-yet-simple redemption tale that provides at least a candlelight at the end of its tunnel so that audiences don't stumble out of the theater absolutely demolished … well, like I said. A mortal lock on Best Picture.
But an Oscar is a mean prize compared to what Schindler's List received: canonization. Sanctification. Legions of people swearing up and down that the movie should be mandatory viewing for schoolchildren. The locus of inconceivable quantities of Holocaust awareness activity.
And there's no question about the absolutely slavish immersion in both art and craft that was necessary to make the Holocaust seem so real to so many, but it's that very truth that gives critic Tom Carson his heaviest arsenal for a compelling Esquire article he wrote about Spielberg and Saving Private Ryan:
While I don't think he's a hypocrite, that's mainly because hypocrisy requires some forethought; for all his gifts, Spielberg is less reflective than almost any movie director of his caliber. Now that he's decided to be mature, he's making the witlessly earnest mistake of equating artistic seriousness with momentous topics — the Holocaust, slavery, and now the "good war." But all he can think of to say about them is to state the obvious smashingly — working us over with his full panoply of techniques for inducing excitement and going for primordial effects while remaining oblivious to their implications.
It's underselling to consider Spielberg "oblivious" to what he's done with these films, but to say that he "state(s) the obvious smashingly" cuts pretty close to the bone.
Perhaps it took not seeing the movie for seven years for me to come to a point where I could say such things about it; I feel certain seeing it again would fully put me back into its thrall. It is a considerable achievement in film, and worth celebrating; besides, perhaps the obvious, smashingly, is as close as we want Hollywood to the Holocaust.
— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)
