the story of Steven Spielberg's controversial film

Steven Spielberg's film addresses a specific episode of the Second World War: the one where an industrialist member of the Nazi party saved more than a thousand Jews from the death camps by hiring them in his factory. “Schindler's List” marked its time, provoking reflections and controversies around the representation of the Holocaust in fiction. Explanations.

What is “Schindler’s List” about?

The film tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist and member of the Nazi party who, during the Second World War, saved more than a thousand Jews from the death camps by having them work in his enamel factory. and ammunition. This ambiguous character, known as a reveler, pleasure-seeker and war profiteer, above all had cheap labor at his disposal. But while “his Jews”, as he called them, and as they called themselves, had to be transferred to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, he used his connections with the notable Nazis whom he financed, squandering his fortune with a lot of bribes, to “buy” his workers and save them from death.

How was the film born?

Schindler's List would probably never have existed if the Australian writer Thomas Keneally had not crossed paths with Leopold Page, whose real name was Poldek Pfefferberg, a Polish Jew who survived the Shoah thanks to Oskar Schindler, who became a travel goods merchant in the United States. When the writer's leather briefcase has just given up the ghost, he gets a new one from Leopold's shop. The two men begin to talk, and the latter tells him the incredible story of Oskar Schindler.

Leopold Pfefferberg, a former factory worker, has in his possession dozens of documents, photos and articles about the man, which he had collected while shadowing producer Martin Gosch. He had indeed managed to convince him to be interested in this story, but the film project had ultimately fallen through. From this meeting and these archival treasures, Thomas Keneally writes a book, Schindler’s Ark (“Schindler’s Ark”), published in 1982, and for which he won the prestigious Booker Prize. It is from this book that Spielberg took the screenplay for his film, Schindler's List.

What do we know about the filming?

The shooting of the film with a budget of 23 million dollars began on February 24, 1993 in Krakow, and lasted until May, while at the same time, the special effects of Jurassic Park were being finalized in Los Angeles. The filming involves 30,000 extras and requires the use of 18,000 costumes.

Steven Spielberg installed the sets for this monumental production a few steps from the camp in the Plaszów district, in a quarry, where the forced labor camp created after the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto in March 1943 was recreated. This is where the SS Amon Goeth, played by Ralph Fiennes in the film, expresses all his sadism, cruelty and madness. Steven Spielberg also filmed scenes near the Auschwitz camp.

How is the film received by the public?

The film was a great public success, bringing in $321 million in revenue worldwide – note that Steven Spielberg refused to receive a salary, which according to him would have been “blood money”. In France, it attracts more than 2.6 million spectators in theaters. When it was broadcast on American television on Sunday February 23, 1997, the film attracted a record audience of 65 million viewers, twice as many people in one evening as when it was released three years earlier on American territory. Schindler's List also received twelve Oscar nominations to win seven, including Best Picture and Best Director.

What controversies surround “Schindler’s List”?

Goodbye Schindler's List, it is, inevitably, to plunge back into the controversy launched by Claude Lanzmann: he published in the edition of Monde of March 3, 1994, at the time of the French release of the film, a paper entitled “Holocaust, the impossible representation”. The director of Shoah (1985) asked in particular: « Comment [Steven Spielberg] can he say what the Holocaust was by telling the story of a German who saved 1,300 Jews, since the overwhelming majority of Jews were not saved? »

The director continues further: “The Holocaust is first of all unique in that it builds around itself, in a circle of flames, the limit not to be crossed because a certain absolute of horror is intransmissible: to claim to do so is to be guilty of the most serious transgression. Fiction is a transgression, I deeply think that there is a prohibition on representation. » The next day, in the columns of FigaroIsraeli historian Tom Segev, agrees: “My biggest criticism is ethical. I think the Holocaust does not need to be dramatized, it is a tragedy in itself and that is enough for us. Any artistic treatment of the Holocaust is thus doomed to failure. Apart from the documentary, I don't see what can be useful and fair. »

Another controversy concerns the representation of the Polish population. Claude Lanzmann's documentary already showed her as complicit or indifferent to the genocide. In Spielberg's film, she is again represented as cruel, notably insulting the Jews when they entered the Krakow ghetto.

Finally, one scene was widely criticized, that of “the shower” and the unbearable uncertainty of this convoy of women (Schindler's workers) wrongly directed towards Auschwitz. They look in terror at the shower heads from which beneficial water will finally come out. Do we have the right to make the gas chambers a source of suspense?

What other fiction films tackle the Holocaust?

Before and after Spielberg, other filmmakers tried their hand at depicting the Holocaust. Starting with Cope, by Gillo Pontecorvo, very harshly received by Jacques Rivette in The Cinema Notebooks, who, in a paper entitled “Abjection”, published in 1961, criticized in particular a choice of staging “The man who decides, at that moment [celui où Emmanuelle Riva se suicide en se jetant sur des barbelés,ndlr], to do a forward tracking shot to reframe the corpse from a low angle, taking care to register the raised hand exactly in one corner of his final framing, this man is entitled to nothing but the deepest contempt. »

Life is beautiful, by Roberto Benigni, Grand Prix at Cannes in 1998, was also recently received by certain titles (not by Telerama). Pour Liberation : « Life is beautiful appears like a film paralyzed by a subject that goes beyond it entirely” ; according to The World : “It is difficult to forgive Benigni for several of his sleight of hand. The director seeks to replace History with memory » ; and finally for The Cinema Notebooks : Life is beautiful is “an innocuous and irrelevant film”. More recently, there was The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski and centered on the life of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a famous Jewish pianist whose music is appreciated by a German officer who helps him survive. The film received the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2002 and was generally acclaimed by critics. And finally, at Cannes in 2015, László Nemes made an impression with his film The Son of Saul, whose camera closely follows a Sonderkommando, convinced of having found his son dying among corpses. The film won the Grand Jury Prize, and was qualified, by Claude Lanzmann himself, d'«anti-Schindler's List.