Schindler's List

I just watched this for the first time. I cried like a small child through the whole "I could have got more" scene.
This movie is heartbreakingly perfect.

Stern: “The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf.”
Stern: "Diese Liste ist etwas absolut Gutes. Diese Liste ist das Leben. Und rundherum, um ihre Ränder ist das Verderben."

First of all, I am not a fan of both, the genre and the length (3 1/4 fucking hours!).
However, this movie is a qualitative masterpiece. Spielberg made some serious thoughts on how he wants to construct this movie.
Many things are great. It is well-written. The scenery is great, nice that they could film in Kraków. It is formative. It is a serious topic and a good message.
The movie just feels like it is real. You do not notice that it is actually a film.
This is because many things are so realistic about this movie: The actors do not act staged, there are so many characters who talk and are somehow important which makes the movie very dynamic. It is also more realistic because it is uncut. People get shot, you see blood, they fall to the ground, it is okay - thank god it is not censored.

It is not just one storyline. Since the different time leaps in WW2 make the movie also more dynamic and particularly more diversified.

There are also some scenes which are quite funny which has not to be a bad thing in this case. Examples:
The crazy old man who thanks Schindler for the workplace.
The piano man who plays piano while everybody else gets shot in the house.

For a movie from 1993 it is a lot better than some movies released nowadays and many movies can learn from this movie.

[9.9/10] How do you go about capturing something as immense and horrifying as the Holocaust on film? It is an event that stretched across countries, with an unimaginable, unending array of horrors, that feels too big to be contained within the feeble confines of celluloid. But Steven Spielberg and his team somehow manage it, by going big and going small.

Spielberg gives us avatars for the different sides of this experience. He gives us Itzhak Stern, to channel the desperation, the resourcefulness, the unceasing fear of the Jews driven from their homes and then forced into camps. He gives us Amon Goeth, to symbolize the utter inhumanity, the callousness of the people who carried out such atrocities, who saw their captives and victims as less than human and acted accordingly. And he gives us Oskar Schindler, and with him, the arc of a man who goes from seeing the Jews as a means to an end, of profit and personal gain, to helping them a little when he can, to realizing that he’s sold his soul and trying to do everything he can to buy it back.

Through these central figures, Schindler in particular, the film brings grand, wide-ranging concepts down to earth: the dehumanization of the Jewish people, the different shades of wanton cruelty visited upon them, the gradual realization of their plight by the world, the good works that created light in the darkness, and the bureaucratic state that treated the harvesting and expungement of human lives like a series of numbers on a ledger.

But he also stretches beyond those avatars, to capture the horrors of one of humanity’s great shames as a series of chaotic, disquieting events that affected massive numbers of people. Spielberg’s camera does not shy away from panic, the tumult, the hiding, the casual deaths doled out in the streets in the “liquidation” of the Krakow ghetto. It doesn't flinch from the masses of people loaded into trains, stripped and prodded and treated like animals, and falling apart as families are split up, spouses are separated, and parents see their children blithely led to the slaughter. It holds the tension to the last when a group of Jewish women are disrobed, shaved, and sent into a shower, uncertain whether they are being disinfected, or sent to their deaths.

Through all of this, Schindler’s List provides a sea of familiar faces, individuals who are less fully-developed characters, but still given personalities, connections, quirks, and specific hopes and fears, that make them more than the indistinct mass of humanity their Nazi tormentors see them as. They are distinguished just enough to make them memorable, relatable, recognizable, but their concerns, their reactions and mere persistence or faltering within these stomach-churning events, are real and universal enough to make them stand-ins for the broader horrors faced by so many like them in the Holocaust. The film expertly balances their humanity and the way they represent the humanity of so many other, saved or caught or lost, in the Third Reich’s mortal machinery.

The film, in fact, treats it like machinery. That’s not to say there is pure dispassionate indifference here. One of Schindler’s List’s most intriguing choices is its treatment of Amon Goeth as someone profoundly real and expressive -- in his boorish laughter, his twisted affections for his conscripted maid, his brief and faltering attempts to own the power of mercy -- but also someone with no shred of empathy in him, for whom murder is either an idle sport or a mundane necessity of his job, until the very suffering or salvation of the people under his watch becomes one extneded joke.

But at the same time, the editing and framing choices emphasize the efficiency, the bureaucracy the meticulousness of the Nazis as they processed the Jews into fungible goods and slave labor and ash. Spielberg returns repeatedly to the images of the “listmakers”, the names being typed onto pages, the stamps that dictate life or death, the regimented memorialization of letters and numbers that either allow humble, blameless Polish Jews to hang onto their lives, or condemn them to an untimely death.

This is not the rush of the battlefield or the fog of war or the uncertainty of combat. It is the systematic extraction and extermination of a people at the hands of the state, done with governmental imprimatur. It is one of history’s greatest horrors regularly delivered with the desultory indifference of a civil servant.

At the same time, Spielberg and company take pains to show the contrast between the lives led by the German officers and private businessman who thrive on this murder and forced labor, and the beleaguered Jews struggling simply to survive. The film juxtaposes the lavish parties Schindler joins with the S.S. officers, and scenes of the squalor of the ghettos. He contrasts decadent pleasures of the flesh and of stunning artistic displays, with private beatings by officers who hate the cause of their own twisted feelings, and life events eked out by Jews in captivity. Without ever having a character speak out to condemn this disparity, he lets the disparity speak for itself in the distance between the casual horrors of mass enslavement and extermination, and the flush, spoils-of-war indulgences of those who profit from it.

That’s aided by the black and white aesthetic of the film. That choice certainly bolters moments like when a colorful flame juts back into the monochromatic world of the film, signifying the traditions carried despite the time they were almost snuffed out, or Schindler recognizes the red coat of a little girl that helps spur him to recognize the abominations of these acts and the humanity of the people who suffer under them. But it also allows Spielberg and director of photography Janusz Kaminski to make light the focus of their images.

The flash of gunfire illuminates and identifies the killings that take place in the Krakow Ghetto. The light that shines on Schindler’s face as he leans out of the shadows to comfort Helen Hirsch after she describes the terror-filled unpredictability of Goeth’s arbitrary murders cuts a contrast in the us vs. them divide. And it creates a stark beauty but also a grim frankness to swaths of liberated refugees walking down a hill, or clothless people forced to run in circles so they can be examined, or the bursts of smoke and ash that signal the ending crush of human suffering practically automated. It makes Schindler’s List feel older than it is, whilst channeling the dark realities the film unflinchingly confronts.

It confronts them with the crowds of Jews, the lists of names, thrown into the mortal whims of men who view them as subhuman, to be killed, abused, utilized, or saved. It confronts them with the story of a man who comes to see that invisible machine, the input and output of war, and laments his myopic part in it, and changes enough to save whom he can whilst decrying the more he might have saved. And it confronts us with the unimaginable scope and brutality and lost humanity, channeling the experience into a visceral three hours of trials and loss, of shameful joys and undeserved deaths, of regimented destruction and unsanctioned survival.

It is, in a word, a masterpiece. It is a hard watch, but also a film that accomplishes the impossible -- it captures the all-encompassing maw of the Holocaust, the acts that called into question our very souls as a species, the kindesses and losses that helped to affirm them, into a film so attuned to make us recoil, that also makes it impossible to look away, to cover our eyes, or do anything but reflect and remember what was done and what was lost.

I lost it when they showed true survivors leaving stones on his grave. This movie is a masterpiece

Made me cry was proper emotional and they got everything right

I cry like a baby watching this movie. A tremendous Schindler's sensitivity to the Jews was shown by Liam's interpretation.

The way this movie is directed it all feels very surreal and like you're watching it unfold right before you. The cinematography is some of the best and what truly makes this movie stand out from many other war movies is the John Wilmas score. And the depth of the characters and their dynamic writing is absolutely phenomenal and beautiful. There is a certain satisfaction and energy embedded into the final hour of the movie. One of the best meta-ending films I've ever seen. Truly, it is the best work by Steven Spielberg. Perfect 10/10 movie.

If this doesn’t move you, you’re a liar or a sociopath. Profound.

Imma go off and say that I am truly ashamed of myself for rating this masterpiece so low the first time I watched this. Schindler's List in no way deserves a 6! I remember wanting to give it a 5 out of 10 when reviewing this. I had said I found the film dull. What the fuck? That day I put Schindler's List on, I was cooking therefore not really focused on the story of the film. I re-watched it today and I am truly amazed. Engaged in every single scene. Every single shot so beautiful; disturbing; authentic.

Schindler's List's cinematography is on point. Spielberg, whom was and still is one of Hollywood's most influential directors of all time and is known for his science fiction films, captures the brutal environment of the holocaust brilliantly. He truly demonstrates his talent, leaving the audience in awe of his ability to create a film so entirely different, completely opposite from his original or pre-shown aesthetic and work. Not to mention that the Holocaust is such a sensitive topic and Spielberg who is a part of Jewish culture did a job so well that this film he took a risk with is now actually an additional win for him.

The film's screenplay is amazing, for all of the recognition that Schindler's List has received is totally, completely deserved. The story of Oskar Schindler was portrayed extremely precise and Liam Neeson's acting is expertly done. In fact, every single actor in this film is fucking amazing! The extras are even worth watching in this film.

Directing; screenplay; production; costume design. All of these are extremely stunning. Seriously, no flaws at all! A film that demonstrates that even at the most horrid, brutal times; even around the most wicked and malicious human beings, there can still be a flash of hope and kindness for these individuals.

Masterpiece. Truly captivated this time—with a first time being unfocused by choice and then wrongly reviewing the film—I am astonished.