Masterpiece or moral authority; analysing the critical receptions of Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993)

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"...the Nazi persecution of the Jews is a perilous subject matter since it can so easily elicit automatic reactions of moral outrage, personal horror, religious self-righteousness and dramatic extremes, not to mention severe depression", (McCarthy, 1993)
Schindler's list premiered mere months after the inauguration of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, leading to a capitalising success on the American peoples cultural focus on historical voyeurism. The critical reception of Schindler's List is a intellectual discussion on the moral nature of a film through the ability to dramatize what was deemed impossible; critically selectively received with a social conscious, and a division on Spielberg's stylistic representation of the subject matter. The scholarship on Schindler's List only reaches one shared thesis that of its transitional nature in his cinematic career into a more self-styled seriousness with arching the blockbuster with sober artistic work (Grainge, Jancovich, & Monteith, 2012). Critical reception of Spielberg's work comments on the true nature of its testimony in memorial to the Holocaust with appropriate restraint or typical emotional manipulation, combined with arguments of the nature of film is artistic or entertaining. Temporal and spatial variations don't seem to affect the critics review, it appears to be more the view of Spielberg as an auteur and also their comfort in exploring such a sensitive historical memory. Deconstruction of the reception will discuss the stylistic nature of the film with a controversial documented cinematography, alongside Schindler's List's place among other works in regards to the subject of the Holocaust and Spielberg's handling of the digestible.
Immediately and most appar...

... middle of paper ...

...a film it is not simply a work of art, it is a story of a historical tragedy that would deem economically successful; Schindler's List is about 200 Jews who lived, while the Holocaust is about 6 million that died, the film required a Hollywood nature around it in order to be popular and consumable (Kubrick, 2000).

Works Cited

Grainge, P., Jancovich, M., & Monteith, S. (2012). Film Histories; An introduction and reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Heilman, J. (2004, May). Schindler's List. Retrieved March 2014, from Movie Martyr: www.moviemartyr.com
Kauffman, S. (1993, December 10). A New Spielberg; and Others. New Republic .
Kubrick, S. (2000).
Malcolm, D. (1994, February 17). Schindler's List. Guardian .
McCarthy, T. (1993, November 19). Review of Schindler's List. Variety .
Novick, P. (2000). The Holocaust In American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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