Tuesday, May 22, 2007

The Girl In Scarlet


Schindler's List (1993)
IMDB
My Rate: 5/5
Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Oskar Schindler is a German businessman who comes to Poland in the first days of occupation by the Germans in 1939. During the evacuation of jews from the cities, he picks some of them for labour to establish a factory producing utensils for the German army. His factory then becomes a refuge for the fugitive jews who prefer labour to death. Watching the Holocaust happening, shocks Schindler and makes him to spend all the money he has gathered from the factory to buy jews' lives from SS officers by bribing them and saving the jews from being slaughtered in Auschwitz concentration camp.

It's in black and white mostly, except that deeply affecting scene when Schindler watches the slaughter from a vantage point and he sees a little girl in scarlet dress running for her life and the only coloured thing in the scene in the little girl. Very touching. The film has many of these emotional peaks showing that how people suffer and what war has done to them...

Behind any war, is some stupidity and behind the stupidity is some ideology. In 1945, when Germany is defeated, a Russian soldier enters the camp and with the Russian accent tells them: "You are liberated by the Soviet army!". Yes, liberated but bound to another ideology that supports killing of the people for another purpose, another kind of groove, another 45 years for another ideology, and then another.

How many do we need?

4 comments:

H.B. said...

I do not know how many ideology shifts we need to be liberated.
I want to say that I can not tolerate the first 15 min of the movie and I have no intention to see it.
the war is always war and I can't find anything worthy in it but life has to go on.

The Monkey In The Corner said...

that's your choice. But you'll lose an important film in history! ;)

H.B. said...

OK! if I find an appropriate time, i will watch it with this new perspective :D

Gog said...

Yes, it's one of the most important movies of the last 20 years. I hate most of Spielberg works, because they're too much commercial and the quality is on (or maybe slightly over) the average.
Another film which I liked a lot is Duel. We must recognise his contributions to the history of cinema with Jaws or ET, but objectively seen, they're plain, simple and even dumb. That's at least my point of view.