EDITH KURZWEIL
203
have come to see his
chif d'oeuvre.
Spielberg is a genius at turning atrocity into film, and "Holocaust
horror" is the currently fashionable atrocity. Schindler's Nazi pal, the
infamous and gun- happy Goth, shoots Jews for the fun of it. Given how
inured we have become to seeing individuals get it in the neck with ever
faster guns by the bad guys on our television screens, Goth appears just a
bit more outrageous because he does not even pretend to have been pro–
voked. In the larger scheme of things, Goth's performance goes just a
notch or two beyond what the audience has become accustomed to,
which itself is a necessary step to keep it on tenterhooks. I am not saying
that Spielberg's public is consciously waiting to be titillated by the vio–
lence, or that it is not petrified by the memory of the events
Schindler's
List
evokes, but only that if ever we manage to avoid another Holocaust it
will not be by way of a film. However moving it may be, however well–
acted,
Schindler's List
remains mass entertainment - in a society where
such entertainment has taken the place of serious thinking and has be–
come the opium not only of the masses but of many intellectuals as well.
It has been argued, quite plausibly, that the Holocaust is beyond the
capacities of art. Only a few novelists, such as Aharon Appelfeld and
Norman Manea, have approached the subject, and they have treated it
tangentially and allusively, so to speak. One is tempted to conclude that if
fiction, which is more complex, metaphoric and symbolic, cannot easily
encompass the Holocaust, then surely the cinema, with its bent toward
the spectacular and the immediate, is not the best medium. A comparison
with the book
Schindler's List,
by Thomas Keneally, illustrates this point.
Weare saddened by the death of
Ralph Waldo Ellison
a friend and early contributor.
1914-1994
E. K.
