Citizen Spielberg (review)

Film scholar Lester Friedman is best known in the field of Jewish studies for his books on Jewish characters in Hollywood movies and Jewish directors who brought them to the screen: The Jewish Image in American Film (1987) and American Jewish Filmmakers (1993, with David Desser). In Citizen Spielberg, Friedman sets out to take film director and producer Steven Spielberg seriously—a task that, Friedman argues, critics and scholars of film have hitherto been loath to do, as they are largely dismissive of this highly successful, popular filmmaker. Friedman seeks a more nuanced approach to Spielberg’s cinematic output as director; taking readers through an analysis of his films and responding to the critical assessments of others, Friedman asserts that “Spielberg is a far more complex, sophisticated, and wry filmmaker than most mainstream critics and academic scholars appreciate” (p. 5).

Friedman organizes his study by grouping the films according to genre. Therefore, for Jewish studies scholars, Citizen Spielberg will be of interest largely for its final chapter, which is devoted to the 1993 film Schindler’s List, a film that stands alone among Friedman’s typology of fantasy films, adventure melodramas, World War II combat films, and social problem films. (Although there is brief mention in the book of Munich, Spielberg’s 2005 drama about the Israeli government’s response to the terrorist attack on the nation’s athletes at the 1972 Olympics, Friedman does not include any analysis of the film, as it was released after he completed his study.)

In his chapter on Schindler’s List, Friedman locates the film in a cursory overview of Holocaust remembrance in America and offers some interesting information about the film’s production—for example, that the cinematic adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s book on Oscar Schindler’s rescue of hundreds of Jews from Nazi persecution might well have been directed by Martin Scorsese or Billy Wilder. Most of the chapter consists of Friedman’s refutation of other scholars’ and critics’ cavils about the film, paying particular attention to those who fault its portrayal of Jews, which he discusses at length.

In his introduction to Citizen Spielberg, Friedman asserts the importance of genre study and auteur criticism, rather than more “postmodern” approaches, for this project. But the popularity of Spielberg’s work and the problems this raises for many viewers—not only critics and scholars, though theirs are the most readily available public voices—are issues worth considering in themselves. They are better assessed by looking elsewhere than within the director’s films—and one doesn’t need to be a postmodernist to do so. Consider, for example, the larger issues that Friedman raises in his introduction to the chapter on Schindler’s List, in which he characterizes his response to the film as “passionate ambivalence. As a Jew who lost grandparents in the Holocaust, I am deeply moved each time I watch Schindler’s List, sincerely admire Spielberg’s courage in making the film, and applaud his willingness to challenge himself technically, thematically, and emotionally. Yet as a film scholar trained to analyze moving images and the reasons these images affect audiences, I find it difficult to embrace the film uncritically” (p. 290).

It is certainly useful to examine Spielberg’s accomplishments as a leading figure of American popular culture—as a director and producer of films and television programs, as the cofounder of the studio Dreamworks SKG, and, moreover, Friedman argues, as a ubiquitous force and iconic presence in contemporary American popular culture. But doing so demands looking beyond the films themselves, however skillfully crafted they may be, to their epiphenomena. What, for example, does Friedman’s own complex engagement with Schindler’s List reveal, both about the power of a fictional film to effect the extraordinary responses it has engendered, across the United States and around the world, and about Spielberg’s stature (since the making of this film) as a public figure, especially for Jews?

Spielberg’s investment, not only of the profits from Schindler’s List but also of the value of...