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Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List
by (Editor: Yosefa Loshitzky)
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Indiana University Press (1997-06)
ISBN: 025333232X
EAN: 9780253332325
Dewy Decimal #: 791.4372
Hardcover: 250 pages
SKU: 07070119
Condition: Very Good As issued
Comments: Hardback in very good condition with no markings. As issued no jacket. Top front corners bumped and dent size of tiny dogear at top front of last 1/3 of text. Tight binding and clear crisp text. Very nice book.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
As the first studio film to deal directly with the enormity of the Holocaust, made by the most commercially successful director in movie history, "Schindler's List" attempts to provide the popular imagination with a master narrative about the Holocaust. Challenging the limits of representation, Spielberg's 1993 film has become a media event, generating extensive discourse on the Holocaust and its mediation by popular culture in a way not seen in the United States since the NBC 1978 television series Holocaust. By now no one can deny the impact of Spielberg's film on an ever-growing viewing audience. Publicly celebrated with multiple Academy Awards and screened as an antidote to racism in New Jersey, the film has been widely acclaimed as a moving, powerful, and truthful depiction of historical atrocity, affirming the veracity of survivor testimony and historical documentation for a public in need of initiation or convincing. Released a few months after the inauguration of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Spielberg's film both capitalized on and contributed to current fascination with the Holocaust. Quenching public thirst for historical voyeurism, "Schindler's List" not only invites a renewed scholarly and intellectual discussion about the limits of representation, but also proves the necessity of such a discussion for a larger public. The critical and popular receptions of "Schindler's List" and the public conversations it has triggered in different national ethnic contexts touch upon a variety of issues: the representation of history by cinema and popular culture; the right to dramatize the unrepresentable; the relationship between public-popular memory; the role of national identity in the shaping and selective reception of popular memory; the place and role of the Holocaust in ongoing debates about racism and group hate; and the authority of popular culture, and Hollywood in particular, to retell and ultimately shape public perceptions of the Holocaust. Such questions are not easily answered. It is to provoke reflection on them that this interdisciplinary critical anthology, compiled of a dozen essays written by distinguished scholars in different fields, has been designed.
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Customer Reviews
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Stimulating Debate of the Merits of Spielberg's Film
Rating  (5)
Date: 2001-03-08
25 out of 27 customers found this reveiw helpful
Perhaps unfortunately, many of the essays in this fine collection would have to fall under the category of univocal Spielberg-bashing. The director is berated by a chorus of academics for his documentary-style authoritarianism in his approach to representing the story of Oskar Schindler and the Schindler Jews. What merits the movie does have are, by and large, swept under the carpet in the interest of pointing out its glaring faults and moments of irresponsible over-reaching. This robs the debate of a good measure of balance, but the wealth of different critical perspectives brought to bear on the discussion more than makes up for any lack of diplomacy.The book's greatest stengths are just this sort of breadth--there are essays here by film experts, historians, literary theorists and other academic luminaries, most notably Geoffrey Hartmann and Omer Bartov. Another virtue of Loshitzky's collection is that the reader comes away with a much better grasp of the larger debate over representing the Holocaust. Essays point repeatedly to Claude Lanzmann's interview-style documentary as an ideal form, but the more careful essays admit that this is not the version most viewers would sit through, as it's too long, too slow, etc. There are some shocking revelations, too, like things Spielberg has said in interviews that should curdle the blood of even his most vociferous supporters. He compares his trials of being rich and famous and recognizable with the suffering of victims of the Holocaust, and one wonders what on earth he could possibly have been thinking. Those tidbits aside, though, the most useful, convincing and durable essay here is, in my opinion, the balanced assessment by Bartov, a Holocaust historian, who candidly admits that Spielberg's triumphalism and hero-narrative are terribly misplaced in this corner of history. Unlike the other essayists here, though, Bartov challenges critics to focus more on the positive accomplishments of the film, and especially the fact that it has raised overall awareness of the tragedy in extraordinary fashion. This must not be forgotten in a judgment of the film, he argues, since it is likely (and he writes this, of course, before the breakout success of Benigni's "Life is Beautiful") the only Holocaust film most people--and certainly most Americans--will ever care to see. While certain of the pieces cater more obviously to an academic crowd well versed in the ongoing debate and most current scholarship on the topic of the Holocaust, the book in general is quite accessible to more mainstream audiences who wish to see Spielberg's version of the Shoah challenged in an often very productive way. I highly recommend this book.
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