One of my personal favourites, Schindler's List is a 1993 American epic historical period drama film, directed and co-produced by Steven Spielberg and scripted by Steven Zaillian. It is based on the novel 'Schindler's Ark' by Thomas Keneally, an Australian novelist. The film is based on the life of Oskar Schindler, an ethnic German businessman who saved the lives of more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. It stars Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as Schutzstaffel (SS) officer Amon Goeth, and Ben Kingsley (who has a knack for acting in award-winning films) as Schindler's Jewish accountant, Itzhak Stern. The movie received 12 nominations, and won a staggering amount of 7 Oscars, and various other awards. The movie was rated 8.9/10 on IMDB and a crazy-high 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.
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| Hail |
Plot :
In Kraków during World War II, the Germans had forced local Polish Jews into the overcrowded Kraków Ghetto. Oskar Schindler, an ethnic German, arrives in the city hoping to make his fortune. A member of the Nazi Party, Schindler lavishes bribes on Wehrmacht (German armed forces) and SS officials and acquires a factory to produce enamelware. To help him run the business, Schindler enlists the aid of Itzhak Stern, a local Jewish official who has contacts with black marketeers and the Jewish business community. Stern helps Schindler arrange loans to finance the factory. Schindler maintains friendly relations with the Nazis and enjoys wealth and status as "Herr Direktor", and Stern handles administration. Schindler hires Jewish workers because they cost less, while Stern ensures that as many people as possible are deemed essential to the German war effort, which saves them from being transported to concentration camps or killed. SS-Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) Amon Goeth arrives in Kraków to oversee construction of Płaszów concentration camp. When the camp is completed, he orders the ghetto liquidated. Many people are shot and killed in the process of emptying the ghetto. Schindler witnesses the massacre and is profoundly affected. He particularly notices a tiny girl in a red coat – one of the few splashes of color in the black-and-white film – as she hides from the Nazis, and later sees her body (identifiable by the red coat) among those on a wagonload being taken away to be burned. Schindler is careful to maintain his friendship with Goeth and, through bribery and lavish gifts, continues to enjoy SS support. Goeth brutally mistreats his maid and randomly shoots people from the balcony of his villa, and the prisoners are in constant daily fear for their lives. As time passes, Schindler's focus shifts from making money to trying to save as many lives as possible. He bribes Goeth into allowing him to build a sub-camp for his workers so that he can better protect them. As the Germans begin to lose the war, Goeth is ordered to ship the remaining Jews at Płaszów to Auschwitz concentration camp. Schindler asks Goeth to allow him to move his workers to a new munitions factory he plans to build in his home town of Zwittau-Brinnlitz. Goeth agrees, but charges a huge bribe. Schindler and Stern create "Schindler's List" – a list of people to be transferred to Brinnlitz and thus saved from transport to Auschwitz. The train carrying women and children is accidentally redirected to Auschwitz-Birkenau; Schindler bribes Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz with a bag of diamonds to win their release. At the new factory, Schindler forbids the SS guards to enter the production rooms and encourages the Jews to observe the Jewish Sabbath. To keep his workers alive, he spends much of his fortune bribing Nazi officials and buying shell casings from other companies; his factory does not produce any usable armaments during its seven months of operation. Schindler runs out of money in 1945, just as Germany surrenders, ending the war in Europe. As a Nazi Party member and war profiteer, Schindler must flee the advancing Red Army to avoid capture. The SS guards have been ordered to kill the Jews, but Schindler persuades them not to so they can "return to their families as men, not murderers." He bids farewell to his workers and prepares to head west, hoping to surrender to the Americans. The workers give Schindler a signed statement attesting to his role saving Jewish lives, together with a ring engraved with a Talmudic quotation: "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." Schindler is touched but is also deeply ashamed, as he feels he should have done even more. As the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews) wake up the next morning, a Soviet soldier announces that they have been liberated. The Jews leave the factory and walk to a nearby town. Following scenes depicting Goeth's execution after the war and a summary of Schindler's later life, the black-and-white frame changes to a color shot of actual Schindlerjuden at Schindler's grave in Jerusalem. Accompanied by the actors who portrayed them, the Schindlerjuden place stones on the grave.
Analysis & Reflection :
To survive in Nazi Germany as a Jew, you needed intelligence, skills, a healthy body and most of all, luck, which in the context of the movie meant working for Oskar. The shot of the camps where they had gassed the “unfit” Jews reminded me of Frankl’s experience, in which even he was lucky enough to escape death at the beginning of his slave days. In his (Frankl) book, 'Man's Search for Meaning', he told of his experiences and was very lucky indeed to have survived the whole ordeal, partly due to his will and purpose of living, something that was difficult to find in tragic times as he was in, at the Auschwitz camp. After reading the entire book a few months ago, I decided that since Frankl could survive the whole experience during his time at the Auschwitz concentration camp (with the lowest amount of hope that anyone could ever have but yet , he still found meaning in living), as could I, with my everyday life problems, which can be considered minute compared to Frankl's problems at the time.
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| No Wifi?!? And you think you've got problems? |
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| The Lady in Red |
In the photo above is one of the few scenes in the movie with actual color in it apart from the constant black and white. To me, it signified the change in Schindler’s conscience that made him do what he did throughout the movie. what was truly captivating to me is that the director used that moment to highlight that little girls movement in a crowd of cruelty and uncertainty, which somehow indicated that everything that was transpiring around the little girl did not faze her and change her innocence, or that even the innocent were not spared.
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| Where Am I |
Schindler’s list is nothing short of a brilliant movie. It showed the views of various different people within and outside the camps, namely that there were some sympathizers in some group of Germans, whereas some merely relished in their glory and power as others suffered. The levels of hatred we saw in the Germans towards the Jews were unreal, as if that they had had millenia of disgust, disagreements, and rage towards them. Some scenes even showed German children throwing dirt at adult Jews showed the effect that had been passed down from their own parents (nature or nurture, it's their parent's fault). Watching the movie now just makes it seem so much more unreal as the thought of such slave labor and mass killing is just too much for the generation of today to even think about. The question that arose from watching the movie is "what truly made the Nazi soldiers treat the Jews in such a way that remorse was rarely ever seen on their face, if any?" The relationship between the Jews and the Nazi militants reminded me of Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment. Despite criticisms on his part, it would seem that when explaining situations of such, his research still holds possibly the best value in which we can study to look for concrete answers. This is due to the experiment possibly being able to indicate the Germans at the time only hated the Jews because they were told to do so (as seen by a scene where Schindler was reprimanded for kissing a Jewish girl at his birthday party).
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| "Mate, you can't do that, it's against the law" |
Conclusion :
All in all a fantastic movie, it makes you ponder on the capabilities of us humans to do both great and destructive things to our fellow man. As we possess the ability to do good, do we also possess the ability to do evil. This film about the Holocaust gives us a glimpse of what the Jews once suffered through, and serves as a painful reminder of tragic history, and the dark side of mankind. That being said, the movies created about the subject matter should be as accurate as can be, as although the depictions were wrong then, and is wrong now, but they should be depicted exactly as they were when it happened, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming that these tragic occurrences never happened.
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| You PARDON them |
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| Oh what a movie |
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| Like this class :'( |
Rating : 9/10
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