Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 25, 1994 TAG: 9401250140
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cody Lowe
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Testimony of the Holocaust always seems to create around itself a buffering envelope of silence.
I've felt it at symposia where survivors described their ordeals, at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, in the reading of the names of those who didn't survive.
Silence was evoked again last Friday at the Roanoke Valley's first showing of the Steven Spielberg movie "Schindler's List."
The stillness originates from a range of our emotions:
Horror, from the realization that human beings could be capable of such things.
Fear, that it could happen again - indeed, is happening to other people in other places today.
Disgust, for those who carried out such atrocities.
Respect, for those who managed by ingenuity or luck to survive.
Pity, for the victims.
Confusion, about good people who didn't do more to stop the evil.
"Schindler's List," you may know by now, is about a "good German" - a member of the Nazi Party _ who uses his personal wealth and influence to save more than 1,000 Jews from the certain death of Auschwitz-Berkenau.
Though this is a brilliantly executed movie, it is the story more than the cinematic art that compels us to watch. It makes us hold our breath or sigh or even, ever so softly, moan.
Make no mistake, Spielberg has done a wonderful job putting this story on film. The narrative flow is smoother than Thomas Keneally's novel. Spielberg's use of gritty, black-and-white photography, often with a hand-held camera, gives the movie a documentary feel. The actors are eminently believable. Sequences depicting the brutal murders of Jews are as grippingly and sickeningly realistic as captured Nazi film that recorded the actual events.
"Schindler's List" has a convincing authenticity.
It's the kind of authenticity that forces us to be silent and listen.
At the same time, it's the kind of authenticity that some young viewers in California had become so used to seeing in bloody action pictures that they laughed when they saw it. It was unreal in its reality. Many of the students, doutless, didn't have a clue as to why they were asked to leave.
After seeing the film, I wondered whether those students' reaction was a clue that this kind of movie, well-intentioned as it is, cannot possibly have the kind of impact Spielberg - or I - hope for.
It was 12 years ago that Spielberg gave us his first movie Nazis in "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Those kinds of Nazis - bad buffoons who exploded when faced with the reality of "ultimate good" - the California teen-agers could deal with.
In the end of that movie, the Nazis who had dared to steal and defile the Ark of the Covenant were blasted with lances of fire that scorched away their hearts and their eyes. The fiery finger of God even zeroed in on the eye of the documentary cameras the Nazis had set up to record their desecration of the Jewish treasure.
In "Schindler's List," Spielberg attempts to have us face those Nazis differently - with the kind of pictures a documentary camera would have recorded.
But it is still a movie. It may be art, it may be social commentary, but it also must be entertainment - a condition that, generally, means history must give way to the demands of the medium through which the tale is told.
Spielberg generally was faithful to a real-life representation of Oskar Schindler as a flawed hero, but his version glosses over some facets of Schindler's character that are less than appealing. This drama demanded that the hero be "heroic."
There are other problems in the movie. Schindler's attempts to protect "my Jews" sometimes seem too easily accomplished. The reality of the harsh conditions under which those Jews lived even while working for Schindler isn't shown.
The film's flaws are few, however, and I'd like to believe that it will serve as memorial and inspiration, even if it is not in a strict sense history.
Stories of the few people like Schindler have a peculiar hold on the imaginations of Jews and non-Jews alike.
They are beacons of hope in the blinding whirlwind of history. They are reminders that individuals can change the courses of history - can stand up to evil and outwit the devil - if the need arises again.
I hope those kids who were turned out of the California theater will get another chance to hear that lesson.
Cody Lowe reports on issues of religion and ethics for this newspaper.
by CNB