A cynic might say that in making Schindler’s List, a film about an opportunistic businessman who used his factory to shelter Polish Jews from extermination in the second world war, Steven Spielberg, that undisputed master of commercial uplift, has somehow managed to find the silver lining in the darkest cloud of the 20th century. And the cynic would be right to a point: Spielberg does seek to eke out whatever humanity he can find from this scenario, even if that humanity is suppressed by arrogance and self-loathing.
But don’t miss how dark he makes the cloud. Thirty years later, it remains astonishing how Spielberg, perhaps the only film-maker Hollywood would ever agree to bankroll for a film about the Holocaust, sought to depict both grand and casual atrocities with unblinking directness, muted only slightly by Janusz Kamiński’s black-and-white photography. Here was a master of misdirection and offscreen space – a man made famous for not showing a shark for most of a killer shark movie – making the horrors of the Kraków ghetto and the Płaszów concentration camp as unvarnished as possible. We see Jews arbitrarily shot in the streets. We see bodies shuffled first into humiliating medical evaluations and later into gas chambers. We see parents screaming as their children are driven away in trucks, waving as if they’re on a field trip from which they’ll never return.
