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Steven Spielberg's Balanced Truth

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The peer-reviewed article Balanced truth: Steven Spielberg 's 'Schindler 's List ' among history, memory, and popular culture was written by Christoph Classen and published on History and Theory, Theme by Wesleyan University on 2009. The article is separated into sub-categories to inquire if this film presents the truth of Holocaust; explore the balancing between film 's entertainment and aesthetics with the historical cultural facts; investigate the Spielberg 's efforts on recreating the milieus as accurate as they were. The article includes many statistic evidences to prove that the film reached a commercial success and received a wide range of the audiences from the world as a biographical movie; however, it also suggests that there are …show more content…

Unlike Piotr Szczypa 's article which encounters the specific approaches within the film to achieve certain impact on the audience; Christoph Classen weighs more on discussing the truths in Schindler 's List and researches for the explanations behind the scenes. In this article, the author spends wide coverage to argue the reasons why Schindler 's List cannot be fully considered as presenting the historical truth, even though Spielberg had tried his utter best to restore the environments and only reflect the evidence he got. In order to answer that problem, the article takes further steps into examine the “aesthetic, political, cognitive” dimensions of displaying a historical event which are inspiring for me to understand more about the existence of conflicts between the contemporary political parties to face the Nazi and holocaust issue. Additionally, though Spielberg deliberately wanted this film to be based on the facts, the article addresses the how people 's memories might have different interpretations in the film, which is another possibility of misrepresenting the fact. I think the comparisons and the thinking, as the article addresses in the title, about how historical truth can be involved in history, memory and culture can provide various aspects to rethink about this film because they view the film as a demonstration of a cultural phenomenon within the society. It can be helpful if I am analyzing the displays the race issues within this film and using the history of the political issues and people 's cognition as the defense for why this film avoids touching on some areas. It is not only because choosing to bebased on the information that provided by the survivors, who were saved by Oscar Schindler, creates the unjust impression of making him an over heroic figure; but also due to the limitations of producing a sensible documentary-like film in that

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