A Comparison of Shoah and Schlinder’s List: A Contrast of Drama and Documentary

The range of formats, genres, and technical choices that the medium of cinema offers to a film unit allows the same subject to be depicted in a vastly different manner in order to achieve an immensely different purpose. Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and Charles Lanzmann’s Shoah use varying cinematic techniques in sound, cinematography, and narrative structure in order to depict the Holocaust through a dramatic motion picture and detailed documentary respectively: with the quiet but riveting Shoah being more successful in conveying the implications of the Holocaust to the audience. 

The emotionally saturated soundtrack of Schindler’s List is designed to influence the emotions of the audience while the relative silence of Shoah encourages the audience to be absorbed in the details of the horrific history. While both films have audio that carries a serious tone, Schlinder’s List achieves this with a rousing orchestral background score while Shoah does this with voices and synchronous sound, or sound that is simply coordinated with the actions and events depicted visually. The entire last sequence of Schlinder’s List in which survivors are shown honoring the grave of Schlinder is enhanced by a violin accompaniment that plays continuously over the scene with no change in pitch or speed. The scene where women are being forced to have their hair cut before being led into the gas chamber has a complex interplay of extremely sorrowful violin music, shouting voices, and the sharp sound of scissors cutting away hair. Even here the pathos of the music seems to dominate the logos of the synchronous sound. This consistent use of violins throughout the film is well-placed and intricate but is similar to the use of melancholic violin music used in many mainstream Hollywood productions, thus giving a clue to its audience about what exactly director Speilberg is intending them to feel. In Shoah’s silence, one can see Lanzmann’s efforts to give the audience a moment to reflect and let the information presented wash over them rather than using music to guide their emotions in a specific direction. This is especially important for the sake of auditory clarity, as Shoah requires its audience to listen to several different speakers in different languages and follow subtitles closely. Even in a situation with little visual action, such as the opening three minutes of the film, Lanzmann chooses to maintain silence so as to not overpower the impact of the scrolling words on the screen. While Schlinder’s List has a background score that remains with you after the viewing and very effectively draws an emotional response, Shoah’s silence allows the audience the solitude they need to understand the grave impact of an event as incomprehensible as the Holocaust.

The stylistic cinematography of Schindler’s List is far more cinematic than the neutral, practical nature of Shoah’s cinematography. Speilberg chose a visual style that was black and white in order to depict a world where all color and life had been lost, using color cinematography only to mark the opening scene, the closing scene, and the appearance of a little girl. Schlinder’s List uses the lack of color to convey the literal darkness of the Holocaust period, while Shoah intends to maintain visual clarity in order for the audience to more accurately empathize with the horror that occurred. While Schlinder’s list has crisp editing with numerous close-up shots that amplify an emotion felt by a character, Shoah maintains distant wide shots that allow the viewer to get the full scope of the tragedy without cutting away to anything else. In Shoah, the entire interview with Franz Suchomel is shot with the archival interview footage intact without close-up or zoom shots, a technique that lets Suchomel explain his own perspective without the interference of the director’s, editor’s, or cinematographer’s intentions. While Schlinder’s List has technically masterful cinematography, Shoah opts for a more realistic approach to visual efficiency that serves to educate the audience rather than draw an emotional response. 

The protagonist-centered narrative structure of Schindler's List is widely dissimilar to the subject-focused organization of Shoah. Schindler's List focuses on the hero’s journey of Schindler. It depicts the actions of one German officer and centers the plot in one location. In contrast, Shoah attempts to be far more grand and comprehensive in its scale: structuring its narrative around the Chełmno extermination camp, the death camps of Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the Warsaw ghetto.  All of these subjects are explored with multiple testimonies from survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, thus preventing the film from being limited in its scope and coverage of the Holocaust. Thus, while Schlinder’s List allows the audience to become inspired and involved with the story of one hero, Shoah allows us to appreciate the larger magnitude of such a complex historical period.

Exploring the array of artistic perspectives through which a historical event has been analyzed may help with gaining insight into the complex and nuanced nature of the historical event itself. Comparing Schindler’s List and Shoah through a lens of historical implications may allow scholars to weigh the academic merits of perceiving the Holocaust as a story of ever-transforming individuals like Schlinder or a narrative of factual, multilayered individuals and institutions as in Shoah.