Schindler's List.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

It is difficult to imagine a film more heavily praised than Steven Spielberg's adaptation of "Schindler's List," about a German businessman and Nazi Party member who, through his ownership of a metals factory using slave labor, saved more than 1,000 Jews from death at Auschwitz. The Academy Award-winning movie's ads contain vast lists of critics saluting it not only as the best picture of the year, but one of the greatest of all time. One critic for a major weekly maintains that it contains some of the most touching moments since the cinema's silent era.

That the film is successful in conveying the horrors of the Holocaust in as reasonable and tactful a manner as can be expected of Hollywood is undeniable. What is bewildering, however, is how little resistance, how little criticism of any kind, the film has received, especially from scholars with vast, even firsthand knowledge of the Holocaust.

Various writers, including Nobel Prize winner and concentration camp survivor Elie Weisel, have insisted that the Holocaust can not and should not be represented in dramatic narrative. The egregious 1970s TV miniseries "Holocaust" was attacked precisely for its hubris in so doing, rather than for the inherent awfulness in its conception of the Nazi genocide. Yet, "Schindler's List" is very much Hollywood fare, dramatic storytelling that, while based on fact, cares nothing for the lessons taught by films such as Alain Renais' "Night and Fog" or, more importantly, "Shoah" - works suggesting that the absence of horrific spectacle may be the prime aesthetic guide in representing what is almost beyond comprehension.

Spielberg, whose career has been about nothing if not spectacle, takes viewers not only into the cattle cars and Auschwitz, but into the gas chambers. While it is true that some of the Auschwitz showers actually gave people baths, the fact that Spielberg's victims survive seems of a piece with the cotton-candy view of the world he consistently has demonstrated, most recently in "Jurassic Park," a film about a dinosaur amusement park gone amok. Even more, the overbearing tearjerker ending (redeemed only by the final documentary moment at the tomb of the real Oskar Schindler) has no relationship either to the historical facts or Thomas Keneally's rendering in his 1981 novel.

What is most disturbing about "Schindler's List," protestations from Spielberg partisans notwithstanding, is its dependence on Hollywood genre conventions. While critics...