Schindlers List Film Study

1993’s Schindler’s List serves as a major achievement in both film making and compositional music design. Directed by Stephen Spielberg, Schinder’s List has become the definitive motion picture account of the sheer horrors that embody the Holocaust. John William’s Academy-Award winning score played an imperative role in the film’s success and wide-spread resonance with audiences across the globe. William’s sorrowful melodies and haunting harmonies accompanied innumerable moments throughout the film, though perhaps most effectively in the Immolation Scene. Through exploring the style of music behind this scene, it’s accompanying sound effects, it’s mise-en-scene, and it’s transition into a subsequent dialogue, an understanding of the Holocaust much deeper than that present visually in a book or lecture is gained. At the 2hr:13min mark in the film, a strange form of precipitation begins to fall over the city of Krakow, Poland. A non-diegetic orchestral theme slowly begins to play as civilians of the town confusedly try to identify what is falling on them. The theme immediately evokes an immense sense of dread and sadness, as the audience viewing the film most likely possesses the knowledge as to what the substance is. The peculiar substance is ash, as Oskar Schindler discovers upon close examination (2:14:02). The mise-en-scene of a mass immolation of “more than 10,000 Jews” comes into view accompanied by a historical footnote of the event known as the Krakow Ghetto massacre. The theme intensifies as the camera pans the thick black smoke pouring from the massive piles of burning flesh. Diegetic sounds of Nazi anti-Semitic shouts, roaring flames, the clangs of shovels, and sporadic gunfire add to the mise-en-scene of utter human-induced evil. As the camera pans Jewish workers literally digging their own graves, a Jewish harmonic choir joins the Immolation Theme, perhaps illustrating the senseless loss of not only their lives, but of their culture. The