Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List changed his career

How did Steven Spielberg’s 1993 masterpiece Schindler’s List reshape his career?

Schindler’s List was a turning point for Steven Spielberg. As the movie turns 25 this year, it’s time to look back at the success and how it completely changed his career.

The Academy Awards has often had a love/hate relationship with Steven Spielberg. On one hand, he made a lot of money for the industry. Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. were all nominated for Best Picture. However, a combination of jealousy and snobbery meant that several members of the Academy dismissed his early work as too sentimental, too crowd-pleasing to be important art.

So starting in the mid 80’s, Spielberg started a dalliance with making serious, prestigious films. His first was The Color Purple. Now, I’ve never seen the movie, but studying Purple’s outline reads like something an algorithm would assemble to win Oscar gold. Spielberg tackled a big, historical theme (racism). He tackled it using a Pulitzer-prize winning source novel. In adapting it, Spielberg and his producers sanded some of the edges off to make it more palatable to audiences and Oscar voters. The Academy didn’t bite.

They’d bite eight years later for Schindler’s List. It didn’t have the industry recalibrating effect of Jurassic Park. However, Schindler’s List had a profound effect on its creator. Making it changed Spielberg fundamentally as an artist and as a human being.

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Schindler’s List unflinchingly documents atrocity

Stanley Kubrick criticized Schindler’s List, claiming that the Holocaust represents such a failure of humanity that giving the story a happy ending is a cop-out. I love Stanley Kubrick’s films. I agree with many of the things he said. I feel he is wrong here.

For one thing, there was an Oskar Schindler. Schindler did, in fact, make factories that used Jewish labor, initially because it was cheaper. As Oliver Burkeman and Ben Aris wrote from the Guardian, Schindler really moved his workers to Czechoslovakia, and successfully appealed to the humanity of SS guards who’d been sent to eliminate the final survivors at camp Plazcow.

Schindler’s List is guilty of both lionizing its main character, and changing how certain events happen. This is something that Oscar winners Lawrence of Arabia, Braveheart, and others have all done.

Where Spielberg and List don’t flinch is on how they depict the atrocities of the Holocaust. The clearing of the Krakow ghetto is a truly horrifying film scene. Nazi soldiers invade people’s homes and herd people into lines with no warning. If people resist, run, or hide, they’re shot, the gushing blood rendered inky black by the film’s black and white cinematography.

After this bravura sequence, Schindler’s List keeps looking. It looks at Amon Goethe, a psychopath who manages to use war as an excuse to act out his worst impulses. He killed workers who were too slow. He took a special delight in shooting and beating women.

Spielberg had never depicted such dark subject matter so earnestly.

Spielberg found a new style for Schindler’s List

Spielberg aided and complimented Schindler’s List subject matter by using a style and techniques that he’d never used before. I’ve been watching Steven Spielberg movies since I was five years old. I have very clear expectations on his visual style: Sweeping landscape shots. The steady use of dolly’s to survey a location. A warm and natural color scheme with lens flairs to signify something fantastical or wonderful.

Schindler’s List doesn’t have many of these signifiers. Most of the movie is in black and white, giving the movie the feel of antiquity. It’s shot similarily to a documentary, with the camera observing suffering and Schindler’s con games at ground level.

If Spielberg needs to establish the setting, he doesn’t use one of his signature sweeping dolly shots. Instead, he plants the camera on top of the roof of one of the worker’s huts in Plazcow, or on top of a large hill. He only chooses vantage points that would be available to someone at the location.

Spielberg resists the urge to make the film look too slick or too pretty. This style makes is less showy than Jurassic Park, but perfectly suited to depicting such shocking atrocities and humble heroism.

The success Spielberg had with experimenting freed him up to make huge changes to his style in future work. Think of the handheld camerawork of Saving Private Ryan. The painterly shot compositions of Lincoln.

Within the world of prestige films, Schindler’s List did have a big impact. It opened the floodgate for other films to grapple with the Holocaust like Oscar winner Life is Beautiful. It encouraged other serious films to use documentary-style camera work to give a feeling of authenticity, such as Zero Dark Thirty.

The person that Schindler’s List changed most profoundly was its director

Schindler’s List split Spielberg’s career in half. Since 1993, Spielberg has alternated 50/50 between making blockbusters and serious films. As time has passed, Spielberg feels more passionately invested in his prestige films. Ready Player One was okay, but I’d much rather rewatch Jurassic Park, A.I., or Bridge of Spies.

On a personal basis, developing and making List caused Spielberg to more deeply and publicly reckon with his Jewish roots. In 1994, he started the non-profit Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (since renamed). Their mission is to gather video testimony of survivor’s stories and educate the public on the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Research he has done on the Holocaust caused Spielberg to raise his children with a deeper sense of their Jewish identity. He even created a second kitchen in his home for his mom to make kosher food in.

Schindler’s List was a deeply felt passion project that altered Spielberg forever. It opened new avenues of creativity for him to explore. More profoundly, the process of making it gave Spielberg a deeper sense of who he was.

List legitimized him as a serious film-maker in a way that won him Oscars. Even more impressively is that Schindler’s List is a Best Picture winner that feels like the right choice for its year. It’s my third favorite Spielberg movie and the story of a war profiteer who discovers his conscience in the horrors of war is a story still worth sharing. He’s basically Iron Man without a super suit.

What did you think of Schlinder’s List? Are you still to watch the 1993 masterpiece? Share your thoughts in the comments below.