From the adventures of Indiana Jones, to a great white terrorising Amity Island, to that adorable alien three million light years from home, everyone knows Steven Spielberg’s work. His films have earned him Oscars, Golden Globes and Directors’ Guild Awards to name a few.
Spielberg has directed, produced or executively produced eight out of the thirty top grossing films of all time. Entertaining the world for decades, with titles such as Amistad, Jurassic Park and Saving Private Ryan under his belt, it’s hard to imagine cinema without Steven Spielberg.
By the age of 22 he was signed by Universal. A 26 minute film called Amblin’ opened the gateway to the industry and the rest, as they say, is history.
Better known than Spielberg’s successes is the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East.
There is no escaping the media attention that it receives, with stories filling the news as the disputes continue between Israelis and Palestinians. The division of land, the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the 1967 six-day war have contributed much to the tension between Israelis and Palestinians. The conflict is extremely complex and volatile and I am not pretending that I know everything there is to know, but the troubles are impossible to ignore.
Spielberg has recently launched a new project aimed at helping relations between the two sides. Video cameras will be issued to young Israelis and Palestinians alongside training to help them make films about their everyday lives.
These documentaries will show the conditions under which each person lives, show who they are, and what they believe in; they will then be swapped to give everyone a chance at seeing how the other side lives. The documentaries will then be edited and made into a joint film.
Spielberg hopes that from this, “They will be able to see the other sides of life and learn that we are all human beings who want to live in peace.” The project is aimed at youths and this in itself makes a lot of sense; if you want your child to grasp a concept, you teach it to them when they are young. The age-old debate of nature versus nurture is appropriate here: nature plays a part, but the impact of upbringing is unquestionable. Spielberg targeting the youth is a way of creating understanding at an age where steadfast opinions and stereotypes have not yet been solidified in their minds.
I remember being struck in a history lesson at school by the pictures of German and British troops playing a football match in the famous 1914 Christmas truce across the trenches during World War I. It seemed so odd that two sets of people fighting against one another in a war could play sport together. It was as if they were fighting for an idea rather than the people who represented that idea.
To this end, do not the majority of people have similar sets of values? Do most people not want the same thing: security, peace and a safe place to live? Just as the soldiers in the pictures saw the opposition as actual people not so different from themselves, so Spielberg’s idea encompasses this logic and is an attempt to take it one step further and stop fighting happening in the first place.
As a Jew himself, Spielberg has done much to raise awareness of what it means to be a Jew today. His film Schindler’s List won seven BAFTAs in 1994 and is a film that few people forget once they have watched it. The profits made from the film which Spielberg dubbed as ‘blood money’, were used to set up The Righteous Persons Foundation in 1994, supporting organisations that aim to strengthen Jewish life in the USA. It funds projects that encourage Jewish learning and promote tolerance and inter-group relations through the media.
The same year saw the creation of the Shoah Foundation, which Spielberg helped to set up. ‘Shoah’ is Hebrew for calamity or catastrophe and the foundation records the stories of Holocaust survivors. The number of testimonies stands at 50,000 to date.
The testimonies come not only from Jews but also from homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and political prisoners, along with others who were affected. Spielberg produced The Last Days, the Shoah Foundation’s third documentary that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It focuses on five Hungarian Jews who each tell their own personal story about life in concentration camps and the suffering they bore for being a Jew.
The Shoah Foundation’s CEO, Doug Greenberg, believes that highlighting the violence that comes from cultural clashes is key to the Foundation; the contribution that it makes is “how to document those things using video and how to make them accessible to others.”
Awareness and visual recognition of global violence could be seen as crucial in the fight to stop history repeating itself. The current crisis in Sudan is receiving far more attention than Rwanda in 1994. The awareness that organisations such as the Shoah Foundation raise could be accountable for the increased consciousness regarding such situations.
The media has long been an effective source of information and a way of reaching people. Imagine the newspapers with no pictures, or the news with no interviews or video clips.
Spielberg’s recent film Munich, focusing on the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics is set to finance another project called the Fund for Coexistence, although the name is not yet confirmed. Like the Righteous Person’s foundation it will use the media as a way of promoting understanding between those of different cultures. It will not focus solely on the Jewish community, unlike the Righteous Person’s Foundation, whose aim is to support Jewish life in the USA.
Trying to reach people through cultural means is not a new conception. One of the other most well known campaigners for inter-cultural relations is the Argentine-born Israeli pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim. Together with the late Edward Said, a Palestinian writer and university professor, they collaborated and instigated the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, consisting of Israelis and Palestinians as well as youths from Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Tunisia. Two people, who politically should be worlds apart, shared the same vision for a stable Israeli/Palestinian future. The orchestra has performed all over the world, most famously in the towns of Ramallah and Bir Zeit in the West Bank.
Of course these examples of both Spielberg and Barenboim’s work are not the simple solution to a highly complex and delicate situation, but they are a step in the right direction. If there is no understanding and interaction between Israelis and Palestinians then the struggle for peace becomes ten times harder.
Barenboim’s orchestra and Spielberg’s projects are not in themselves going to achieve peace, but a way to help close the gap that exists between the two opposing sides. Barenboim says of his orchestra that it is ‘an orchestra against ignorance’, one that is not part of the political agenda but an example of a productive co-existence. The work of both Spielberg and Barenboim has and will inevitably continue to receive criticism; how can peace be reached through a few films and recitals?
But solving one of the biggest conflicts in history is not what these two men are about. Of course picking up a camera or a clarinet is not going to solve the whole problem but it is a way of encouraging interaction between two groups that have a long-standing historical rift between them; an attempt to come to a better understanding and acceptance of each other’s beliefs.
The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not going to be solved overnight but in a world with so many battles to be fought, any attempt at bringing those of different cultures together and creating a better understanding, has to be applauded.
