Schindler's List (1993)

The piercing drama movie Schindler's List appeared one of the most successful movies created by Steven Spielberg. In 1993 this masterpiece won 7 Academy Awards including the golden statuettes for Best Film and Best Director. This biography movie is a screen version of the book called Schindler΄s Ark by Thomas Keneally. The action of the movie takes place in Germany run by the cruel fascist regime annihilating the Jewish population. Those shocking events are known as the Holocaust and are still echoing with a sharp pain in the hearts of Jewish people.

Though Spielberg is known and loved mostly for his fantasy films, such as The Extraterrestrial or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, he has also succeeded in shooting a couple of highly realistic war movies which are now occupying the top lines of various best movies ranges and belong to the treasury of the world’s cultural heritage. Schindler’s List is a cruel and naturalistic movie, abounding in shocking scenes of massacre. However this is one of the main things providing the movie with such a great artistic and historical value.

Oscar Schindler (Liam Neeson) is a successful German businessman. His outstanding skills, business connections and the membership in the ruling Nazi party make his business flourish. In 1939 he arrives at Krakow in Poland with an idea of opening there a factory. At the same time the Nazi begin their persecution of Jews and make them resettle in a Ghetto. Due to his great business skills Schindler involves some rich Jews and their capitals into his business. He employs Jewish workers who are a cheap labor force and are glad to have a chance to be away from the awful Ghetto.

The personality of the main hero doesn’t reveal in an instant. In the beginning he appears a skillful businessman and a sophisticated manager who selfishly uses people at an impasse and their money. He even works out a cruel theory that the war is a necessary factor to provide his business with stable profits. But further on the personage of Liam Neeson passes through a kind of moral evolution and catharsis. When the terrifying Nazi machine starts to slaughter ruthlessly Jewish men, women and children, Schindler uses his money and connections to save more than a thousand people from concentration camps and awful deaths. In the end he goes bankrupt and has to hide himself from the new governing forces.

After the war one of those thankful people saved by Schindler decided to devote his life to the idea of telling the world the heroic story of this man. Thanks to Leopold Pfefferberg the name of the great humanist Oscar Schindler has been written down in the history of the most terrific war the world has ever witnessed.

Spielberg resorted to a fascinating move, having shot a black and white film. The key episode with a girl in red coat where the color suddenly appears in the screen has become one of the best-known and most stunning episodes in world’s cinema.

There’s one more significant episode when the Jews present their rescuer with a golden ring with the engraving He who saves one life, saves the world. In these words there is the essence and the key message of the movie. Five years later Spielberg released another war masterpiece – Saving Private Ryan, bearing actually the same idea and closely related to Schindler's List with its shocking naturalism, scenes of cruelty and heroic personages.