Word: schindlers
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...Spielberg told the cast, "we're not making a film, we're making a document." Documents, of course, are printed in black and white, and so is Schindler's List. To Spielberg, these are the colors of reality. They may also be part of an effort to find the cinematic equivalent to the style of Keneally's 1982 novel, which is marvelously understated -- the only way to go, really, when your subject is so overwhelming that all but the simplest words are bound to fail...
Spielberg strove for a similar artlessness with his camera. The film was made on location in Cracow, using the actual factory Schindler operated, even the apartment he once inhabited. The scenes in which the Jews are forced into the ghetto or endure the torments of camp life are shot documentary style, with hand-held cameras. As Spielberg says: "I didn't want to direct off a Cecil B. DeMille crane. I wanted to do more CNN reporting with a camera I could hold in my hand." To enhance this effect, he eschewed storyboards for only the third time...
...Kingsley, who plays Itzhak Stern, the Jewish accountant who both cooked the books for Schindler's lifesaving scams and served as guide to his conscience, was astonished at Spielberg's nerve: "I didn't think he would have the courage and the panache and the command to fill an area of five blocks, a big area of action where you are receiving information from what's happening in the foreground, in the midground and also in your peripheral vision." But these are among the greatest sequences of chaos and mass terror ever filmed...
...contrast, the scenes in which Schindler befriends the German command, the better to suborn them with bribes and favors, first to advance his own interests, later to protect his workers, are filmed in the high formal style of the 1930s and '40s. The style is as cool and calculated as Schindler himself, played with a kind of impenetrable bonhomie by Liam Neeson. The work here comes close to satirizing the antique conventions of espionage dramas...
...function is also to set the stage for the savagery of Schindler's dark double and most dangerous antagonist, Amon Goeth, commandant of the nearby labor camp, played by Ralph Fiennes in the film's most compelling performance. A man of Schindler's own age and background, he likes to sit on the balcony of his house idly shooting prisoners who happen to wander into his gunsight. He keeps as a servant a Jewish woman named Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz), whom he constantly beats and humiliates precisely because against all dictates of ideology, he loves her. The point about this...