'He's very good at work not involving little creatures, you know': Schindler's List, E.T., and the shape of Steven Spielberg's career

摘要

Popular and academic criticism of Steven Spielberg's work today tends to conceive of it as being divided into highly effective family entertainment and serious, issue-oriented films. Schindler's List is often seen to mark a transition point in Spielberg's career when he switched from an emphasis on the former to a much stronger concentration on the latter. By tracing Spielberg's changing levels of involvement in the Schindler project from its inception in 1982 to the film's release 11 years later, in this paper I offer a different perspective on the development of his career. I emphasise the extraordinarily rich diversity of the filmmaker's output but also show that the unprecedented impact of E.T. led to a significant reorientation of both his reputation and his actual output, which was then counteracted to some extent by the success of Schindler's List.