Word: spielbergisms
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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...
...same time, Spielberg says, "this movie didn't need my strengths as a storyteller because the story's already been told." Here he is being too modest. It was surely the screen storyteller in him who responded to the compelling narrative strength of Thomas Keneally's novelized life of a German- Czech named Oskar Schindler, who came to Poland to make money out of its - occupation by the Nazis and stayed to preserve 1,100 Jews -- workers in the enamelware factory he established -- from the death camps...
Finally, that storyteller, a master of movie technique, must have sensed in this tale elements that would bring out the best in him. Spielberg has always been a man who likes to work on big, crowded canvases, but he has never challenged his skills with a subject so dense and dark as this one, never used them with more tact or to better dramatic and emotional effect. There is a kind of morality -- a respect for one's tools and materials and for the intelligence of the beholder's eye -- in the craftsmanship he has deployed. It serves the interests...
...process energized Spielberg, who "felt liberated for the first time in my career." He was finally realizing a dream he first entertained more than a decade ago and delayed while awaiting both the script he wanted (it was provided by Steven Zaillian, writer-director of Searching for Bobby Fischer) and the maturity in himself he felt he needed. Onlookers say he never sat down, never retreated to his trailer, and that he one day made an astonishing 51 setups. Yet always he moved in an aura of "austere calm . . . a man at peace with himself," in the words...