Oskar Schindler, Pet Detective

“Schindler’s List” came out in mid-December 1993, but my friend Cynthia and I didn’t get around to seeing it until about two months later. The film is rather long, so when we showed up at the theatre, it was a good two hours before the next showing. Rather than waste all that time, we decided in the meanwhile to catch a newly released comedy, the Jim Carrey vehicle “Ace Ventura, Pet Detective”.

I don’t need to tell you that these are very different movies. Both were highly enjoyable, but in distinctly different ways. Fortunately, we knew enough by then to see the comedy first (it really, really doesn’t work to do it in the opposite order). The very next day, I was describing to Cynthia a shot that had resonated with me — a moment in “Schindler’s List” when a uniformed guard is menacing his helpless victim. Half way through my description I realized that I was actually describing a scene from “Ace Ventura”.

You can well imagine that I was taken aback to have made such a mistake. How could I have confused a serious film about an attempt to annihilate millions of people with a wacky comedy in which the hero talks out of his butt cheeks?

That, my friends, is a very good question.

I have a theory, which goes something like this: We are so used to the conventions of film that we no longer quite see them. We don’t even realize they are conventions. Were we to encounter a similar experience in real life, we would quickly doubt our sanity. In a movie, points of view shift instantaneously, time skips and jumps around with abandon, and everything is grouped into scenes in which action first needs to be “set up” via an establishing shot before anything else can happen. Not to mention that nobody ever goes to the bathroom.

In fact, the myriad conventions by which any Hollywood film operates are so thoroughly engrained in our collective psyches, they have become part of the very fabric of our existence. The two shot, the jump cut, the slow pan or rapid montage. It’s all part of the language of film. We often forget, while completely immersed in the cinematic experience, with its powerful visual language, just how particular and stylized that language really is.