Claude Lanzmann ("Shoa") about Schindler's List 1994 (1)

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

An older text, but I think still quite interesting. kwp
 
Claude Lanzmann 
Schindler's List is an impossible  story 
I have much respect for Steven Spielberg. I have seen Indiana Jones,  Raiders 
of the lost arc, E.T., Jaws; I love his films. He is a virtuoso, he  knows 
his trade. When I heard about this project, of which I do not know the  history 
of production, I said to myself: Spielberg will see himself confronted  with a 
dilemma. He cannot tell the story about Schindler without also telling  what 
the holocaust has been. But how can he tell what the holocaust was, if he  is 
telling the story of a German who saved 1300 jews, while the overwhelming  
majority of the jews was not saved? Even when he shows the moment of the  
deportation to the Cracau ghetto, or the camp officer shooting at the deported,  how 
can he do justice, even then, to the normality of the procedure of murder,  
the machinery of the extermination? It did not go like that for everyone. In  
Treblinka, or in Auschwitz, the possibility of salvation was inconceivable. 
And does Schindler's List convey, indeed, a deformation of the total  view, 
of the historical truth? Yes, in the measure in which in the film  everybody 
communicates with everybody. The jews communicate all the time with  the 
Germans. In Shoah nobody meets anybody and to me that was an  ethical stand. The 
problem is that Schindler's List is swarming of  ambiguous, and, in the extreme 
case, dangerous scenes, where one should,  instead, have worked with a pair of 
tweezers. When Spielberg shows us jewish  police officers bouncing on doors, 
during razzias, he conveys, without nuance,  without further instructions, the 
idea that the jews have partaken in their own  annihilation. When Spielberg 
shows Schindler demanding money from jews, the  scene takes place in a car, with 
two bearded jews from the 'Judenrat' who  whisper some and then take the money 
out of their pockets and hand it to  Schindler. In this we find the 
stereotype that connects jews with money, bearded  jews with money. 
The whole film is attached to the personal story of Schindler: Schindler and  
women, Schindler and sex, Schindler and money, Schindler who is a gambler of  
sorts. That appeals; it is a bit like Raiders of the lost Arc. Yet,  when you 
see Schindler at work, having diner with German officers or SS-people  to 
implicate them in the story, these figures certainly appear corrupt, but at  the 
same time, they are not wholly unsympathetic in their beautiful uniforms.  
This is, exactly, the problem of the image, of the picture. Nothing of what has  
happened resembled this by far, even where everything has an authentic ring to 
 it. In fact, I fail to see how actors could convey deported people who had  
suffered months, years of agony, misery, humiliation en who died for  fear.
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