Kent Jones

Schindler's List (1993) is an interesting case. Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film about movie making during the Nazi period. So he consulted with Kristina Söderbaum and he did a lot of research but he finally decided there was no real way of doing it. Then, as you probably know, he bought the rights to "Wartime Lies" by Louis Begley and planned a film called "Aryan Papers" and went very, very far down the road with the movie. When "Schindler's List" came out, he said, well, nobody is going to see the film now. Which is really a shame. He shot tests. There was this exhibition that was done [at LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2013]. What he wanted was to find a story that would contain all of the horror of Nazi Germany in the images and in the trajectory of one person, so that you can feel the horror and the danger in every situation, in every moment in every room. If you look at the stills, you can really feel what he was trying to do. That's the film that no one ever made, I must say. "Schindler's List" really is not that film. (...) Who could do it? You need Kubrick. There's a book by Frederic Raphael, the guy who co-wrote the script for Eyes Wide Shut (1999) ["Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick"] and they are talking about the Holocaust. Raphael [brings up] "Schindler's List" and Kubrick says "Really? Do you think that's really a film about the Holocaust? I would call it a success story. Because the Holocaust is about six million people who died and "Schindler's List" is about one thousand people who lived." That kind of says it all. (...) When "Schindler's List" came out, the scene that bothered me was the scene where the women are all stripped down and go into what they think is the gas chamber but then turns out to be the shower. My understanding was that people didn't know about the gas chambers and so if they were herded into a room they wouldn't think they were about to be gassed because no one survived to spread the rumour about it. Show less «