Schindler's List

"Schindler's List" was shot in black-and-white because it is a movie about the denial of humanity, about an effort to annihilate the soul of a people. Filming in black-and-white ensured the movie's focus would beinternal clarity and not external spectacle. This technique engages an audience with the inner drama of the characters rather than with colorful images. The film possessed a few emphasized moments of color,suggesting the vitality of the human spirit.

The film's opening--the lighting of the candles for the beginning of the Sabbath--is in color. The glow of a single candle burns down to a faint orange dot in a dark field of gray-black. It quickly extinguishes, and its dying gray smoke takes us into the black-and-white world of the Nazi occupation. The next moment of color involves Genia, a little girl in a red coat wandering through the ghetto looking for her mother. The red of her coat symbolizes the vitality of youth, emphasizes the presence of a child amidst the horrors of the Holocaust, and foreshadows her death. Later the red coat of Genia reappears,covering the dead body of the little girl who inspired Oskar Schindler to save what Jews he could. Finally, there is the culminating moment in the film when those liberated, younger Schindler Jews, stride freely across an open field. It is a colorful scene of the survivors walking across the Jerusalem plain in 1993.

Without the dynamic contrast provided by the black-and-white world against which these moments can play, their value to the drama would be diminished.