How does the 1994 Steven Spielberg film Schindler's List construct the historical events, time period and personality of the Holocaust and...

Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Thomas Keneally's fictional depiction of Oskar Schindler took, as one would expect from the prominent Jewish American director, a very respectful portrait of this flawed but heroic individual. The filmed version of Schindler's List also presents a harrowing and accurate depiction of the treatment of Europe's Jewish population by Nazi Germany.

In filming Schindler's List, Spielberg deliberately gave his film a documentary feel, evident in the director's decision to film in black and white and to present informative titles throughout to emphasize the accuracy of the events portrayed. As characters based upon actual individuals, most prominently, Amon Goeth, the real-life commandant of the concentration camp where much of the story takes place, are introduced, Spielberg has subtitles placed on the screen to inform the audience as to the character's identity. He used a similar tactic to inform viewers as to the geographic locations depicted.

Spielberg and his writers, Keneally, who adapted his novel for the screen, and Steven Zaillan, meticulously researched details of the locales used and the events that took place. Spielberg's idea was to depict the story of Oskar Schindler as a microcosm of the larger events occurring during the years covered. The Holocaust was an event of enormous magnitude involving the deliberate deaths of as many as nine to 10 million people, six million of them Jews. By giving a sense of the magnitude of suffering and the level of brutality inflicted by Germany on its victims, Spielberg was able to illuminate the heroism of his main protagonist, Schindler.

As noted, Spielberg is Jewish, and is heavily involved in documenting the horrors of the Holocaust through his Shoah Foundation, which interviews survivors of the Holocaust for future historians to use in refuting the efforts of anti-Semitic individuals to deny that the Holocaust occurred. He put a great deal of effort into depicting the events and locales as realistically as possible. The film's perspective is definitely that of the victims and of Schindler, and the film presents the titular character as the flawed individual he truly was, which serves to humanize its subject, but the final scene (excepting the contemporary footage of visitors to Schindler's grave) was criticized for making excessively melodramatic this particular individual's already courageous actions.