Ethical Diversions

[MalignD at aol.com]

<< Can you point out why it was embarrassing and how it fostered an incorrect 
view of the holocaust?  I have not seen the movie, but I am aware that it is 
considered one of the greatest films of the 90s. Some say it is the greatest 
of all time. >>

Two things:  I don't know anyone who said it was the greatest film of all 
time.  And I didn't say it fostered an incorrect view of the holocaust.

I found it embarrassing because Spielberg, time and again, showed himself 
more interested in the esthetics of his film than in the subject matter.  He's a 
sort of savant, a child; his ability to tell stories in pictures in as good as 
it gets.  But when one is watching the trains of soon-to-die Jews pulling 
into Auschwitz and what is most compelling is the set-up and framing and beauty 
of the shot--then someone's values are askew and that someone is Spielberg.  He 
revealed himself to be clueless as to an approach to the story he was trying 
to tell.  It was the emperor's new clothes and few were going to admit it.  
When the hard choices were made, Spielberg chose filmmaking over history.  He 
likely didn't even recognize them as hard choices.

There are similar examples in Armistad.  There's a scene of slaves being 
thrown overboard to drown where all when can notice is the beauty in the way the 
shot records their bodies landing in the water.  

Shoah, by comparison, was mainly shots of a guy talking, standing in a field 
of overgrown railroad tracks and it was far more powerful and a hundred times 
weightier than Schindler's List.