Schindler's List

Confounding every expectation, Schindler's List is a painful triumph, accomplished unabashedly in the rhetoric of classical narrative cinema. It privileges one of the earliest functions of the photographic image - memorializing the dead against the erosions of memory. Here, the deceased constitute nearly the entire Eastern European diaspora. Against the native tide of forgetfulness, against the vile insinuations of recent anti-Semitic Holocaust “revisionists,” Spielberg has undertaken to illuminate the Jews’ dreadful passage at the crucial moment of history when their surviving remnant is dying out.

And yet that undertaking is beset with difficulties and contradictions. An interchange that occurs at a crucial juncture in the film captures some of the difficulties: The gentile Schindler, attempting to convince the Jew Stern that he will save his life even if his friend is sent to Auschwitz, is confronted by Stern's obdurate skepticism; out of patience, Schindler complains, “Do I have to invent a whole new language for you?” “I think so …” replies the Jew in one of his formidable dry understatements. Their exchange crystallizes a dilemma perenially confronting efforts to portray the Holocaust: whether a language (either verbal or visual) can or should be created to imagine the unimaginable. Some deem the task impossible, or sacriligious; others believe it to be as vital to the sacred mission of remembrance as the trial of war criminals.

Pictures from the camps - skeletal corpses tumbled into lime pits, shards of charred bone spilled across crematory floors - possess a unique, if flawed, authority. The grisly antecendent events, the manner and agents of death are mainly to be found in verbal, not visual testimony, except for the very limited photography inmates themselves were able to smuggle out, and the even smaller quantity of film and stills infamously shot by SS personnel against official policy for their private enjoyment.

Licit SS camp photos exhibited Potemkin-vil