Archive for the ‘holocaust’ Category

Playing for his life

One that I have been meaning to do for some time – without doubt, one of the finest films ever made about the Holocaust and one that, in differing its approach from the similarly superb Schindler’s List (1993), manages to convey the unique horrors of those anti-human times in a way that is peculiarly intimate and personal.

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‘One more person. A person, Stern.’

There are some films that bypass critical carping and can lay claim to being perhaps the greatest ever made. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) is one such work, and it is my privilege to talk to you about it.

The legend began back in 1982, when Australian author Thomas Keneally finally succeeded in publishing his account of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who managed to save some 1,100 Jews from the death camps in The Holocaust, or Shoah, as the Jewish race refers to mankind’s darkest hour.

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Reading between the lies

Objectively assessing a film that’s drawn from Bernhard Schlink’s book about how reading changes lives, for good and ill? An interesting situation.

Given the theme of The Reader, and the frequency with which cinema been cited as a medium that is so different from print as to make comparisons invidious (but, as everyone knows, it’s the points on which they cross that make both art forms what they are), director Stephen Daldry’s well-used filmic mode of flashback to assess the emotional distance between a Germany barely a decade past the Second World War, and a society living in an almost universal sense of disillusionment and in many cases ignorance, is a fascinating device.

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