With the casting of shadows, this makes Helen look even more vulnerable and attractive. Goeth moves around a lot yet he always seems to have his face covered by darkness which shows how whatever he does, he will never leave the “dark side”. Then we see Schindler actually kissing the singer and the light on his face is very proportional due to the use of the close-up shot. With the smashing of a light bulb at the Jewish marriage to complete the ceremony, it also is a trigger for Goeth to unleash an unholy rage on a woman who doesn’t speak to him through fear.
Plus, each time Goeth’s anger grows, the faster the interchanging between the three settings is. As the scene of the women in Auschwitz begins, we have a shot from inside the carriage. From one of the women’s views, this conveys the lack of knowledge and power that these women had over their lives and that ironically, without Oskar Schindler, they would have ended up at Auschwitz anyway. The next scene is where the women are removed from the cattle carts and it appears to be “snowing” except it is not snowing, it is raining ash.
All their clothes are removed and their heads shaven almost saying what is the point of having a past when you have no choice over your future. The extreme close up of the girl with no face because it was hidden by darkness before they all go towards “de-lousing”, creates pathos and pity for all those involved. As they begin to move down the halls, the first thing you see is a set of identical twins with their heads shaved. In the same way, this symbolises that all the identity of a human being had been lost and now they all were faced with the same fate.
They lost their identity and their control of their lives. Spielberg uses one of his favourite types of shot when he looks through the peephole and moves away, giving a Germans-eye view. With this shot, Spielberg almost screams, “This is the end – they’re not coming out of there. ” When the lights go out and they all scream with terror. In a cinema this would cause the audience into screaming at not only the noise, but also the sheer fact that Speilberg leads the audience to believe that the people are going to die.
Combined with the fact that this is one of the most horrific ways for a large number of people to die. Subsequently we see a close-up of a woman shaking with fear and terror at the story the woman told them at bedtime in the concentration camp was true and, as the woman said they were going to be gassed. The following two shots are of a crying child to create pathos and of embracing sister and a mother to make the audience think “what if that was my child”. It gives it that bit of audience identification, which makes the audience feel involved and the film profits from this all the way through.
The next ten seconds of the piece are spent wanting to know, because the audience doesn’t know, nor do the prisoners, what comes out of the taps. This creates an enormity of suspense as you see people staring with fear at the taps. With the realisation that they are actually just a shower, many break into tears. This next horrifically ironic scene is of the people actually going into the gas chambers with a child being focussed on while a guard is nice to it, all the child was to them was an “it”.
As they get to the entrance of the gas chambers it goes down as if the people are going to Hell. The concluding part of the film is when we see the characters and their real life counterparts placing roses on the grave of Oskar Schindler. This scene adds to the magnitude of the film by providing us with the proof that the film was real. That the horrors that we have just witnessed were not a creation of a twisted writer but of a small group of people bent on bringing terror on who ever they met.
In conclusion, Schindler’s List conveys the horror of the holocaust in a great detail yet not in a way that would offend the families and survivors of this terrible event. It combines a moving and disturbing true tale of how millions suffered at the hands of the most disturbing men and women of an entire generation, maybe of all time. How successfully does Schindler’s List convey the horrors of the holocaust Written by Matthew Townson 11N Mrs Ayliffe.
