Arunava Das

The film portrays the story of Oscar Schindler who starts out as a greedy war profiteer with the motive of earning money. But with the onset of the gruesome cruelty of the Holocaust he transforms into a man who is willing to sacrifice the last drop of his fortune in favour of life. The film demonstrates several instances referring to complete stripping of the identities of the Jews. The statistics has been changed into names and faces to ensure that the viewers can make a personal connection with characters on the screen and they can be confronted to experience the horror on a personal level. The victims regain a sense of individuality and uniqueness instead of being put into a group. The whole story is heartfelt at the point of remark- "The List Is Life". The film has been shot in black and white and Spielberg uses this opportunity to highlight certain key scenes and emotions. One of the strong character in this film is a little girl in red dress who represents the embodiment of life and hope. Besides heavy symbolising, parallel editing is also used to highlight the contrast between the cruelty towards the Jews and the comfort of the Schindler and the Nazis. Itzhak Stern subtly demonstrates Schindler's conscience and influences his morality. Amon Goeth, The leader of the concentration camp with a high respect for Nazi morality visualises us the vivid and horrific situations of the holocaust and expressed his traits of greed and self-centeredness The final scene depicted in colour represents the Schindler Jews along with the actor counterpart. There were roughly 1200 jews who were saved by Oscar Schindler during Holocaust. Now the "Schindlerjuden" or the "Schindler Jews" are estimated to have over 8500 descendants in the US, Europe and Israel. This is one of the masterpiece created by Steven Spielberg and it went on to win several academy awards.

To brush up, the story has three main characters namely - The CRIPPLE, The UNDERTAKER and The MINISTER. The Undertaker represents others people's fear of death. He is not the cause of the death but the sign of its forthcoming. The minister on the other hand manipulates people through the hope of salvation and is the root source of all evil. The cripple is a carefree person who has not fallen for the tricks of the treacherous minister and seems to enjoy life rather than fearing death and wanting Salvation. The idea here is not to criticize religion but to criticize the herd mentality of the people and their nature of believing in religion blindly without any rational viewpoint even if it is at the cost of an innocent's life. The whole point is that religion can be used as an influential tool to manipulate traumatized people for the personal benefit and authoritative hold by some people in the society. All this vile motivation is backed by the ambience where the only playing key factor seems to be FEAR in every step. Backwater gospel tells the tale of how religion has been misunderstood similar to the story of "Sinners In The Hands Of Angry Gods"

The story of two adventurous persons heading for their destination with a bittersweet ending. The animations, facial expressions ,emotions expressed and the message of teamwork and sacrifice are heart touching...