Respuesta: El Spielbergpost
Spielberg and the Girl in the Little Red Coat
by Julie Rigg
When I think of
Schindler’s List there are some scenes which epitomise everything I hate about Steven Spielberg’s filmmaking.
The film was shot in black and white by Janusz Kaminski, with the well known effect of making images emotionally sharper. (We have far stronger and more detailed recall of black and white images than their equivalent in colour.) Though no doubt black and white for Spielberg also denoted ‘history.’
There’s a scene in which the ultra-tall, ultra-blonde, and ultra-heroic Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) watches Jews being rounded up in the Cracow ghetto. His eye and ours fall on the figure of a small girl in a red coat dodging through the legs, and the panic, and the terror. She disappears from our sight, but later, we catch a glimpse of a small red coat thrown on a cart.
Ah, that girl in the red coat! Pristine, anonymous, tasteful. How could anyone fail to be moved by this travelling blob of terrified innocence?
It was a cliche of old-master painting to place a dot, a splash of red in the foreground to draw the eye, to force the perspective. Spielberg leaves nothing to chance.
We know nothing about her, of course. Just as we know nothing about most of the Jews in this film…apart from Ben Kingsley’s portrait of the accountant, Itzhak Stern, and the young Embeth Davidz’s Jewish girl brutalised by an SS Commandant.
For the most part, they are treated by Spielberg as a class, a group, a category: Jew. Even the family we see being brutally evicted from their apartment disappear from the narrative. But they’re not given identity in the first place.
The scene with the little girl in the red coat was, reportedly the subject of a dispute between Spielberg and the screenwriter Steven Zaillian, who feared it an overly sentimental touch. Spielberg prevailed.
Like the neat folds in the headscarves of the women waiting to be herded into the camps, the small girl in the red coat for me stands for the shortcuts Spielberg so often takes for affect, his failure to respect our emotional intelligence.
Julie Rigg is a film reviewer for ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Radio and correspondent for Arts Today, Radio National.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/27/steven-spielberg/spielberg_symposium_films_and_moments/#rigg
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