Ethical Diversions

[jd]

People have the same complaint with City of God, it seems.  There was
another movie... I can't remember the name at all, but apparently it
dealt with the same city and was a lot more gritty and down to earth,
the director gathered kids from the city to be in the movie and it
started with the director standing on a hill above the town...
anyways, that's just a tangent, if anyone happens to know what I'm
talking about, now that I have Netflix I'd love to get the title and
put it in my queue.

However, I was a fan of both Schindler's List and City of God - I can
certainly see where the complaints originate but the aesthetics of the
film for me only contrasted the grittiness of what was really going
on, and rather well at that.  Was the aesthetic not a good counter to,
say, the scene of the boy in who climbed into the outhouse?  The
juxtoposition of beauty onto grit seemed rather powerful in and of
itself, but maybe most viewers don't make that distinction and instead
are drawn into that romanticised version of it.

I think the same can be said of the absurdity of GR mapped onto the
horror that occurred during WWII.  The apparant skin-deep silliness of
the bananas, the octopus fight, dressing up like a pig, laid across
the images of, say, the soldiers dead in the snow clutching their
Miraculous Medals like Dumbo his feather (for me, that's probably the
most powerful scene in the novel).  I'm drawn to it, give a chuckle,
and  then realize what's going on beneath the surface and the fact
that I chuckled just adds to the chill.

On 6/26/06, MalignD at aol.com <MalignD at aol.com> wrote:
> << 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.
>