Why seeing a little girl in red during a black-and-white film can affect us so deeply.
There are certain moments in cinema when you encounter something so unexpected and jarring that, for a split second, you completely forget you are watching a movie. The jump cut from a bone to a spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the shower scene in Psycho, the spinning top at the end of Inception—moments like these leave us suspended somewhere in the gulf between observation and comprehension, unable to think or process or do anything except simply surrender to the raw emotional intensity of the experience. At least, that’s the closest I can come to describing what I felt the first time I saw this scene from Schindler’s List, when the black-and-white film is suddenly interrupted by a little girl in a red coat:
That Steven Spielberg could manufacture one of these moments in a film centered on a trauma as unfathomable as the Holocaust is more than just fitting; it speaks to the power of cinema itself, and to its ability to express ideas in ways that language could never capture. What I find most remarkable about this scene, however, is how it uses something as simple as color, a formal element that is often disregarded or taken for granted, to evoke such a deep emotional resonance. I think there’s a profound complexity to this decision that can easily get lost amidst all the melodrama, which is why I want to take a closer look at this scene. But first, some quick context.
Even those who have never seen Schindler’s List have likely heard of the film’s subject Oskar Schindler, a Nazi industrialist who secretly saved the lives of thousands of Jews working at his factory in Poland. This scene takes place halfway through the film, after a sadistic SS commandant arrives at the Krakow ghetto in order to “empty” it out and build a concentration camp in its stead, and marks an inflection point in the narrative of the film. Until this moment, Schindler’s efforts to employ and protect his workers have been motivated entirely by his own convenience; they provide Schindler the cheap labor that he needs to capitalize on lucrative wartime business opportunities. After witnessing the brutal massacre of the ghetto, however, Schindler will gradually begin using his connections to other Nazi party members and SS officers to actively shield more and more prisoners from the death camps, even at the expense of his own fortune. In light of this transformation, this scene is often read as highlighting Schindler’s internal realization of the true horrors of the Holocaust by emphasizing, both through the attention on a little girl and the music featuring a children’s choir, the innocence of the Jewish victims.
The question that remains, then, is: what does color have to do with any of this? In other words, why does Spielberg choose to depict the little girl in red rather than keeping her in black-and-white like everyone else in the film? Most critical discussion essentially boils down to two compatible explanations for this chromatic decision. First, it individualizes the girl — by “painting” her in red, Spielber marks the girl out against the mass of undifferentiated bodies we see in the frame and puts a distinctly poignant human face to the violence. Second, this use of color subjectivizes the scene, so that Spielberg shows us the girl as Schindler sees her; the red then visualizes the idea that in this moment of overwhelming brutality and senseless death, Schindler’s pathos is indexed by the specific sight of a child. While these arguments certainly have merit, I think that Spielberg actively destabilizes both of them, and that this subversion itself forms the thematic crux of the scene.
To see why, let’s begin with the second point, on subjectivization. Visually, the reason we might think that the camera takes on Schindler’s perspective is because of Spielberg’s decision to repeatedly cross-cut between eyeline shots of the ghetto and reverse shots of Schindler. It’s not a stretch then to say that the girl, who so often occupies the privileged center of the frame, is the clear object of Schindler’s attention. Consider, for instance, the sudden pan of the camera at 00:49, just as the girl goes out of sight behind a stretch of houses; here, the motion of the camera reflects how Schindler, in observing the massacre, is always searching for the girl. This would suggest that the red color symbolizes how the girl stands out to Schindler personally, taking on some special meaning or significance in his eyes.
There’s two immediate challenges to this interpretation, however. First, the camera does not solely give us POV shots of the city from Schindler’s perspective, but also shots from the street level as well; and second, the girl appears in red even when she’s emphatically not in Schindler’s field of view (for instance, when she enters her home). That is to say, there is a deeper filmic logic by which color becomes attached to the girl as a diegetic object, one that is independent of Schindler’s perception of her. An easy response to this would be to say that the scene is presented to us the way Schindler imagines it—after all, the surrealist injection of color into a black-and-white film already presents us with a degree of fantasy. And Spielberg seems to support this reading, giving us a closeup of Schindler’s face in intense thought right before he turns his horse away from the scene and rides off. But of course, the scene doesn’t end there. We get one more look at the girl – still in red – inside her home before she runs to hide under her bed, at which point the camera cuts to the first and only black-and-white shot of her.
This change in color is, to me, the most haunting and horrifying image in the scene, if not the entire film. Because at first, the red allows us to read the girl as a symbol of pure innocence, a lost child wandering through the city unaware of the terror of the moment. While everyone around her is engaged in a frantic struggle for their lives, she simply strolls through the streets like a kid would any other day; and while she constantly moves through spaces of indiscriminate execution, she always remains untouched by the violence herself, as if she occupies some parallel, dream-like world. But the second she moves underneath the bed, we are forced to re-read her as someone who is afraid, who is trying to hide, who knows she is about to die. In that instant, the person we thought was chromatically marked as a beacon of hope, as a stand-in for all the innocent lives who might be saved if only a figure like Schindler could act, transforms into a victim like everyone else. And although we do not actually see the girl overtaken by violence, it is always following in her wake, with the transition out of color signifying what we know but are afraid to say: that it will inevitably catch up to her.
That’s what Spielberg’s use of red represents—the futility of trying to project hope or goodness or redemption onto moments of suffering. No matter how hard we try to reimagine history, we are inevitably called to re-read scenes we thought we had understood until we have fully stripped the color away. Because the very movement of trauma is this re-reading, this constant reliving of a past that overwhelms us by the sheer absence of meaning in its pain. To interpret this scene as a private revelation in which Schindler discovers his humanity in the sight of a little red girl is, I think, to latch onto an optimistic yearning to make sense of something fundamentally senseless, an illusory hope that Spielberg offers before firmly wrenching out of our hands with that final cut to black-and-white. And this exploitation of color is ultimately performed not for Schindler’s sake but for ours as the audience, witnessing one of history’s most indescribable traumas the only way we can: as moviegoers looking back at the past.
That this experience takes the form of the fate of the one being collapsed into the plight of the many is certainly significant. It’s tempting to say that the red color functions to demarcate the girl, to throw her in sharp relief against the black-and-white backdrop of the film. Just look at the pains to which Spielberg goes to visually set her apart from everything else we see on screen. The first thirty seconds of the scene are positively dominated by frenetic horizontal lines of movement, as the ghetto inhabitants continuously race across the street from either side; the girl’s slow pace and vertical motion down the street stand out in sheer contrast. Similarly, at 00:59, the girl walks alone in the exact opposite direction as the huddled line of prisoners being marched by the soldiers, once again emphasizing her movement by virtue of maximal difference.
And yet, from the start, there’s an uneasy tension in the impulse to pay close attention to the girl as a character of special significance. When I first watched this scene, what surprised me the most was not even that the girl appears in red, but the kind of red that Spielberg chooses to show her in. Whereas one might expect her to look like this:
We actually see her as this:
If Spielberg’s goal in using color was merely to make the girl as visually pronounced as possible, then he could have easily exaggerated the coloration to magnify the contrast. Instead, he chooses to paint her in a diffuse, greyish, faded tone of red, one that solicits the possibility that you might miss her completely. And that’s exactly how she first appears—not with a bang, but a whimper.
Between the scale of this shot and the muted quality of the red color, it’s very likely for the girl to stay unnoticed until long into the scene. And even when the red color does become visible to us, the girl is almost always obscured from the camera, either hidden behind other bodies (00:44) or blurred out in the background of the shot (01:45). If you’re still not convinced, look no further than the fact that the only term we can use to even identify her character is simply “the girl in red.” Spielberg may have given her color, but he refuses to grant her a name.
I think this deliberate ambiguity between presence and namelessness, between visibility and anonymity, is part of the point. What Spielberg is drawing our attention to here is the contingency of identity, or the danger that the individual might be entirely forgotten when we think about or study traumatic events. The ease with which the red color, and with it our attention as spectators, withdraws from the girl mirrors how each human life claimed by the Holocaust is so often masked or blurred by the impersonal statistics that tend to dominate historical discourse: the unfathomably large numbers of victims, the masses of bodies and piles of hair in photographs, the long lists of names. To frame the tragedy of the Holocaust in the language of quantity – of the sheer volume and scale of the atrocities committed – is to consign the individual suffering of a little girl in red to utter oblivion—in other words, to strip her of her name. The film even plays on our propensity for this exact kind of forgetting by bringing the girl in red back, long after the initial shock of her appearance has faded from our memory, for one more brief, blink-and-you-miss-it moment:
It is perhaps this sight of the dead girl that prompts Schindler to break down at the end of the film and lament, “I could have saved one more.” Not “more lives,” but one more life. What makes Schindler’s List at its core such a humanist film is its insistence on this one-more-ness of tragedy, the idea that every single human life deserves to be celebrated and safeguarded for its own sake. Named after a list, the film nevertheless does not succumb to the temptation to subsume its titular subjects into an amorphous whole but rather seeks to breathe life into each of their individual identities. That’s why Spielberg spends so much time lingering on close-ups of the faces of his Jewish characters as they each speak their name out loud, or why he does not merely tell us the final length of the list but instead shows us each name being typed out, one at a time. Perhaps the film’s greatest accomplishment is its ability to actively make Schindler’s list anew, to offer in its patient recording of these lives one final immortalization against the obliterating force of history.
