Warbler said:

Bingowings said:

When he did he chose another bestseller, Schindler's Ark and while the final film does break ground for Spielberg (even if one of it most memorable sequences was lifted frame by frame from Zastiha ne noc) it have much more melodrama than the book (I don't object to the name change even if it was done for the most insanely stupid of reasons) and as a picture of that particular black mark on history it's shamefully simplistic.

if you say so.

Bingowings said:

Personally I'd make viewing of the nine hours of Shoah (1985) mandatory in all schools throughout the world rather than encouraging people to watch Spielberg's film a few times.

I may have to watch it sometime.

Bingowings said:

And if we think this is a German aberration from that particular moment in time we delude ourselves.

I don't believe that is what Schindler's List was arguing.

I guess my original point(and still remains), it that the film isn't about what caused Spielberg to make the movie, its about Schindler, the Schindler Jews and what they experienced during the holocaust, and holocaust itself. You criticize Schindler's List for not being Shoah, did it ever occur to you that it wasn't trying to be Shoah? You criticized Schindler's List for it's somewhat "happy" ending. I may be incorrect, did not Schindler really save some of the Jews? Should Spielberg have falsely depicted all the Schindler Jews being murdered?

I criticised it for being a being an unnecessarily stylised, unnecessarily melodramatic, derivative, inaccurate adaptation of the book, made with a eye more on the film makers career arc than anything else.

I didn't criticise it for not being Shoah (I voiced an observation that Shoah was none of the above).

I didn't criticise the facts of history but their depiction in the film and how pointed it was that Spielberg should pick that story over all others knowing his preference for sending the audience away with a positive emotional response.

Stanley Kubrick said of the film:

"Schindler's List was about 200 Jews who lived. The Holocaust is about 6 million who died"

And I agree with that observation.

The unnecessary coda of the film is open to an alternative reading which a more wise film maker would have attempted to avoid.

Notably that the suffering of Jews in the holocaust justifies the diaspora and continued oppression of the Palestinians.

I don't for a minute believe Spielberg feels this is the case or intended that sequence to be ever read that way but see that sequence from the point of view of a Palestinian who has been kicked out of his country or penned into a Arab ghetto state.

Not all Palestinians fire rockets at Israel but none of them asked for a European invasion justified by the collective guilt of Europe and the support of America.