Steven Spielberg’s landmark Holocaust film Schindler’s List was released in the UK 30 years ago this month. It was an adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s historical 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark and recounts the story of Oskar Schindler, a businessman and Nazi Party member who, by the end of the war, had saved hundreds of Jews from extermination.
It marked the death of Stanley Kubrick’s planned Holocaust film. Kubrick, too, had read Schindler’s Ark but was not enthused, sharing Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg’s searing opinion that it “is about success”.
Kubrick had spent decades searching for a suitable property to adapt, reading hundreds of books but finding nothing he considered appropriate, failing to find a single story which would channel everything he had read and studied.
Representing the Holocaust on film presented obvious logistical challenges. As Michael Herr recalled of Kubrick: “What he most wanted to make was a film about the Holocaust, but good luck in getting all that into a two-hour movie”.
A film specifically about the persecution and extermination of Jews also clashed with Kubrick’s long-held refusal to tackle Jewish issues head-on. How could a director who specifically wrote Jewish characters out of his screenplays make a Holocaust movie?
After years of looking, the search ended in 1991 when he read Wartime Lies, Louis Begley’s semi-autobiographical story of the struggle for survival of a young Jewish boy and his aunt in Nazi-occupied Poland. It struck Kubrick as the ideal story and starting point for his Holocaust project.
Working alone, Kubrick adapted the novel into a screenplay called Aryan Papers. He simultaneously began extensive pre-production preparation that rivalled that of another of his never-to-be-made films, Napoleon. He was gearing up to shoot in Poland but was temporarily stymied when he learned that Spielberg had already booked all that country’s WW2 vehicles, armour, civilian and military clothing. Not wanting to fight with his friend, Kubrick decamped to neighbouring Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Spielberg went on to shoot Schindler’s List in a stark cinema verité style, going to extraordinary lengths to be factually accurate and historically authentic. Using such A-listers as Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes, the result was a powerful docudrama that brought the Nazi genocide into sharp focus.
Despite being impressed by Schindler’s List, Kubrick is reputed to have told writer Frederic Raphael: “Think that was about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List was about six hundred people who don’t.”
Kubrick put his own film on hold. He knew that audiences would not go to see two movies about the Holocaust in quick succession. But he was secretly relieved, according to his widow, Christiane, because he had become depressed by the depth of his research. As he told her, “to make a truly accurate film about the Holocaust, the film would be unwatchable”.
We may bemoan the loss of a Holocaust film by one of cinema’s greatest filmmakers because of the release of one that remains controversial to this day for what many see as its trivialisation of the Shoah. However, an unforeseen consequence of Schindler’s List is that it has firmly embedded the Holocaust picture into the Hollywood landscape. Hundreds of films have been released in the wake of Spielberg’s film.
One of those is Jonathan Glazer’s forthcoming Zone of Interest. Set in the family home of Auschwitz’s commandant, Rudolf Hoss, which abuts the wall of the camp, it could not be farther from Schindler’s List. It also fulfils all the criteria for a Kubrick project. It runs at under two hours, it is not about success, and it shies away from showing any atrocities because it takes place outside the walls of Auschwitz. As one critic has astutely noted, it is not so much a film about the “banality of evil” but about the banality of domesticity.
This is the film Kubrick could have made — but Martin Amis’ novel of the same name, on which it is based, was published in 2014 and Kubrick died in 1999. In the end, though, we may have ended up with a form of Kubrick film, not least because its director, Jonathan Glazer, is also Jewish and grew up in north London close to where Kubrick was living and making his films.
But mainly because, as Glazer freely admitted of his illustrious forebear: “I’ve picked his pockets, really. People politely say ‘homage,’ but I probably stole his wallet.”
Nathan Abrams is professor of film studies at Bangor University and the author of ‘Kubrick: An Odyssey’ (Faber)
