"Schindler's Singularity"

"Schindlers Singularity" | Slocum J. David Slocum New School for Social Research "Schindlern Singularity" Yosefa Loshitzky, ed. Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindlern List. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Despite being exceedingly complex and rooted in a variety of intellectual fields, the ongoing debate about the representation of the Holocaust is familiar to many humanists who perceive the event as a potential limit-case for a range of aesthetic, religious, and historical practices. In cinema, the 1985 appearance of the documentary Shoah and director Claude Lanzmann's well-publicized strategy of working to invoke memory through oral recollections rather than explicit images endorsed the unrepresentability of Holocaust experience on screen. Hollywood's infrequent treatment of the subject in productions like Sophie's Choice (Alan J. Pakula, 1982) and Triumph ofthe Spirit (Robert M. Young, 1989) implicitly confirmed the same assumption and avoided direct representation of the genocide. Even a handful of scholarly works from the late 1980s - Ilan Avisar's Screening the Holocaust: Cinema's images ofthe Unimaginable, Judith E. Doneson's The Holocaust in American Film, and Annette Insdorf's Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust - underscored the separation between public discourse about the Holocaust and the productions of popular culture. In late 1993, the release of Schindlern List profoundlyofgraphic violence, the depiction of the camps at Plaszów challenged the terms ofdebate about representation by of-and Auschwitz, the individualized focus on.the Germans fering a Hollywood-style narrative dramatization of the Jew-Schindler and Goeth, the more collective (and, to some, steish genocide. That challenge also constituted for many a reotypical) portrayal ofJews, and the use of"realistic" narratroubling initiation of the Holocaust debate into a main-tive filmmaking conventions to render the Holocaust. In the stream culture arguably ill-equipped to do it justice. Thelatter, they consider the broad cultural histories of responses film compelled the public and critics alike to rethink howto the film in the United States, Germany, Israel, and the Shoah could be imagined, remembered, and given his-France, its role in constructions ofthe popular memory and torical meaning.history of the Shoah, and the more general significance of The twelve essays in Yosefa Loshitzky's Spielberg'sHob-Hollywood cinema to contemporary global and national culcaust : CriticalPerspectives on 'Schindlern List'endeavor totures· 1^ best Pieces> ,ike Barbie Zelizer's meditation on address both the film's presentation ofexplicitimages, "real"the shaPing ofnistory and Miriam Bratu Hansen's analysis of characters, and a "true" story andthe emerging popular cui-American public memory, effectively combine these two artural discourse about the Holocaust to which the film is cen-eas of°°?aG?· 1^ make Pkin how time,y was the Productral . In the former category, contributors assess the imaging~ article continues page Vol. 27.1-4(1997) | 131 deaths ofmillions ofslaves? I found especially disconcerting Dmytryk's efforts to distance himselffrom Maltz, a person who was his close friend, prison mate, and best man. He even has the gall to say that the bitterness, anger, and hate which people like Maltz held toward those who informed is a sign of inner rot. Finally, Dmytryk argues that the evils of communism were so great that they aloe warranted his HUAC testimony. What makes this argument so weak is a simple question: was it necessary to name names before the HUAC and the FBI and thereby aid and abet those bent on destroying our Constitution (and, inadvertently, ruining the lives ofthousands ofdecent people) in order to condemn Stalinist communism? How is it that some managed to be neither Stalinists nor informers and, at the same time, maintain their commitment to the ideals which had motivated most people to join the party in the first place? Why not take the stances ofCarey McWilliams, I. F. Stone, Thomas Emerson, and Y. I. Harburg? Dmytryk does not seem to grasp that, when you get down into the mud with scum like anti-Semitic Congressman John Rankin or attorney Roy Cohn, you get pretty dirty. They and their brethren championed the very values which Dmytryk claims to despise. What is worse, they had the power to begin to impose their values on all ofus. Dmytryk and the rest ofthe informers only helped...