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As promised here are some links on writing a film review.
How to write a film review (different website)
All of the websites have clearly set out articles which are easy to follow. The information will support the work we have started in class. Remember that there is already lots of information available on this blog (check out the film review category) and on moodle.
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I have added a review of “Schindler’s List” from the BBC as I think it is one that will be useful for the students who are preparing for the Formal Writing assessment.
In the same year, that Steven Spielberg had a huge hit with “Jurassic Park”, he also made his powerful testament to the suffering of the Jewish people during the Second World War, “Schindler’s List”.
It gave him the critical acclaim he wanted with seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director.
Shot in black and white, with the odd carefully chosen touches in colour, the horror of the holocaust is laid bare and speaks for itself. The documentary style allows Spielberg to deliver his message without preaching. The clever use of light and shade also makes it visually stunning. When Oskar Schindler visits a night club, he looks like a 1930s movie star as his cigarette smoke spirals above his head, his eyes hidden in the shade.
It is the story of German businessman Oskar Schindler which captivates right to the end. He is transformed from physically imposing, charismatic philanderer to the humbled man, wishing he had saved more lives.
We watch nervously as he tries to save over a thousand Jews from almost certain death in concentration camps by getting them to work in his factory. He bribes officials and befriends Nazis including evil camp commandant, Goeth, played brilliantly by Ralph Fiennes.
Spielberg has cleverly juxtaposed Goeth and Schindler as two sides of the same coin. They both love the finer things in life, easily swayed by money and women. Playing on this, Schindler tries to show his contemporary that power can be better served by sparing people’s lives rather than taking them. It is an idea that Goeth acknowledges, but is destined not to adhere to for long.
The film finishes on a powerful note in present day with the real Schindler survivors and their descendants visiting his grave. It is the final reminder that this is a true story of one man’s bravery and that in “saving one life, you save the entire world”.
Comments(0) A moving photo essay about Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Those students who studied ‘Schindler’s List’ will know of the awful events that occured there.
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To recap the Schindler’s List seminars from today click on the links below.
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This post is for Year 12. As we have finished our creative writing and presentation preparation it is time to move on to a new activity. Here is advance notice of your next group task. You are to write an essay in a format I will discuss with you in class on one of the following topics.
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This week Year 12 students will start to write longer responses about the film. What should you be writing about? I have put a few ideas below.
The people in the story are the characters. When you first mention them you should give the name of the actor who plays the part, in brackets, after the character’s name, in this way: Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson). You should write about the main characters, commenting on such things as their circumstances and situation, their personality and anything else which engages our sympathy or disapproval. Characterisation refers to what the actor or writer does to establish what the character is like: this means such things as physical actions or gestures, habits of speech or favourite sayings.
The setting is ss important as the human characters in many cases, and often more so, are places where the action occurs both as identifiable locations and for what they represent or the feelings associated with them. In some kinds of film (eg.Westerns) the setting is grand and panoramic while in others (eg. horror films) it may be narrow and claustrophobic.
In Edward Scissorhands Tim Burton depicts a caricature of small-town America, with elements from the 1950s to the 1980s, with identikit manicured lawns and suburban tidiness; but at the end of the town is a Gothic castle, complete with manic inventor - the effect of this juxtaposition (mixing) of details is surreal and unsettling. At the start of the film an Avon lady, doing her rounds, calls at the castle - and this is presented as perfectly normal.
This refers to the “look” of the film and the way this contributes to its total artistic effect. Look at the lighting of particular scenes; look at use of colour; consider camera technique - steadicam or hand-held, long tracking shots, reaction shots and cutaways. Directors sometimes deliberately make films in black and white (e.g. Peter Brooke, Lord of the Flies; Steven Spielberg, Schindler’s List). Why do they do this? Among many films remarkable for their artistic design or cinematography are Ridley Scott’s Alien, Bladerunner and Thelma and Louise; Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands and Sam Mendes’ American Beauty.
Accompanying music is important for the mood of a film. This may be achieved by playing well-chosen popular music, to establish a sense of place and time or evoke nostalgia; or it may be done by original composition. Try to comment on the effect of any musical accompaniment in films you watch.
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I have put a review of Schindler’s List by Scott Renshaw below. The review was written in 1993.
Back in August, I wrote the following: “If Schindler’s List is even halfway decent, Steven Spielberg will be nominated for Best Director, and probably win.” That statement was based on the assumption that such an award would basically be a lifetime achievement recognition, like Al Pacino’s Best Actor win last year, as well as an industry-wide “thank you” for the coat-tails business provided by Jurassic Park. I didn’t expect that if he did win, he would actually deserve it. But with Schindler’s List, Spielberg has crafted a nearly perfect film, a gripping and brilliantly acted epic which is not only the best film of 1993, but probably the best film of the decade thus far.
Schindler’s List is the true story of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), a German businessman and Nazi sympathiser who decides to turn the 1939 invasion of Poland into a personal windfall. Cashing in on carefully established Party contacts, Schindler sets up an enamelware factory in Krakow to make pots and pans for the German army. His start-up capital is provided by wealthy Jews with few other options, among them accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley). Schindler makes a fortune utilising Jewish slave labour, until his business and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews collide with the March 1943 liquidation of the Krakow ghetto, and the subsequent relocation of Jews to Plaszow labour camp. There Schindler establishes a friendship with Commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), and attempts to use his money and influence to save the lives of his workers.
Longtime viewers of Spielberg films will scarcely recognise his hand in Schindler’s List. Gone are the swooping crane shots; gone are the zoom-ins on awestruck faces. With the exception of a risky epilogue, gone too is the cloying manipulation of emotion. This is a mature, restrained Spielberg, and his narrative decisions are right on the money. He casts a glossy sheen on early scenes showing Schindler wining and dining highly placed SS officers, playing up the “panache” which Schindler later describes as his strong suit. Another sequence juxtaposes a wealthy Jewish family leaving their home for the ghetto with a smug Schindler moving into the very same house. One scene after another is expertly staged, too many individual moments to mention but each and every one liable to leave an indelible mark on your memory.
What allows Schindler’s List to work both as fine drama and vivid historical document is screenwriter Steven Zaillian’s decision to make the characters as memorable as the images. Oskar Schindler is a marvelously intricate study, a slimy and self-serving profiteer who finds himself becoming an unlikely saviour before he even realises what he’s doing. Liam Neeson manages both sides of Schindler skillfully, making the transition seamlessly. Ben Kingsley turns in a typically understated performance as Stern, the “good angel” who must walk a delicate line while encouraging Schindler’s magnanimity. The finest performance is also the most disturbing, Ralph Fiennes’ perfectly amoral Amon Goeth. As a creature of pure random destruction, it would have been easy for Goeth to become another stereotypical Nazi, but Fiennes gives him surprising depth and complexity, particularly in a tense scene with his Jewish housekeeper (Embeth Davidtz). All three performances are among the finest of the year, and they give Schindler’s List a personal quality that transcends the subject matter.
There will be some discussion about Spielberg’s use of colour in the depiction of a young girl in a red coat who catches Schindler’s eye. My feeling is that this is part of a larger attempt to make the Holocaust a tragedy of individuals rather than of a faceless mass. Spielberg includes several scenes of SS troops and the Jews themselves announcing their names as they are registered, given work assignments, or separated into “essential” and “non-essential.” In this way, he assaults the viewer both with staggering numbers and with individual lives. There are many disturbing images of arbitrary murder, of death without pattern or meaning, and in the midst of such arbitrariness one act of mercy could mean everything. “The list is life,” Stern tells Schindler when their work is complete, and Schindler’s List is a testimony to the individuals whose lives were changed forever by the Holocaust.
Lest we forget.
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In 1993 Time magazine published an interesting article by Richard Schickel on Schindler’s List. It has lots of interesting and relevant information and it is worth reading the whole thing. Here is an extract:
“… Schindler, a hypnotically ambiguous character - he was a drinker, womaniser, black marketeer and con artist — was operating in a charnel house, he was finally that classically empathetic, inspirational figure, the lone individual doing good in a desperately dangerous context. If you could get an audience to accept that context, you could involve them with a man who, though antiheroic in some of his behaviour, was in his essence a movie hero of quite a familiar, beloved kind. “
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The wiki is shaping up - have a look to see what’s new.
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I have put part of a 1994 interview with Ralph Fiennes in which he discusses elements of his performance as Amon Goeth. You may find it helpful in understanding the representation of Goeth in the film. The interview comes from Entertainment Weekly.
“In Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s masterful contemplation of the Holocaust, the face of evil has gentle eyes and a runny nose, cherubic cheeks and a quiet voice. And though the movie is at heart a story of unlikely heroism, it is that improbable-looking villain, Nazi commandant Amon Goeth, who follows you home after the credits roll and the audience files silently from the theatre. For Goeth could give even Lucifer pause. This was a man who would stand on his balcony, bare-chested and bloated, aiming his rifle at children; a man responsible for the murder of 4,000 Jews his first month as a commander of the Plaszow labour camp.
Like the Holocaust itself, he is unfathomable. Yet in Schindler’s List, Amon Goeth is rendered human by Ralph Fiennes, a heretofore obscure British actor who has emerged from the London fog to become the most talked-about thing in the most talked-about movie of this year’s Oscar race. Reviewers have been fraying their thesauruses to praise him, and so far, Fiennes’ performance has earned him a prize from the New York Film Critics Circle and an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor.
“Spielberg emphasised that he didn’t want any obvious Nazi stuff,” says Fiennes, 31. “I do not want to excuse Goeth, but ultimately he was human… He was a kid in diapers at one point, and he had all this potential to be something, and he went the wrong way. That, to me, is tragic.” Says Schindler’s Embeth Davidtz, who plays Goeth’s battered maid, Helen Hirsch: ” Ralph didn’t make [Goeth] a monster. He found this little boy squashed inside this Nazi overcoat.”
Steven Spielberg was moved to audition Fiennes for the part of Goeth after watching his performances in Wuthering Heights and the ITV production A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia. “I think that Steven saw what I was attempting in Wuthering Heights,” says Fiennes, “a much brutal, very unsympathetic portrait of Heathcliff. I think he probably saw in that elements that could work for Amon Goeth.”
Several weeks in Los Angeles promoting Schindler’s have baked Fiennes’ nose to a bright red, and his fair British skin has turned splotchy. Except for his ice-blue eyes, all those elements of Amon Goeth have melted away - including roughly 25 pounds he gained by way of alcohol, cake, and weight-gain powders. “That seems to be a thing,” says Fiennes. “At some point [every] actor has to put on his weight… I think that having the sense of going to seed, as well as being accurate to Goeth, just felt right. It gave me a whole new sense of how to move. When you carry around a bit of a tummy on you, it just changes you.”
Before and during the shooting in Poland, Fiennes spent months searching for signs of Goeth’s humanity. He watched a documentary interview with Goeth’s former mistress and read Tom Segev’s 1987 study of SS officers, Soldiers of Evil, which included details of Goeth’s privileged but neglected childhood. His inhumanity, however, was easier to find; one of the Schindler Jews who had worked as Goeth’s secretary at Krakow recalled that Goeth once nonchalantly interrupted his dictation of a get-well note to his father to shoot a prisoner from his window. “It may sound glib,” says Fiennes, “but I think the killing of human beings that capriciously is like the [grown-up] version of the little boy with the air rifle who is blasting at sparrows or smashing wasps with a fly swatter. And obviously, it was something that turned him on.”
It is, in fact, Fiennes’ dark and unexpected sensuality that ignites many of his scenes. “I think he’s sexy [in the film],” says Davidtz, who had to soothe her face with ice after the beatings she took during their brutal scenes together. “There’s something about anyone in conflict that’s exciting.”
