Schindler's List

There may have been a good many things Spielberg couldn't show in Schlinder's List, for obvious reasons, like the fact that neither he nor his audience could take them. But the most important omission lies in the absence of the pyrotechnical wizardry that's made him the most consistently popular film-maker in the world.

The film is in black and white, and there is no obvious flamboyance whatsoever. Many of the shots are hand-held and, though totally professional. This is the film with which Spielberg ceases to be the supreme entertainer and tries for another, tougher kind of glory. Spielberg has never manipulated us less. If there's no such thing as a film which fails consciously to shape what we see, at least Schlinder's List is a great deal nearer to it than most Hollywood films.

Though a great work, the flatness of expression can sometimes make three hours plus seem a very long time in the cinema.

Since it has been called a masterpiece so often already, it may seem churlish to say that Schindler 's List has quite a few flaws. I can't say that it gripped me as it should have done, nor that it provided the emotional impact for this particular movie that others have found in it. But it is still the best and most difficult thing Spielberg has achieved.

That said, there could have been other ways to accomplish the adaptation of Thomas Keneally's account of the true story of the German businessman who saved over a thousand Jews from the concentration camps. One of them would have been to make Oskar Schindler more of a flawed hero than Liam Neeson, who plays him with great dignity and intelligence. The man walks a little too tall throughout, planning at every stage how to seduce the Nazis almost as if they were variants of the women he bedded with such avidity.

For some of us, there seems little left to say about the Holocaust, unless it is accomplished in a very special way. Though it should quickly be admitted that for a great many others it has to be said for the first time, and possibly again and again. Not so long ago, a poll taken in America showed that a substantial number didn't know about the concentration camps and a scarcely credible number knew but disbelieved. Schindler 's List is certainly a film for them.

When Amon Goeth, brilliantly played Ralph Fiennes, takes pot shots from his balcony at prisoners passing below, or when Schindler desperately hoses down the train carrying thirst-maddened Jews into Auschwitz, the terror is not dwelt upon. Both sequences are very simply expressed, with the camera more on the perpetrators than on their victims.

And when Schindler persuades Goeth and his bosses not to take the children away from his factory since they alone have small enough hands to polish the insides of shells, you share in the black humour of the situation, as you do when Schlinder tells Goeth that sometimes not to kill is more fun and gives you more power than killing,  the man takes his words at face value.

Occasionally, the familiar Spielberg manipulation surfaces - the ending, no longer in black and white, in which the real survivors pay silent tribute to Schindler at his simple graveside monument in Israel, somehow seems artificially moving. And the sequence when a group of naked prisoners is herded into the 'shower room', expecting death but suddenly overjoyed by the fact that water, and not gas, falls from the ceiling, seemed to me like a film-maker very consciously playing with our emotions.

The fascination lies, partly in the researching of the extraordinary story itself and its multifarious detail, and partly in Spielberg's play on good versus evil, where Ben Kingsley quiet effectively portrays Itzhak Stern, Schlinder's Jewish accomplice, and  is contrasted with Goeth as the good and bad at his side.

Ultimately, the film is memorable as much for simple testimony as for the cinematic art it displays. It is, of course, hardly artless, either intellectually or technically. And it is certainly leagues ahead of anything else Hollywood has even hinted at on this subject, as well as being bravely sure that what it is saying will count with the millions of those who will see it merely because its director made ET and Jurassic Park.

Some, of course, will hail the film simply because it's there. Still, there's an element of truth in the praise Schindler 's List which surely makes it deserve the Academic Awards it received.