Schindler's List Film Analysis

Schindler 's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) is perhaps one of the greatest films in the late twentieth-century cinema. It encapsulates the brutality of the Holocaust as it evokes memories of atrocities of the World War II and a sense of inability to save innocent people. The film is shot in monochrome as Spielberg thinks it is more "realistic" and “closer to [a] documentary” of that time (Shandler 156). According to Jeremy Maron, Schindler 's List should primarily be understood as a melodrama; a film which intentionally employs sympathy and functions “as a representational mode that appeals to emotional truths and enacts excess in the content of its form” (72). The girl who wears a red coat is the only person in the whole film with noticeable colors. Therefore, in order to discuss this particular scene, it is necessary to discuss its cinematic …show more content…
According to Frank Manchel, the film, especially the girl’s scene, serves to present what he terms the “impersonal Jew” that falsely presents Jews as “a backdrop to the central plot in a Holocaust movie” (435). By focusing almost entirely on Schindler 's perspective, Spielberg effectively generates a situation in which the Jewish residents are shown to possess no actual agency in the events that befall them. Rather, they are presented as simply reacting to the soldiers who terrorize them, and even the girl herself appears to be unaware of what is going to happen to her if she walks with the soldiers. Schindler is shown as industrialist, capitalist figure in the film who sees Jews as an opportunity for wealth. He remains as such until he sees the young girl dead and carried away with a pile of corpses. This becomes a pivotal moment as Schindler vows to save as many Jews as he could. He sees the atrocities of the war, but nothing moved him so much as the innocence and tragic death of the young