The lost world

Rating: Null/10 (27 October 1999)

The critic Terrence Rafferty put it best: SCHINDLER'S LIST has a primal emotional power that hasn't been felt since silent film.

Those who prefer the post-structuralist beard-scratching of Claude Lanzmann's unbearable SHOAH to this movie are denying the potency of great populist art. Like Dickens and Griffith, Spielberg uses melodramatic techniques to make ideas palpable to a mass audience. In America at least, public perception of the Holocaust will be forever changed. You can carp that the audience's experience is synthetic, Disneyish, but is a fictional re-experiencing of these events worse than an abstract and remote noodling over them? Is it worse to represent the Holocaust in fiction than to leave it as a concept--and, as history bears out, a deniable one?
As a work of filmmaking, it ranks with the greatest. In LIST, Spielberg arrives at a point--shoulder to shoulder with Scorsese --as the most dexterous and gifted of filmmakers working today. Scene after scene displays an offhand, unplanned-feeling mastery of the medium that staggers the imagination in its power. The cumulative effect--as in the best of Spielberg's earlier work--is of a long and sustained, almost unbearable cry of loss. Intellectuals have come to so despise Steven Spielberg, the mogul of Century City, that they have become blind to Spielberg the craftsman and artist. (Spielberg's smarm while receiving his first Academy Award didn't help this perception.) SCHINDLER'S LIST is the only film I've seen in my adult life where the screen disappeared; I was no longer aware of the construction of the movie and entered into it as spontaneously as a child. Surely Spielberg will never again find material that engages him so profoundly. But this film, far dwarfing its aspiring successor SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, places Spielberg at the first rank of film artists.