Spielberg's Magnum Opus: A Look Back at SCHINDLER'S LIST

                                                         A Director Searching for Meaning
Steven Spielberg was the biggest name in show business.  At age 29, he became Hollywood's resident wunderkind with the highest-grossing film ever (at the time), and the original "blockbuster", JAWS (1975), which was nominated for 4 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.  Just two years later, he earned his first Best Director nomination for another smash hit, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), which was also nominated for 7 other Oscars.  In 1981, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK became his most Oscar-nominated film yet, with 9 nominations including Best Picture and Director, also winning more Academy Awards than any of his films before with 5 and on top of all the critical acclaim, it became one of the highest-grossing films of all time.  Just the next year, for a second time, a Spielberg film became the highest-grossing film of all time; this time it was ET: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL and it was also one of the most critically-acclaimed films of all time and nominated for 9 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Director.  Through the 1980's he made two extremely successful sequels to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, but had begun to wander towards more serious fare as well, such as THE COLOR PURPLE (1985) and EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1987), giving fodder to speculation that Spielberg was on a quest for Oscar gold.  With 3 nominations for Best Picture, and 5 of his films nominated for Best Picture, he still had not yet won, despite his status as Hollywood's golden child, herald of the blockbuster age and the most successful filmmaker of all time.  The problem was that he was too well-liked.  He was a mainstream crowd-pleasing director, which led some to disregard his value as an "artist".  He was merely a very successful showman, a pretender to true importance.  The Academy Awards don't reward great film, specifically.  They reward what they consider a great statement in film, something to lend weight and real-world importance to the medium, and they could not see that in the visceral thrills and special effects of Spielberg's films, in spite of their enviable success. 
A Story Worth Telling
A film about the Schindlerjuden had been in gestation as early as 1963, as Poldek Pfefferberg, one of the real-life Schindlerjuden, sought to see the story of his savior told.  Schindlerjuden refers to the "Schindler Jews", and the "savior" was Oskar Schindler.  Schindler was a German businessman, a member of the Nazi Party, an adulterer, a scoundrel and a war profiteer; in short, a man who began with no scruples, but he eventually became the man who saved the lives of over a thousand Polish-Jewish refugees from the horrors of the Holocaust.  Pfefferberg had arranged to produce a biopic of Schindler for MGM, but the project fell apart.  Almost twenty years later, in 1982, Thomas Keneally, an acquaintance of Pfefferberg's, published the book Schindler's Ark, and MCA Universal almost immediately sought Spielberg to make a film adaptation, and while Spielberg showed interest, he distanced himself from the possibility, considering himself unsuitable for such a mature and important film.  Regardless, Universal bought the film rights, and Spielberg courted other directors to take it up, including Roman Polanski, who had in fact lived through the Holocaust in the Krakow Ghetto and whose mother was among those killed at Auschwitz, but quite understandably, Polanski denied the project due to its personally devastating nature, although he would later direct his own Holocaust drama, THE PIANIST, in 2002.  Eventually, Spielberg convinced Martin Scorcese to come aboard as director in 1988, but passing on the project began to weigh on his conscience, in particular citing a distaste for the rise of Neo-Nazism as the Berlin Wall fell, and Spielberg returned to Scorcese with the 1991 remake of CAPE FEAR in exchange for SCHINDLER'S LIST.  Finally, MCA Universal Studios greenlit SCHINDLER'S LIST with a stipulation that Spielberg make JURASSIC PARK first.
After the extended post-production period for JURASSIC PARK, during which the film's elaborate onset effects were developed and scenes were meticulously storyboarded as was typical of a Spielberg film, shooting began in late August 1992 and was completed by the end of November, at which point Spielberg shifted his attentions toward SCHINDLER'S LIST.
After piecing together a cast and necessary resources, though considerably less than on any film Spielberg had previously made, budgeted at $22 million (a third of JURASSIC PARK's budget), filming began in March 1993, on location in Poland.  During the emotional 71-days long shoot, Spielberg oversaw the post-production progress on JURASSIC PARK, working simultaneously on two films that couldn't be more different.  JURASSIC PARK represented the mainstream, big-budgeted action-adventure synonymous with the Spielberg name, and SCHINDLER'S LIST was everything the critics never felt he would dare.
It was Spielberg unleashed, completely unwrapped and raw.  Gone were all the fancy camera cranes, all the expensive special effects, the big-name casts, even the color.  Although today, despite being unusual, it's not extremely unusual to see an artistic Oscar-contending film shot in black & white, but in 1993, it was just about unheard of.  Production designers and and cinematographers had to go back and relearn all they knew in order to create a timeless look for the b/w epic.  The storyboarding, characteristic of all Spielberg films, was done away with as he opted to shoot the film like a documentary, free-filming the scenes in all their chaos as they played-out onset as if in actuality.  Without concerns for special effects, post-production was minimal, involving editing, scoring and sound mixing.
1993
1993 saw the releases of two Spielberg films.  The first, JURASSIC PARK, opened on June 11 to critical acclaim, breaking the record of Spielberg's E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL to become the new highest-grossing film of all time and forever changed the summer blockbuster Spielberg invented with JAWS by introducing groundbreaking photo-realistic computer-generated animation.  The second was SCHINDLER'S LIST, released six months later on December 15, receiving even greater critical acclaim and forever changing the so-called "Oscar film".  It was nominated for 12 Academy Awards and won 7 (JURASSIC PARK won 3 out of 3 nominations), including Spielberg's long-awaited Best Director and Best Picture.  It became widely-considered one of the greatest films ever made and was listed at the eighth-best film of all time by the American Film Institute.
                                                          One Man's Contemporary Opinion

 SCHINDLER'S LIST is not an easy film to watch (after all, the Academy voters loved it), and you can't afford to only watch half of its 3-hours long running time then break or it'll make you suicidal.  You can only watch it sparingly, but it's an important film to watch every so often.  It is the pinnacle to the career of one of the greatest directors of all time.  To be honest, it's not my personal favorite out of Spielberg's filmography, but it's the kind of film that stands as a prime example of great craftsmanship, the kind that will endure throughout the ages.  I do not mean to imply that it's the kind of film that is admired, but too distant or boring.  Spielberg never forgets that it's a film, not a lesson, and it maintains a strong dramatic grip and even has moments of humor and thrill, if of a different brand, but it does demand commitment and it's an emotional journey you can only handle so often.
The black and white photography brings the mind to that place where we associate the reality of the 1940's with it, and with the handheld footage and documentary style, it feels like being a bystander to actual life, and it brings the actuality of the Holocaust closer to home than ever before.
Inevitably, the film has had detractors and backlash, mostly involving the usual criticism of Spielberg's work, such as melodrama and mainstream appeal.  SCHINDLER'S LIST came to be considered the definitive work of film to address the Holocaust, and several filmmakers and critics, especially documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann who made the 9-hours long Holocaust documentary THE SHOAH (1985), lambasted Spielberg for allegedly turning the Holocaust into a "kitschy melodrama" and detracting from the pain and suffering of the millions killed in Nazi death camps while turning it into a feel-good drama about a relative few saved by a German.  It's important that there be a minority opinion in everything, but as a member of the majority opinion here, I feel like the detractors are missing the point.  Either way, a definitive characteristic of Spielberg as a person and a filmmaker, is humanity, the human race's potential for good in the face of darkness, so doing otherwise would have been dishonest as a filmmaker.  Other filmmakers with personal connections to the Holocaust, including Roman Polanski and Billy Wilder, lavished the film with praise.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the film is the way Ralph Fiennes, as a sadistic S.S. officer, and Ben Kingsley, as a Jewish accountant, act as a metaphorical devil and angel, respectively, upon Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler's shoulders in a subtle battle for his soul.  The characterizations are complex, as are the emotions and motives, while the symbology is surprisingly simple.  It's a film that offers something different to each viewer and throughout the years, new things are taken away with each viewing.  There are many films that attempt to tackle the subject of the Holocaust, and many are worth watching for the varying perspectives, because no one film can contain them all, but SCHINDLER'S LIST is unique for that which Spielberg can do.