Oskar Schindler, a German
businessman in Poland who sees the Nazi rise to power as an
opportunity to make money. Together with his assistant Itzhak
Stern, using flattery and bribes to win military contracts, he
starts a firm to make cookware and utensils. They staff the plant
with Jews who have been herded into Krakow's ghetto by the Nazi
troops and therefore gain a dependable unpaid labor.
However, in 1942, all of Krakow's Jews are forced to go to the
Plaszow Labor Camp. Schindler sees what is happening to his
employees and begins to develop a conscience.
Significance: Schindler's list is the most critically approved
movie of Steven Spielberg's career. It won seven Oscars- Best
Picture, Best Director, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best
Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Music-Original Score and
Best Writing (with screenplay based on material from another
medium.) In 2004, the Library of Congress reckoned the film
"culturally significant" and selected it for
preservation in the National Film Registry. Schindler's List
also appeared on the Time magazine's list of 100 Greatest Films
and on Roger Ebert's 'Great Movies'. The readers of the German
film magazine Cinema voted the movie as #1 to the best movie of
all time. Thanks to the great success of the film, Spielberg is
founding the 'Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation
and the production of historical documentaries such as 'The Lost
Children of Berlin', 'The Last Days, Anne Frank Remembered' etc.
Schindler's List was a movie that no one had expected from
Spielberg, with his previous production being based on rather
sci-fi (Jurassic Park, E.T., Jaws…). It gives us a greater
understanding on how this nightmare could have possibly happened
by letting us in on the thinking and motivation behind the
Nazis' actions.
