FILM MARCH 7, 2013
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
Here’s an oddity, from Yahoo Movies this past Monday: two photographs, side by side—a dark-haired woman, apparently 23-years-old, in a belted red raincoat, standing in front of a wall covered with Jewish imagery; and then, a child, 3-years-old, in a red coat, but in the foreground of a black-and-white picture that shows German soldiers guarding abashed citizens. It is the same person in both pictures, Oliwia Dabrowska, from Krakow in Poland. There is a heading to the pictures and the short article that follows: “‘Red coat girl’ from ‘Schindler’s List’: I was ‘horrified.’”
Have you placed it yet? In Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, there is a scene in which Oskar Schindler and his wife, both on horseback, and on a knoll above the city, see one of the first round-ups of Jews by German soldiers. They shot the sequence in Krakow, and it is a very persuasive evocation of Schindler’s mounting distress and conscience. But then something horrifying happens. Schindler notices one little girl, on her own in the crowd, and just in case we haven’t got the point Spielberg colorizes her coat. He makes it a dusty red, so that we will notice it and feel it. As if the true impact of the Holocaust depended on costume. The colorizing is very tastefully done, but that doesn’t stop the device from being appalling.
Not that Dabrowska’s horror was prompted in that way. Spielberg plainly cherishes children, and when they had shot the scene he took Oliwia aside and told her not to look at the finished film until she was much older. Like 18, he thought. But older people talked about the scene and the film, and Oliwia was impatient and frustrated, so at the age of eleven she saw Schindler’s List and she was “horrified”. She felt she never wanted to see the picture again. You can understand her feelings, just as you can appreciate Spielberg’s advice. A child is not ready to see Schindler’s List, which is a candid and vivid look at the experience of holocaust. But a child is not ready at the age of three to be rounded up for extermination. There are things too horrific to be filmed, or too awkward to be digested as part of a drama. Yet we have made a kind of pledge to be faithful to what happened in those places, and not to forget.
But what are we meant to remember? In the same week as the story on Yahoo Movies, it emerged in a years-long research project by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum that we have been living with a moderate idea of the Holocaust. We are all inclined to say “six million’, when the subject arises. It’s a round figure, but that’s the automatic answer to how many people died. Except that the new research says it was far more—try 15-to-20 million. If you think about it, the margin of latitude in the new estimate is nearly the same as the original “knowledge.”
This news is very tricky. I can believe that you were already “horrified” or “chilled” or “stunned’ or “devastated” by six million. Some people killed themselves in dismay when that number was reported or when they had to live with their own grief and guilt. Suppose the true number is three times six million, is it within your capacity to have all those desperate reactions tripled? Surely it can’t be possible to find any useful way of saying 18 million dead was significantly worse than six million, The trickiness here is our vulnerability to a moment in history in which the slaughter is beyond our imaginations. A young person today—and there are plenty who hardly know what the Holocaust was—will pass over the adjustment in numbers as a technicality.
To which, I daresay, Steven Spielberg would respond that that’s why he made Schindler’s List—to help future generations remember—and that’s why he put the little girl in a red coat. It was dramatic; it was personalizing history; it was giving us an aid to memory. One has to acknowledge the legitimacy of that explanation, just as I feel bound to say that Schindler’s List is, for the most part, an extraordinary and moving film. Still, I feel it has the awful vulgarity of the red coat, in the way that Saving Private Ryan has the gross and unnecessary book-ending of the elderly Ryan at the cemetery in Normandy worrying over whether he deserved to be saved. Whereupon, a Spielberg, or any leading director, could say that’s what movies try to do. They make a story out of history. Only recently, there are important ways in which Lincoln, Argo, and Zero Dark Thirty all play movie games with the facts. In all those cases, under criticism, the filmmakers said some license was necessary, and legitimate. Documentary films often make exactly the same defense. It's film itself that is so tricky.
So maybe remembering will depend on the horror of white lies, or adjustments. Or maybe the idea of remembering is simply a vanity. Who remembers what the Black Death was like or the evil of the Inquisition? This is a riddle if you love story and movies; if you respect history, it becomes much more than a riddle. I don’t like the red coat; it gave me a queasy feeling the first time I saw Schindler’s List. And I know that it was in the profound nature of Hollywood that the concentration camp story could only be told in a big, mainstream picture if someone found a story that had at least a touch of the upbeat. That was Oskar Schindler.
There’s something else to remember in the Yahoo Movie story, with its two pictures of a young Polish woman twenty years apart: “Incidentally, Schindler’s List 20th anniversary limited edition DVD/Blu-ray/digital copy/Ultra Violet is available on March 5.”
14 comments
Another confused and confusing David Thompson essay... So many questions and so few answers! Isn't Hollywood a (bad?) trip?
- AaronW
March 7, 2013 at 12:30am
3,7,13, 12:25 Agreed it's a confusing and confused piece. The man seems incapable of developing a linear argument over a number of paragraphs.
- basman
March 7, 2013 at 12:24pm
SHOW 1 RESPONSE
I know a few Holocaust survivors and their children personally, and I don't know how hard I'd push the following opinion of mine in their presence, but I reckon 'Schindler's List' was a miserable piece of drek, not just the red coat but the whole thing.
- AaronW
March 7, 2013 at 12:37am
I haven't seen it in a while. I was in high school when it came out, and I think I saw it then, and I would have been younger than 18 -- more like 14. I remember finding it moving but finding the red coat shtick weird and phony. I also remember that the John Williams theme stuck in my head, much as my memory of Ken Burns's Civil War documentary basically consists of Ashokan Farewell and "My dearest Clara,..."
- JakeH
March 7, 2013 at 1:50am
The girl's coat is red so that the audience will understand that the girl is what Schindler is looking at, and that it's her coat that stands out to him. I don't see how that is vulgar; it's a basic film-making device. The holocaust is a dark and tragic subject, but the subject of a movie shouldn't get in the way of basic movie-making. It wouldn't have made any sense for Mr. Speilberg to be cutting the movie together and say, "Wait, a minute, this is a film about the Holocaust. Therefore, I better ignore my director's instincts and leave that girl's coat in black-and-white."
- Zuri-K
March 7, 2013 at 2:59am
I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam. So I am quite familiar with the artistic liberties filmmakers love to take in order to make a dramatic point in the story they are telling. I saw "The Deer Hunter" and though I understood how Michael Cimino used the Russian roulette scenes for dramatic effect as a metaphor for the alluring attraction toward self-destruction war vets feel , I've never had the compulsion to play it with fellow Vietnam vets. And I've gotten pretty depressed about the horrific things I saw and experienced there before I finally started getting better. Most of the Vietnam War movies were made for civilian moviegoers, except for Oliver's Stone's "Platoon," which really reminded of the wounded grunts at the base hospital where I served. And likewise Steven Spielberg always has an eye for the dramatic moment, where he manipulates the audience, and tugs at their hearts. I thought the landing at Normandy was probably one of the most realistic depiction of what the meat grinder of combat does to grunts. But then he falls back and borrows from old Hollywood war movie conventions for much of the film, such as when the medic asks for his mother as he dies. I also was a litter bearer when the medevac dustoff helicopters brought casualties to the emergency room. Never saw one grunt cry out for his mother. They were too busy just dying as I recall. And another point about the little girl in the red coat. Could it be a film homage to Akira's Kurosawa's "High and Low?" I faintly remember reddish pink smoke rising above the horizon in Tokyo when the kidnapper finally gets his ransom money and burns the bags. And there s that scene in "The Great Train Robbery," when the cowboy faces the camera, fires his pistol and red-tinted smoke comes out of the barrel of his pistol. Martin Scorsese used that scene in "Goodfellas," when Joe Pesci's character turns toward the camera and fires his revolver at the audience. And, finally, there's that scene in "Rumble Fish," when Mickey Rourke's character, who is supposedly color-blind see the fihting fish in color. I'm just surprised that such an astute film critic such as you didn't pick up on any of these homages to other films. As far as filming the holocaust, I feel that modern warfare by its very nature is a holocaust for all the soldiers and innocent civilians. Or as Sam Fuller responded in a press junket to a reporter who asked him if "The Big Red One" was an anti- movie, he rhetorically asked, "Is there any other kind?" Love that answer. Fuller landed at Normandy on D-Day. A bluntly honest war vet. Bless him.
- rewiredhogdog
March 7, 2013 at 6:25am
rewiredhogdog - your post was much more astute and interesting than Thomsan's entire piece (try as I might, I could not decipher what exactly his beef was. Like you, I saw the girl in the red dress as a straight forward homage to war films, an archetype appropriately taken up two or three notches. People always seem to get itchy when Speilberg succeeds in touching their deepest emotions. I am sorry the actress was disturbed as an adult, but she should take that up with her folks - her present angst has zero to do with the value of the film. It is act of duty and witnessing straight out of Spielbergs soul, bigger than her or him). 'Schindler's List' is a masterpiece - Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley, Spielberg, all at the very top of their abilities.
- WandreyCer
March 7, 2013 at 7:34am
That said - a mere film can never appropriately contain or bear witness to these events. Perhaps this, or any other film about this era, should always leave us partially outraged for even trying.
- WandreyCer
March 7, 2013 at 7:37am
SHOW ALL 2 RESPONSES
The significance of the coat, for me, wasn't that the little girl was wearing a red coat. The significance was a little later on, when on a cart full of coats, you see the little red coat. Indicating that this little hopeful innocent life had been snuffed out, just like so many others./// Now perhaps you think that's cheap, or manipulative, or some other negative connotation regarding how Hollywood tries to tell an emotional story. But the message was that even little children are being killed because they're Jews. Which I believe is a true message. That's one of the purposes of story-telling, after all, to reveal truth by telling a story.
- AllanL5
March 7, 2013 at 7:54am
How odd that you left out her reaction at the end of the article: "But now Dabrowska's initial horror has turned into pride. "I had been part of something I could be proud of," she said of her current thinking on her iconic role."" /// Apparently, some news people try to use a story to distort the truth into some false point they're trying to make. How odd.
- AllanL5
March 7, 2013 at 7:58am
3,7,13, 12:25 est, I agree with those who thought the red coat effective for the reasons given. As I noted to Aaronw this is such an odd piece, so discursive in the bad sense of that word.
- basman
March 7, 2013 at 12:28pm
From paragraph one, I found this essay confusing and full of questionable assumptions. Do you guys want me to write about cinema? I work in the industry and can write coherently, just look at this comment!
- seagoat8888
March 7, 2013 at 2:17pm
I agree that this article raised more questions than answers, but I thought it was one of Thomson's better pieces. The thesis does need to be more focused, though, methinks.
- Curran1
March 7, 2013 at 8:08pm
SHOW 1 RESPONSE
Mr Thomson is a good essayist and of course, in a sense, is he means he finds the colorized child appalling and believe likely many do. I found it a bit cryptic, symbolic, unforgettable, ultimately moving, and not unlike what I do when I see a picture of 30 school children, and read none survived, and wonder, What happened to this one - the girl - the fourth from the left? Like a kind of purely mental colorizing. And much as my mother did, forty years ago, when I was a child, pointing to perhaps the fifth boy from the right, and saying, don't you wonder what happened to him, to that one. Or perhaps we look from face to face, one at a time, a few seconds each, as if mentalizing colorizing and standing-out one at a time. / Separately, I happened to recently show my 11 year old the first five or ten minutes of Schindler's list and we talked about how, virtually as a silent movie, with images alone, Spielberg introduces the character played by Liam Neeson. But only the first 10 minutes.
- brucequinn
March 8, 2013 at 5:52pm