It is revision time and today I am going to start reviewing Schindler’s List. As you know the film tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a war profiteer and a member of the Nazi party who saved over 1000 Jews during World War II. The film explores the human capacity for monumental evil as well as for extraordinary courage, caring and compassion. Schindler’s List is able to turn history into a moral lesson. It shows the viewers that the past – no matter how horrifying – must be preserved so that we don’t forget and so that we may judge. Preservation and judgement do not justify the past but reveal its meaning.
Director Steven Spielberg was once asked to choose an image that summarised all his films and he chose the little boy in Close Encounters “opening the door and standing in that beautiful yet awful light, just like fire coming through the doorway.” That “beautiful yet awful light” can be seen as knowledge and it offers both promise and danger. Spielberg in Schindler’s List encourages the viewer to step towards the light – “toward what we don’t understand and what we don’t know about what scares us.”
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