The concept of sentimentality in critical approaches to film and its cultural antecedents

ions of avant-garde practice on one hand, and the arrogant claims to objective truth made by documentary on the other. If genocide seems to demand the nonmimetic, either by avoiding the graphic representation of atrocities or by underlining its impact on a collective of people above all else, Balazs’ theory here corresponds with synecdoche in its insistence that such events be filtered through the consciousness of a diegetic individual. Such defences of Spielberg very much echo those qualified defences of Chaplin, Mickey Mouse, and other Hollywood entertainment figures discussed in previous chapters by such writers as Benjamin and Kracauer, where a sentimental mode of address ironically underscores the sad facts of modern oppression and hegemony. In Spielberg’s films, the articulation and foregrounding of hopeful, idealized outcomes, such as the reform and remorse of the central male protagonist, provide poignant and instructive counterpoint to instances of historical trauma against which they occur, where moral subjectivity continues to be fraught with contradiction and violence, yet remains an ideal nevertheless. The film concords with Steve Neale’s arguments 48 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Subject Positions, Speaking Positions: From Holocaust, Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler's List’, in Vivian Sobchack (ed.), The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Public Event, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 178. 259 concerning melodrama’s invocation of the ‘too late’, where displays of humanity and sentiment (often maternal sacrifice in the ‘Woman’s Film’) partially resolve a local or familial problem but fail to remedy the larger conditions that produced them and necessitate such acts. In such respects, the film’s central relationship between Schindler and the concentration camp commandante Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), underscored as a kind of alter-ego to Schindler, mitigates charges concerning the film’s unalloyed optimism. Demonstrating not only that for every Schindler that took the risk of disobeying Nazism, there were many others that did not, Goeth’s crimes in particular testify to the pedagogical problems of Schindler’s exemplary actions. One of the film’s most interesting scenes shows Schindler’s attempts at inspiring compassion in Goeth’s treatment of the Jews in his camp. By suggesting to Goeth that the latter’s feelings of power could be enhanced rather than diminished by ‘pardoning’ the life of camp victims rather than by murdering them, Schindler tests a key premise of ‘moral sentiment’ theory that foregrounds the potential of compassion for moral change. By doing so, the test not only foregrounds the film’s moral pedagogy as an overriding philosophical concern, but also crucially serves as a rebuttal to those who condemn the film on the grounds of distorted optimism, for it is a test that resolutely fails. Once Goeth attempts to pardon a Jewish boy who has failed to clean grime off his bath (‘Go ahead, go on, leave. I pardon you’), he kills the boy anyway as he leaves the commandante’s house, finding the rewards of empathy inferior to those of murder. Owing in no small way to the terms upon which it is formulated, whereby power is still invested in the one who ‘pardons’, which is in turn commended by Schindler as a 49 See Steve Neale, ‘Melodrama and Tears,’ Screen, Vol. 27, No. 66 (1986), pp. 6-22. 260 pleasure of virtuous power rather than any kind of categorical imperative, Goeth returns to murder within minutes. Remorse and compassion are shown as such to be far from ‘innate’ to the human soul, which is just as likely to be invested in sadism during times of war and racial persecution. The film’s foregrounding of Schindler as a man who ultimately refused to follow orders becomes radically more condemnatory of those that didn’t (and a culture that succumbed to totalitarianism) than the most graphic or factually accurate representation of Nazism. If the final farewell scene seems a cloyingly sentimental falsification of a pragmatic and self-interested Nazi up to that point, its point is as much to underline the tragedy of Schindler’s exceptionality as to present him as a hope for mankind. Just as Chaplin’s tramp ultimately represented the same kind of idealized figure that worked against the grain of history, history and its failures nevertheless remain signified as much as effaced by them. In both instances, such excessively desired presences serve to signify mankind’s ‘too late’s.