To explore your medium, to revisit childhood, to have paying customers queuing round the block, to confront history at its most atrocious—there aren’t many filmmakers who can reasonably claim to have been driven by all of these impulses. Steven Spielberg has been a global brand for over 40 years now, though you’d have to say it’s a curious brand when the products run from ET to Saving Private Ryan, from Tintin to Jaws. In 1993 he was responsible for two highly successful films that couldn’t have been more different: Schindler’s List, which set out to represent the Holocaust in Poland without compromise, and Jurassic Park, which set out to sell a lot of popcorn. The 30-odd films Spielberg has directed may have brought in an estimated total of four billion dollars at the box office, and he may currently be the subject of a retrospective at the British Film Institute, but this is a very uneven and self-divided body of work, the contradictions running deep. It’s as if there were quite a few separate sub-Spielbergs, not all of them necessarily working well together.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY PEDRO DEMETRIOU
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