Short Take: Steven Spielberg

Last week I had the fun experience of using the opening Omaha Beach sequence of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan in my two World History classes. Oddly, none of the students had ever seen it before. The boys uniformly thought it was awesome, but a few of the girls couldn't take the gore and asked to excuse themselves. I found that rather gratifying, actually - it demonstrated the power of the scene, which to my mind is the greatest stretch of film-making that Spielberg has ever created. If it were someone other than him and Tom Hanks involved, the scene would have a far higher standing among cineastes. The shot of the bewildered soldier picking up his severed own arm and wandering off with it is worthy of Kurosawa, Bergman, or anyone else you might care to mention. I used a lot of video clips - documentary and fiction - in the year-long history course, but none better than this one at putting you inside the historical experience.