Rabbi Steven Spielberg – A Colorblind Visionary
Is Steven Spielberg a Rabbi?
Strictly speaking, no. Though coming from an observant family, he embraced the movie-house, not the Yeshiva.
The term “Rabbi” however, literally means “My teacher.” Spielberg’s lessons have been priceless. More than any other individual (not named Elie Wiesel), he educated the world about the Holocaust. His Oscar-winning Schindler’s List is responsible for the public consciousness of it far more than all the history books and survivors’ testimony combined. Furthermore, to preserve the latter, he established the Shoah Foundation to videotape survivors. He single-handedly fulfilled every survivor’s only commandment – “Gedenk! Zachor! Remember!” more than all the rabbinical sermons on the subject in history combined.
Is he literally colorblind?
If so, he has never disclosed it (unlike other directors like Chris Nolan.) What is striking however is that his three arguably greatest films feel devoid of it. Lincoln didn’t focus on the blue and gray, or the red, of the bloodiest war in our history, but on the emotions, limned in shades of gray. Saving Private Ryan opens and closes focused on an American flag waving in the wind, blanched of all color. Most strikingly, his masterpiece, Schindler’s List is almost entirely in black & white.
Is he a visionary?
Definitely. Most obviously, any cinephile can discern if a war-movie was made before or after Private Ryan by the way the battle scenes are depicted. If they are subjectively visceral, verisimilitudinously deafened by the acoustic assault, they are recapitulating Ryan‘s opening D-Day scene.
More important than his technical expertise is his determination to be a storyteller, (why he collects paintings of Norman Rockwell, another artistic storyteller.) He has refined a signature method of enhancing the process, the art of anticipation.
It isn’t coincidental his first directorial work was Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, a TV suspense anthology. The TV-movie that made him famous was Duel, a clash between a driver and a homicidal trucker who is never seen. Our anticipation of his appearance is never satisfied, which purifies our satisfaction at his demise.
Similarly, in his first cinematic-hit, Jaws, the villainous shark remains unseen for most of the film. This was based on necessity since the mechanical shark wasn’t working, but Spielberg turned a problem into an improvement.
He employs the same approach with his next inhuman villains, the Jurassic Park dinosaurs. We never see them in the opening scene, but we appreciate how dangerous they are, because we witness how elaborate the precautions are taken (unsuccessfully) to protect their handlers from being devoured.
Other masters of suspense (Hitchcock, Fincher, Shyamalan) also cultivate anticipation, but exclusively in the expectation of danger. With Spielberg, it anticipates both bad, and good.
In Lincoln’s opening scene, Union soldiers address at length an unseen listener. It is only when the camera slowly rotates 180° that we receive our first glimpse of Abe. In Ryan‘s opening scene, an elderly veteran visiting the Normandy cemetery with his family morphs into the star Tom Hanks, reassuring us that he survives WWII.
When, at the finale, the eponymous Private Ryan morphs into the veteran, we realize we were tricked, but we are satisfied that Hanks sacrificed his life for a worthy individual, family and cause.
We are similarly surprised at the conclusion of Lincoln witnessing a scene at the theater anticipating, of course, Lincoln is about to be assassinated. Instead, it is a different theater with a different Lincoln, Abe’s son, who receives the news about his father prompting us to share his pain, becoming mourners, rather than voyeurs.
The best example is Schindler’s List. When, early on, the film transitions to black and white, as certainly as day follows night, we know when the harrowing experience ends, it will revert back to color. We don’t know when, why or where. Frank Lloyd Wright always designed entryways to be narrow and low to make the room one enters feel more majestic. Schindler’s sun-filled, brilliantly hued Israeli climax would not have been as revitalizing if the entire film was in color.
Oscar-winning director Lord Richard Attenborough repeatedly insisted to me there were only two geniuses in the history of the cinema, Chaplin and Spielberg. When accused of being Jewish, Chaplin replied he didn’t have that honor.
Spielberg earned that honor, not by being born Jewish, but by Tikkun Olam, leaving the world a better place than he found it. In doing so, he not only earned the gratitude of every child of survivors, like myself, but he also earned the title of Rabbi as someone who guided us to, in Lincoln’s words, the better angels of our nature.
