When I first saw Schindler's List I was already wholly opposed to Steven Spielberg's celebration as the great American auteur, bar none. I had already been recruited as a fan of Jane Campion's The Piano that I still consider a brilliant film without the cult of fame, fortune and political correctness seemingly thrown across Spielberg's shoulders as a mantle of his moral high ground and sense of artistic purpose. I was also a fan of little movies in the year's awards campaigns and felt skeptical about mass society proclaiming the value of any single movie with the complete solidarity that surrounded Schindler's List.

Consider these remarks while remembering 1993 was the year Spielberg directed the screen adaptation of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and minted a bank from its Jaws-like successes. Remember too that later in the year, and in time for the Christmas rush, he released his screen adaptation of Thomas Keneally's novel Schindler's List.

The first title was a blockbuster with untold fans. It cost tens of millions of dollars and featured the cutting edge in live action and digital special effects. Significantly it was considered light fare and lacking in the heft of some of Spielberg's earlier films.

The second title was a lesser blockbuster with still more fans. It cost a mere $25 million to produce and was a nearly all black-and-white drama on a sobering subject lasting well over three hours. Significantly it was considered among the most disturbingly realistic and graphic films of its day along with being the fulfillment of Spielberg's earlier promise as heir apparent to the Hollywood legacy of Frank Capra. Of course it didn't hurt that its three leads, Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes, each turn in accomplished work but most especially Fiennes who positively chews the scenery whenever he's onscreen.

Telling the real-life story of the World War II-era Catholic war profiteer, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), Schindler's List is a documentary lesson on the Nazi Final Solution even as it's an absorbing personal story of transformation and human courage. Where the film is utterly compelling is in its narrative about Schindler's recognition of wartime opportunity. As his business catapults him into the rarefied world of the industrial elite and the social circles of Nazi leadership, though, his company begins crumbling with the sustained attack of genocide on his work force.

At first indifferent to these problems because of his expanding affluence, he gradually learns to regard his forced Jewish laborers as more than mere components in his factory. The lens through which his transformation is affected is twofold. There is the personage of Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), his accountant and the pivot upon which his company was erected in parlaying Jewish wealth from the Polish ghetto into Schindler's seed capital. Then there is the personage of Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), Nazi official in charge of the Krakow concentration camp from which Schindler's laborers hail and through which Schindler observes the inhumanity of man acting against man.

With a crisis in conscience Schindler uses his considerable wealth and political connections to move his factory to Czechoslovakia and in so doing pays Goeth for the 1,100 laborers who've since become known as Schindler's Jews. In this newly erected safe haven Stern is directed to run the company into the ground in an effort to avoid contributing to the war effort until, finally, the war ends releasing the laborers into a European circumstance largely indifferent to their plight or existence.

With a careful full color prologue and epilogue beginning with a Hebrew prayer and ending with a visit to Oskar Schindler's grave in present day Israel, the film reminds us that less than 4,000 Jews exist in modern Poland. Yet there is the hopeful annotation that some 6,000 descendants of the Schindler Jews now live due to his efforts at creating a capitalistic underground railroad through the terrors of the Nazi machine.

Even in outlining this basic story, however, it's difficult to convey the set pieces organizing the picture with some of the most extraordinary horror and drama ever put to film. Perhaps most notable in this regard is the liquidation of the Jewish ghettoes when German soldiers herd crowds of wholly disenfranchised Jews from their crumbling temporary apartments on the way to the Krakow concentration camp. Bodies are ripped through by gunfire and vignettes abound with a stickiness that stays in memory.

Goeth begins by explaining the simplicity of Nazi racial and social purification in rendering 600 years of history a rumor through unyielding destruction and cultural erasure. A soldier plays Mozart on an upright piano after shooting the man hiding inside. Family members swallow their remaining jewelry and valuables once hidden inside mouthfuls of bread. Infirmed convalescents are assisted in taking poison before the appearance of gun-toting German soldiers. Night falls on the ghetto now rendered a series of flashing lights with gunfire and silence. Bodies are stacked as they fall.

Such sequences of seeming historical accuracy riddle the film and make it an emotionally rattling experience. Yet the very quality of these vignettes depicting the Holocaust fractures the movie in scenes where the lessons are not subordinate to the needs of the plot. By making Oskar Schindler the hero of the film Spielberg's version of Keneally's novel via Steve Zaillian's script delivers the goods about personal transformation but flays a bit about the edges when its canvas becomes too broad.

For instance, there is a harrowing section near the end of the film when Schindler has paid for his laborers and is moving them to his native Czechoslovakia. Due to misfiled paperwork the train of his Jewish laborers is diverted to Auschwitz where they are selected, stripped, shorn and force-marched into what appears to be gas chambers. After what ends up being a shower they survive their first day in the most infamous of death camps when Schindler bribes their release although the interlude interrupts his story.

Under closer scrutiny and a second screening of the film I can't fault the strength of the sequence because it's an amazing moment in the movie. Still, I'm aware it is also a break from Schindler's story and it gives the film one of its many meaning moments that were later used by schools and libraries to educate a mass audience about the holocaust.

The purpose for this effort is perfectly just when considering the generations born since the end of World War II without any first hand experience. The point, however, is that the historical backdrop for the film is but a backdrop, no more or less important than the various human relationships built to deliver its conclusion.

I'm personally critical of mainstream fiction film serving as the substitute for more traditional scholarship. But I'm also a supporter of pop culture's usefulness in wetting the appetites of mass audiences for historical periods, events and people in such a way that involves further consideration and study in that mass audience. Obviously the collision of these impulses to instruct and entertain lack an obvious solution but it is admirable that Spielberg and his producing cohort embraced the problem as a basic element in organizing their screen story.

Filmed as it was almost entirely on location in Poland and employing the magical qualities of Janusz Kaminski's visual palette as cinematographer, Schindler's List is infused with a three-dimensional quality of light and shadow that somehow compliments the horrors and tenderness of its on-screen action. It is nothing like anything done by Spielberg before or since and its audacity at being shot in black and white is an affront to convention but also a method for making its narrative stand outside cinema history.

That is to say Schindler's List, due to budgetary considerations, was shot on location with an unconventional method. This choice was made to both conserve dollars and infuse the film with the air of truth claiming which is, in the larger discussion of the its reception, the film's lasting lesson. It is simultaneously an incredible screen fiction and due to its production design, set pieces and directed action a history lesson as well.

Again what makes me personally uncomfortable about the film is that it is a screen fiction adapted from a novel in turn based on real events that has since been used as a history lesson. Treated liberally with the acknowledgement that history is the interpretive explanation of events in the past, including their causes and lived experience, history is not fundamentally intended to be a social science beholden to ideas of good and evil. Schindler's List, on the other hand, is an absolute and righteous condemnation of genocidal practice while also being the story of a good man with a conscience. This subtle difference between the social science of history and the commercial science of filmmaking is an important one to consider when watching Spielberg's movie.

It is exceptionally affective at delivering the visceral impact of events in the historical record when told through the prism of Schindler's attempt to save 1,100 Jews. But it is equally awkward in attempting to jettison its historical trappings to make dramatic moments for their own sake (i.e. Schindler as he's led from his factory while crying about how he could have saved more Jews if he'd sold all his worldly goods) or when it offers dogma spoken by its characters that seems implausible in the confines of the film's world (i.e. Jewish women sharing stories of crematoria and selection in their bunks).

Criticism included, Schindler's List is an overblown movie with an opening hour and a half ranking among the greatest ever produced in American cinema. That it falters in its subsequent hour and a half despite remarkable sections and scenes is the result of its attempt to detail the Holocaust through the method and character of a gentile capitalist.

Unfortunately for the other Oscar nominees, The Fugitive, In the Name of the Father, The Piano and The Remains of the Day, Spielberg's film was simply too awesome an accomplishment to ignore. His typical orientation towards popcorn entertainment notwithstanding, Schindler's List was the capstone of artistic risk-taking in that he is, himself, a Jew whose real life is occasionally assailed for having ignored this aspect of his ethnic origin. Silencing such personal critiques with a tour de force of storytelling including dogmatic breaks representing the Holocaust, his return to self, in a sense, is the underlying subtext of his Academy Award-winning film.

Not to be forgotten 1993 also saw non-nominated films released that will likely improve in public regard with the increasing passage of years. Among them is Robert Altman's web-like fascination with Los Angelenos with strangely interconnected lives, Short Cuts, Martin Scorsese's adaptations of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, the Harold Ramis comedy vehicle for Bill Murray, Groundhog Day, and the Clint Eastwood thriller by Wolfgang Petersen, In the Line of Fire. Each of these films found an audience for having featured well-regarded cinematic masters like Altman and Scorsese in the first two and more commercial draws like Murray and Eastwood in the second.

One other outstanding, independent film was also released in 1993. Menace II Society remedied the overtly melodramatic hyperbole of inner-city experience in so-called gangster films inaugurated by Boyz 'N the Hood. In so doing it fulfilled the promise of its twin directors, Allen and Albert Hughes, who created the most original and outstanding small film of the year, except maybe for The Piano that remains a personal favorite.