Written Response: After you have finished watching, write your first reaction by answering these two questions: What does the film make you think? What does the film make you feel? Take your first feeling and thoughts and develop both ideas i.e. how does the film make you feel? Then, take your first thinking after seeing the film and write about that. Again, what does the film make you think about? Answering both questions should take at least a few hundred words each. This essay response should be 500-750 words in total.
Then, write down any questions you have about the action or the historical background.
Then, at some point after May 23, we will discuss these questions about the film:
1. What is the effect of the film’s opening sequence in color of the family at shabbat dinner?
2. What is the effect of the black and white cinematography?
3. How does the film portray Oskar Schindler? What kind of man is he?
4. What is the turning point in Schindler’s view of what is happening? Do you find this change in him believable?
5. Schindler resists the Germans in a number of ways. List as many as you can remember?
6. What specific things does Schindler do to help Jews?
7. What is the effect of the little girl in the red coat?
8. Note the frequent use of “lists” in the film: in the beginning, with the registration of Jewish people from the countryside; at the registration for the ghetto; at the train station when Stern is almost deported; at the separation into workers and non-workers at the liquidation of the ghetto; at the organization in the camp; at the selection of healthy and sick inmates, etc. What is the effect of this foreshadowing?
9. What details does the film provide about the perpetrators of the violence? What do these details tell us about the Germans?
10. What are some of the ways people survive in the camps?
11. Note the frequent use of crosscutting between actions in the camp and actions outside in “normal” life. What is the effect of this crosscutting?