Schindler's List - Reception

Reception

Schindler's List received widespread acclaim from critics. Reviewing Schindler’s List for The New York Review of Books, the leading British critic John Gross wrote: “Suppose the Disney organization announced that it was planning a film about the Holocaust. Spielberg’s films up until now have mostly been fairy tales or adventure stories, or a mixture of both, so I can’t pretend, then, that I approached the film without apprehension. My fears were altogether misplaced. Spielberg shows a firm moral and emotional grasp of his material. The film is an outstanding achievement.” However, film critic Robert Philip Kolker, in his book A Cinema of Loneliness, attacked the film's portrayal of Goeth as "too unrelievedly brutal. He is a psychopath, and psychopathology is too easy a way to dismiss Nazism and its adherents. Ideological elements are so distorted by dreams of power, authority, and manufactured hatred and convictions of necessity, that the majority of a culture gets caught up in the act of killing the demonized other. There were psychotic Germans, to be sure; but Nazism cannot be reduced simply to psychosis. There are scenes in Schindler's List of German officers in a hysterical frenzy of killing that are, perhaps, more accurate than Goeth's unrelenting murderousness, but also bring with them the old Hollywood representations of Nazis as sophisticated gangsters."

Schindler's List was highly received by many of Spielberg's peers. Filmmaker Billy Wilder reportedly wrote a long letter of appreciation to Spielberg in which he proclaimed, "They couldn't have gotten a better man. This movie is absolutely perfection." Roman Polanski, who had turned down Spielberg's offer to direct the film, later commented, "I certainly wouldn't have done as good a job as Spielberg because I couldn't have been as objective as he was." Polanski has also cited Schindler's List as an influence on his 1995 film Death and the Maiden. The success of Schindler's List persuaded filmmaker Stanley Kubrick to abandon his own Holocaust project, Aryan Papers, which would have been about a Jewish boy who survives the war, along with his aunt, by sneaking through Poland while pretending to be a Catholic. Convinced that no film could truly capture the horror of the Holocaust, scriptwriter Frederic Raphael has recalled that Kubrick commented on Schindler's List, "Think that's about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn't it? The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. Schindler's List is about 600 who don't."

French New Wave filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard, accused Spielberg of using the film to make a profit of tragedy while Schindler's wife, Emilie Schindler, lived in poverty in Argentina. In defense of Spielberg, critic Roger Ebert said, "Has Godard or any other director living or dead done more than Spielberg, with his Holocaust Project, to honor and preserve the memories of the survivors?" Author Thomas Keneally has also disputed claims that Emilie Schindler was never paid for her contributions to the film, "not least because I had recently sent Emilie a check myself." Filmmaker Michael Haneke also criticized the sequence in the film in which Schindler's women are accidentally sent off to Auschwitz and hurdled into showers: "There's a scene in that film when we don't know if there's gas or water coming out in the showers in the camp. You can only do something like that with a naive audience like in the United States. It's not an appropriate use of the form. Spielberg meant well – but it was dumb." However, according to one of Schindler's women, Etka Liebgold, this incident is based on fact.

The film was attacked by filmmaker and professor Claude Lanzmann, director of the 9-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah, who called Schindler's List a "kitschy melodrama", and a "deformation" of historical truth. Lanzmann was especially critical of Spielberg for viewing the Holocaust through the eyes of a German. Believing his own film to be the definitive account of the Holocaust, Lanzmann complained, "I sincerely thought that there was a time before Shoah, and a time after Shoah, and that after Shoah certain things could no longer be done. Spielberg did them anyway." Spielberg angrily responded to Lanzmann's criticisms, accusing him of wanting to be "the only voice in the definite account of the Holocaust." He added, "It amazed me that there could be any hurt feelings in an effort to reflect the truth." Hungarian Jewish author Imre Kertész, a Holocaust survivor, also criticized Spielberg for falsifying the experience of the Holocaust in Schindler's List and for showing it as something that is foreign to the human nature and impossible to recur. He also dismissed the film itself, saying "it is obvious that the American Spielberg, who incidentally wasn't even born until after the war, has and can have no idea of the authentic reality of a Nazi concentration camp... I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life (whether in the private sphere or on the level of "civilization" as such) and the very possibility of the Holocaust."

In 2004, the Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. Schindler's List featured on a number of other "best of" lists, including the Time magazine's Top Hundred as selected by critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel, Time Out magazine's 100 Greatest Films Centenary Poll conducted in 1995, Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" series, and Leonard Maltin's "100 Must See Movies of the Century". In addition, the Vatican named Schindler's List among the top 45 films ever made. The readers of the German film magazine, Cinema, voted Schindler's List the #1 best movie of all time in 2000. In 2002, a Channel 4 poll named Schindler's List the ninth greatest film of all time, and it ranked fourth in the 2005 war films poll.