Oskar Admirers

Regarding Peter Rainer’s film commentary “Why the ‘Schindler’s List’ Backlash?” (Jan. 30):

As one who holds the film “Schindler’s List” in even higher regard than does Rainer, I thank him for his most thoughtful response to the complaints of the Backlash Brigade.

Most of the debate, like the one concerning “Philadelphia,” only demonstrates that filmmakers are sure to be “damned if they do and damned if they don’t” when it comes to dealing with certain sensitive subjects.

I recently viewed “Schindler’s List” for the second time. I have little doubt that in decades to come this extraordinary work will come to be regarded as one of the truly great motion pictures. The present carping, so eloquently answered by Rainer, will be all but forgotten. As historians of the arts well know, this is a very old pattern.

BOB EPSTEIN

Los Angeles

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Political agendas aside, those who criticize the movie for not depicting the “Schindler Jews” as well-developed individuals have obviously never written a screenplay.

Whereas Anne Frank and the Sophie of “Sophie’s Choice” were main characters, the Jews in Steven Spielberg’s film were secondary. To have done justice to them, screenwriter Steven Zaillian would have had to devote enough pages--and Spielberg enough screen time--for a miniseries.

Zaillian and Spielberg chose to tell the story of Oskar Schindler. Their critics are saying, in effect, that they should have told a different story.

I suppose there are those who feel that Melville should not have written about an obsessed whaler.

PHILIP GOLDBERG

Los Angeles

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Rainer calls Nazism a “vicious riddle.” It isn’t a riddle to me, and I doubt it is to Spielberg.

The documentation of Nazism and its roots, Hitler’s understanding of a collective German character and his virtuosity in playing on the nationalistic needs of that character--with appalling results for both Europe and her Jews--is recorded with readable clarity by William L. Shirer in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”

How many Americans do you think can identify the first two Reichs? How many do you think care? Someday our ignorance of the past will be our undoing.

DINAH HATTON

Shell Beach

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While I admired Rainer’s sensitive piece on the deplorable backlash against Spielberg’s masterful “Schindler’s List,” he should read the section on Hitler in Alice Miller’s “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence” if he seeks additional insight into “the vicious riddle of Nazism.”

He might also screen Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Conformist” and Elio Petri’s “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion” and “One Way or Another” if he thinks it’s not possible to “explain” fascism in psychologically convincing and artistically satisfying terms.

TOM SILVESTRI

Studio City

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On the “Schindler’s List” backlash and whether the Holocaust ought to be dramatized at all:

Time is a lens that alters our memories just enough to make grief bearable. That is why we are able to get over things. Art is often instrumental in that process: It condenses, replays, refocuses. By its very nature it can help us heal.

PATSY HILBERT

Granada Hills