Steven Spielberg Films | Steven Spielberg Filmography | Steven Spielberg Biography | Steven Spielberg Career | Steven Spielberg Awards

Perhaps any discussion of Steven Spielberg must inevitably begin with the consideration that, as of 1996, Spielberg remains the most commercially successful director the world has yet 482 seen-an incredible, if mind-boggling proposition which, in another time, might have immediately made the director's films ineligible for serious critical consideration. Yet the fact that Spielberg's combined films have grossed well over one billion dollars attests to their power in connecting to the mass audience and offers the analyst an immediate conundrum which may take a more distanced generation of critics and filmgoers to answer fully: What does Spielberg know? And why has so much of his work invited such audience approval?

Spielberg has worked in a variety of genres: the television film Duel is a thriller; Jaws is a horror film; 1941 is a crazy comedy; Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a science-fiction film; Raiders of the Lost Ark is an adventure film patterned after film serials of the early 1950s; E.T - The Extraterrestrial is a fantasy/family film combining elements from The Wizard of Oz, Lassie, and Peter Pan; The Color Purple is a social drama; Empire of the Sun is an expansive wartime epic. And yet virtually all of Spielberg's films are united by the same distinctive vision: a vision imbued with a sense of wonder which celebrates the magic and mystery that imagination can reveal as an alternative to the humdrum and the everyday. The artistic consistency within Spielberg's work is demonstrated further by his narratives, which are structurally similar. In the typical Spielberg film, an Everyman protagonist has his conception of the world enlarged (often traumatically) as he comes face to face with some extraordinary and generally non-human antagonist who is often hidden from the rest of the world and/or the audience until the narrative's end. In Duel, a California businessman named Mann finds himself pitted against the monstrous truck whose driver's face is never shown; in Jaws, the water-shy sheriff must face an almost mythological shark whose jaws are not clearly shown until the final reel; in Close Encounters, a suburban father responds to the extrasensory messages sent by outer-space creatures who are not revealed until the last sequence of the film; in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones quests for the Lost Ark which does not let forth its Pandora's Box of horrors until summoned up by those who would attempt to profit from it; and, of course, in E.T, a small boy whose life is already steeped in imagination keeps secret his adoption of a playful extraterrestrial (although one could easily argue that the non-human antagonist here is not really the sensitive E.T., but the masked and terrifying government agents who, quietly working behind the scenes throughout the narrative, finally invade the suburban house and crystallize the protagonist's most horrific fears). Structural analysis even reveals that Poltergeist, the Spielbergproduced, Tobe Hooper-directed film which relates to Spielberg's career in the same way the Howard Hawks-produced, Christian Nyby-directed The Thing related to Hawks's career, is indeed a continuation of the Spielberg canon. In Poltergeist, a typical American family ultimately discovers that the antagonists responsible for the mysterious goings-on in their suburban home are the other-worldly ghosts and skeletons not shown until the end of the film, when the narrative also reveals the villainy of the real estate developer who had so cavalierly disposed of the remains from an inconveniently located cemetery.

Technically proficient and dazzling, Spielberg's films are voracious in their synthesis of the popular culture icons which have formed the director's sensibilities: Hitchcock movies, John Wayne, comic books, Bamhi, suburban homes, fast food, the space program, television. His vision is that of the child-artist-the innocent and profound imagination that can summon up primeval dread from the deep, as well as transcendent wonder from the sky. If Spielberg's films are sometimes attacked for a certain lack of interest in social issues or ?adult concerns,? they may be defended on the grounds that his films-unlike so many of the ?special effects? action films of the 1970s and 1980s-derive from a sensibility which is sincerely felt. A more subtle attack on Spielberg would hold that his interest in objects and mechanical effects (as in 1941 and Raiders of the Lost Ark), though provocative, may not always be in perfect balance with his interest in sentiment and human values. Spielberg himself acknowledges his debt to Walt Disney, whose theme ?When You Wish upon a Star,? a paean to faith and imagination, dictates the spirit of several Spielberg films. And yet certainly if intellectual and persuasive critical constructions be sought to justify our enjoyment of Spielberg's cinema, they can easily be found in the kind of mythic, Jungian criticism which analyzes his very popular work as a kind of direct line to the collective unconscious. Jaws, for instance, is related to the primal fear of being eaten as well as to the archetypal initiation rite; Close Encounters is constructed according to the archetypal form of the quest and its attendant religious structures of revelation and salvation; and of course E. T has already been widely analyzed as a re-telling of the Christ story-complete with a sacred heart, a ritual death, a resurrection brought about by faith, and an eventual ascension into heaven as E.T. returns home.

If Spielberg is especially notable in any other way, it is perhaps that he represents the most successful example of what has been called the film-school generation, which is increasingly populating the new Hollywood: a generation which has been primarily brought up on television and film, rather than literature, and for whom film seems apparently to have replaced life as a repository of significant experience. And yet if the old Hollywood's studio system is dead, it has been partially replaced by a solid, if informal matrix of friendships and alliances: between Spielberg and a fraternity that includes George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Lawrence Kasdan, John Milius, Bob Zemeckis, Robert Gale, Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, Melissa Mathison, and Harrison Ford.

It is noteworthy that Hollywood, though consistently accused of a preference for box-office appeal over critical acclaim, has nevertheless refused (until Schindlern List in 1994) to valorize publicly Spielberg's work, despite his popular and critical success. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has consistently chosen to pass over Spielberg's films and direction-in 1975 bypassing Jaws in favor of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Milos Forman; in 1977, bypassing Close Encounters for Annie Hall and Woody Allen; in 1981 bypassing Raiders of the Lost Ark for Chariots of Fire and Warren Beatty (as director of Reds); in 1982 bypassing E.T. for Gandhi and Richard Attenborough; and in 1985 bypassing The Color Purple for Out of Africa and Sydney Pollack.

More than requiring an explanatory footnote in film history texts, these ?slights? made it clear that the industry of the time had come to hold Spielberg responsible for the juvenilization of the American cinema in the late 1970s and 1980s. If the Coppolas and the Scorseses attempted to remake Hollywood to their own vision of a freer, more European, artistic sensibility (and by and large failed), should Spielberg now be held responsible for betraying earlier victories and turning Hollywood into a Disneyland? And although Spielberg became the richest man in Hollywood, the most commercially savvy, the man everyone most wanted to make a deal with, the most influential, he could not easily become anything at all like its most serious, respected artist. Spielberg's longtime insistence on avoiding adult themes, instead taking refuge in nostalgia, special effects, remakes, and sequels, seemed to be directly responsible for rather perniciously preventing non-Spielberg-like films from being produced. As well, the overwhelming number of Spielberg imitators, many producing films under Spielberg's own auspices, have largely contributed commercially successful hackwork.

Hollywood noted the irony, too, that it was in the Spielberg production of The Twilight
Zone movie (directed by John Landis) that two children and actor Vic Morrow should have been killed in a clearly avoidable accident in which the children's employment violated child-labor law. The Color Purple, although conforming to Spielberg's typical pattern of the hidden $ antagonist, backed off from an explicit representation of Celie's lesbianism, turning her instead 111 into a cute E. T.-like creature. Thus the confrontation of the hidden antagonist (Celie's true r - nature) became a kind of missing climax in a film which many critics ridiculed. After The Color Purple, when receiving the Irving Thalberg award from the Motion Pictures Academy, Spielberg -- gave a widely quoted speech which seemed surprisingly to admit responsibility for the state of i-r American film culture: "I think in our romance with technology and our excitement at exploring all the possibilities of film and video, I think we have partially lost something.... It's time to - r renew our romance with the word; I'm as culpable as anyone in exalting the image at the OSZ expense of the word.... Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers." Spielberg's speech was followed by arguably his finest work: from a screenplay by famed dramatist Tom Stoppard, Empire of the Sun, set in Asia during World War II, includes some of Spielberg's most startling set-pieces (such as a crowd sequence which rivals Eisenstein's use of montage in ?The Odessa Steps? sequence of Potemkin, or an unusually expressive evocation of the atomic bombing at Hiroshima), as well as more adult themes relating to war and peace, community integration and disintegration. Nevertheless, when this film was overshadowed in many ways by Bertolucci's Asia epic, The Last Emperor, Spielberg seemed to beat a hasty retreat into safer material.

Always, a remake of A Guy Named Joe in which Spielberg portrayed adult relationships within a fantasy context including helpful ghosts, was both a critical and financial failure. Even more distressing was the critical failure of the 1991 Hook, in which Spielberg's professed appreciation for the word disappeared under the weight of charmless Hollywood juveniles having onscreen food fights amidst special effects gleefully presented by Spielberg as artistic entertainment. Although critics had for years suggested that the source material Peter Pan would provide Spielberg his most natural material (a boy not wanting to grow up), many were stunned when Spielberg's version finally arrived: bloated, overlong, overproduced, looking more like a vapid amusement park ride or a multimillion dollar commercial for a new attraction at the Universal Studio Tour than a film. Its artistic message-that its adult Peter Pan should work less and spend more quality time with his children-was in ludicrous contradiction to the herculean effort required by all, including its director, to devote themselves to such a high-budget, effects-heavy project; thus the film emerges as the most cynical, hypocritical attempt to play on audience sentiment to attract box-office in the Spielberg oeuvre.

The year 1993 marked a turning point for Spielberg-with the release of two films in the same year that could not have been more different. Jurassic Park, a cinefantastique wonder showing dinosaurs wreaking havoc in a contemporary theme park, was a roller-coaster ride which fast became the most commercially successful film of all time, bypassing even Spielberg's own E. T Although the special effects were mostly marvelous and definitely the reason for the film's appeal (can anyone who has seen the film ever forget the startlingly graceful images of apatosaurs grazing in the forest?), many critics were startled by a certain desultoriness in the construction of the narrative: loose ends here and there, scenes which seemed not all to pay off. And indeed, deficiencies may be attributed to Spielberg losing some interest in the project-for the other Spielberg film released in 1993 was the film which would finally, irrevocably answer his critics: a black-and-white film photographed in a radically different camera style, devoid of the famous Spielberg backlighting as well as his traditional over-the-top orchestrations, using virtually unknown actors, and all on the single most unremittingly serious subject of the contemporary world: the Holocaust. Spielberg's Schindlern List was his most striking, over whelming work; with it, he finally won his Academy Awards for film and director, as well as best film awards from the L.A. and New York critics groups, the Board of Review, and the National Society of Film Critics-a startlingly unanimous achievement. For a serious film, Schindler's List was also amazingly successful with the public, which was powerfully moved and horrified by the film. Based on the real-life story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who actually saved over a thousand Jews by employing them at his factory, Schindler's List, keeping with the Spielberg ethos, emphasized the most hopeful components of the story without minimizing or denying its horrifying components. The film's coda, which showed the actors along with their real-life counterparts who survived because of Schindler visiting the gravesite of the real Schindler, was criticized by some, but this strategy insisted the audience understand the story as historical and gave the film an even greater emotional depth. Although time will tell whether Schindler's List will retain its instant reputation as a great, towering achievement comparable to, say, Alain Resnais's short Night and Fog, the definitive Holocaust film, the film has-according to his own testimony-altered Spielberg's life, sensibility, and career. The first artistic work that allowed Spielberg directly to explore his Jewish heritage, Schindler's List so consumed him that he has since embarked on what he has called his most important life's work: a video project documenting the survivors of the Holocaust for educational purposes. In interviews given before his multiple Academy Award wins, Spielberg has also said that he could no longer imagine going back to directing the kinds of films he made before Schindler's List.

On other fronts, Spielberg has continued to consolidate his position in Hollywood as its most powerful man. His company, Amblin, has stepped up television production, either Spielberg and/or Amblin involved in television series as disparate as Amazing Stories, sea Quest, the top-rated drama ER, and the children's show The Animaniacs. Spielberg has continued to help produce the films of others, and at least one of those post-Schindler films, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, though a traditional Hollywood film in its warmth and sentiment, took on a non-traditional subject: homophobia in America. More monumentally, in one of the most publicized entertainment stories of 1994, Spielberg has formed a new Hollywood studio called Dream Works SKG in partnership with two of the other most powerful men in Hollywood, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. As Spielberg moves closer and closer to being a modern-day mogul in the style of Walt Disney or Cecil B. De Mille, will his Schindler's conversion continue and he devote himself to serious, revealing, personal projects requiring no apology, or will the lure of big bucks for future installments of Indiana Jones and other popular entertainments prove too great a temptation for Dream Works to forego? Perhaps Spielberg will find some way of mediating these apparently contradictory goals with enough integrity and skill to retain his popular appeal as well as his newfound critical respectability as a serious artist.-CHARLES DERRY