OT: Schindler's List
No real Psycho connections here (aside from both films being in b&w), but I was just wondering what you guys think of this other tremendously iconic film.
shareIt's very good
shareActually, Schindler's List isn't all THAT OT from Psycho, at all.
In his seminal chapter on Psycho in his seminal 1965(original edition) book, "Hitchcock's Films," Robin Wood wrote:
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"Psycho is one of the key works of our age....its themes are of course not new-- obvious forerunners include Macbeth and Conrad's Heart of Darkness...but the intensity and horror of their treatment and the fact that they are grounded in sex belong to the age that has witnessed on the one hand the discoveries of Freudian psychology, and on the other the Nazi concentration camps. I do not think I am being callous in citing the camps in relation to a work of popular entertainment. Hitchcock himself accepted a commission to make a compilation film of captured material about the camps. The project reached the rough cut stage, and was abandoned there, for reasons I have not yet been able to discover; the rough cut now lies, inaccessibly, along with similar quantities of raw material, in the vaults of the Imperial War Museum.
But one cannot contemplate the camps without contemplating two aspects of this horror: the utter helplessness and innocence of the victims, and the fact that human beings, whose potentialities all of us in some measure share, were their tormentors and butchers. We can no longer be under the slightest illusion about human nature, and about the abysses around and within us, and Psycho is founded on, precisely, those twin horrors."
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CONT
I can say that if Psycho is my favorite film(edging North by Northwest only slightly) , that Robin Wood's "Hitchcock's Films"(the 1970 update of the 1965 book, including a chapter on Torn Curtain) is likely my favorite book. I read it at a young age-- AFTER I saw North by Northwest and BEFORE I saw Psycho -- and not only did it "set the mark" for my understanding of Hitchcock(even though, over the years, I found myself in disagreement with some of its theories), but it set my understanding of "well reasoned advocacy writing." Perhaps because I read it when I was so young, Wood's sentences rather burned their way into my brain and stayed there for decades.
Like this one: BEGIN " That, beside its immediate neighbors, (North by Northwest) is a lightweight work, a relaxation, in which we see Hitchcock working at something less than full pressure, I do not deny. That it is trivial or frivolous, not worth serious attention, I deny absolutely. When I spoke of an unbroken series of masterpieces from Vertigo through Marnie, I had not forgotten North by Northwest." END
A funny paragraph, that. "An unbroken series of masterpieces" from Vertigo to The Birds, I can accept...but not necessarily all the way to Marnie. And yet, here's Wood suggesting that NXNW might be considered lesser than Marnie. Nope.
Anyway, Wood's comparison of Psycho to the Nazi death camps is something I read early on in my understanding of Psycho, and its always stayed with me, especially Wood's chilling contention about "the utter helplessness and innocence of the victims" and the fact that human beings were their "tormentors and butchers."
Also this: Wood in this paragraph mentions Hitchocck's "commission" to do something with footage of the Nazi death camps. That one sentence led nowhere in 1965, but decades and decades later, SOMEBODY finally went into those vaults and FOUND that project. Its weird, closer in time to WWII(1965), there was no chance to find the Hitchcock concentration camp material at the Imperial War Museum -- decades LATER, in THIS age, that material was found.
One supposes that the British and US governments rather glibly thought that Hitchcock -- the master of murder and the macabre along with suspense -- would be just the right filmmaker to saddle with looking at that gruesome and heartbreaking concentration camp film, and yet -- was he REALLY "deep" enough to handle it? I think so -- so many of his movies make sure to make murder painful and murderers monsters -- not only Psycho, but definitely Frenzy, and before them, Strangers on a Train, Rope and Lifeboat and Shadow of a Doubt and Foreign Correspondent. (We have in Rear Window, though something odd -- a monster of a killer who dismembers his wife, but proves a pathetic, sad individuall.) We also have, in Torn Curtain, the HERO brutally murdering a German man(Communist, not Nazi) by putting his head into a gas oven, and Hitchcock himself noted the connection to the means of death at the camps.
But this: the gas killings at the concentration camps were carried off, often, by sending the victims into SHOWERS.
Uh oh.
In real life, psychos like Norman Bates and Bob Rusk DO exist..indeed both Bates and Rusk were based on real-life killers(Ed Gein and Neville Heath, respectively.) Our "blessed luck" is that the homicidal madness exhibited by Bates and Rusk happens very rarely in real life -- perhaps one in a million or even greater odds. Brains that get "diseased," bad chemistry...or evil. And we have a whole literature about these guys(its mainly guys): Ted Bundy, Ed Kemper, Son of Sam, etc.
But yet another horror of the Nazi concentration camps is that this homicidal psychopathy sounded in entire GROUPS of people -- a groupthink that allowed the Nazis to FIND the psychopaths necessary to actually do the killing(Ralph Fiennes character in Schindler's List) even as other, less crazy Nazis endorsed the use of psychopaths to carry out the mission of the Reich.
As we know, the Nazi regime is hardly the only regime to endorse wholesale killing of "objectionables" or enemies. It still happens, it can and will happen again.
And yet: Psycho found a way to "bury" that theme into a "mere horror movie" in which only two victims are killed(but horribly, without mercy, and both of them are trapped with no exit when the murders begin.)
Meanwhile, on the other side of Robin Wood's equations, even as Marion and Arbogast are "innocent and helpless victims," Norman Bates as their murderer(whether as Mother or not) is a "human being, whose potentiality we all share." Given that Mrs. Bates is barely seen or in shadow when she kills, we are not confronted with Norman's madness til the very end, in the cell. I rather think that Bob Rusk -- shown clearly so that we can watch his murderous actions and a face that shifts from uncaring to raging and back again -- more clearly encapsulates "the Nazi concentration camp mindset."
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While I have seen Psycho many times, I have only seen Schindler's List all the way through once. So my memories of its scene by scene structure are practically nil.
I do remember the scene where the female architect tells her Nazi guard that the barracks to house Jewish prisoners has been built wrong. She offers advice on how to fix it -- he executes her on the spot. As I recall, it is the first moment in the film when the murderousness of the Nazis reveals itself to the Jewish characters, and there is the aspect that victim is an "educated woman" and her killer is an uneducated, robotic brute. There is also the moment where the woman, realizing she is about to die, makes sure to tell the Nazi that her side WILL win. There is something uplifting in this horrible moment.
I also remember the scene where the heroic Schindler(Liam Neeson) tries to "gently persuade" the psychopathic Fiennes NOT to keep randomly killing Jews, appealing not to the man's better nature, but to his "superiority": something like "you are too superior a man to lower yourself to just killing these people, you have better things to do." Fiennes agrees for awhile -- a minute, a scene? I can't remember -- but ultimately can't help himself and starts killing Jews again(sometimes just picking them off at random in the distance, with a rifle.)
There is also the quick, banal but wonderfully satisfying moment in which Fiennes is captured and summarily hanged on the spot -- his evil finally dispatched by his executioners with a kind of contempt and unwillingness to even honor the evil man's passing.
The horrors in Schindler's List -- being based in reality and on a wide scale -- totally eclipse the horrors in Psycho, and yet the horrors in Psycho -- which also sound in the "fun"(Hitchcock's word) of haunted houses and "BOO" scares -- have their own power. There is something to be said for the entertaining aspects of Psycho and its Gothic-modern atmosphere.
Meanwhile, Schindler's List makes sure to counterbalance the horrors of the concentration camp scenes with the uplift of Schindler's rescue of the many Jews who make it on to his list(aided by his assistant Ben Kingsley, whose very face here connotes decency -- he's not the Sexy Beast brute.) And we get the (entirely fictional) scene where Schindler speaks to his grateful rescues and breaks down ("I should have rescued MORE of you") . And the final scene -- in color -- of modern-day survivors and heirs from the list.
Spielberg got "dinged" for some of the uplift of Schindler's List, but the truth is, in the end, the concentration camps were exposed and shut down, their operators were punished(well some of them).. there WAS a happy ending.
And this: I've always felt that Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" of five years later -- with its ultra-gory opening D-Day sequence and sad, brutal deaths of the American GIS along the way -- was making the point that to CLOSE the camps of Schindler's List...much blood had to be shed. It wasn't an easy victory.
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Think of all the "mean murders" in Hitchcock -- from Shadow of a Doubt to Lifeboat to Rope to Strangers on a Train to Dial M for Murder to Rear Window to Vertigo(Gavin Elster's heartless plan) to NXNW(the UN ambassador who gets a knife in the back) to Psycho to The Birds(just birds -- but MEAN birds who kill innocent people) to Marnie and Torn Curtain (committed by "the good guys" ) to Topaz(torture deaths and executions are on the menu) to Frenzy(arbitrary and sexual)....Hitchcock seems to have understood all too well just how inhumane humans can be to one another.
"Schindler's List" wrote this theme large -- but ended in uplift. And so, too, did most of the Hitchcock films above. Its like the cop at the end of Shadow of a Doubt says: "The world goes a little crazy sometimes...it has to be carefully watched."
PS. An interesting HBO "movie" about how the concentration camps were created can be found in "Conspiracy" starring Kenneth Branaugh, Stanley Tucci, and Colin Firth. Some of the dialogue in the film is from real transcripts, the rest is invented, but it is about a meeting of the Nazi high command at a very nice castle in the snow. Topic of discussion: creating the death camps and Exterminating the Jew.
Its a harrowing watch, sort of "12 Angry Men" in reverse, as Branaugh and Tucci "steer" any dissenters to concensus about creating the camps and killing all the Jews...post haste. One realizes that even psychopathy can be organized around Robert's Rules of Orders. (Or whatever Germans used for parliamentary procedure in the 40's.)