The Art of
Remembering
Semi-autobiographical journey of Sammy Fabelman, a young boy who discovered that the camera isn't just a toy—it's a tool for uncovering the truth, shielding the soul, and capturing the impossible.
The Fabelmans, directed by Spielberg and co-written with playwright Tony Kushner, has been hailed as Spielberg’s most autobiographical film and has won generally admiring reviews. The story of a teenage boy coping with his parents’ disintegrating marriage in the 60s midwest is described by many as a “rare insight into the world’s most famous director's early life
The Fabelmans are a middle-class Jewish family living in various cities in the middle of the 20th century. Steven Spielberg's film about them centers on the conflict between artistic drive and personal responsibility, as well as the mysteries of talent and happiness.
Steven Spielberg’s uncharacteristically personal drama The Fabelmans is a string of character-defining memories, rare insight into the world’s most famous director who has usually kept us at arm’s length.
His formative years are moulded into something semi-fictionalised here – this is The Fabelmans, not the Spielbergs – but the vague details are roughly the same, the story of a boy discovering his love for film as his family splinters around him.
We start with his first experience at the cinema, as Sammy, in terrified awe of The Greatest Show on Earth and then haunted by what he’s seen. Determined to recreate the train crash that has filled his nightmares, to control and understand his fear, he begins a journey of home movies, both encouraged by his parents while reminded that a hobby should only take over so much of his time. As he grows, we spend the majority of the film with his teenage self, played by an excellent Gabriel LaBelle, as he wrestles with his passion while grappling with the slow decay of his parents’ marriage, played by Paul Dano and Michelle Williams.
The script, from Spielberg and Tony Kushner, speeds past the easy potholes and takes us somewhere less expected, focusing on smaller, not-as-easily explained emotions rather than the swell of the big. There remains a remove though still, Spielberg giving us a slightly too stage-managed version of himself and his family, some gristle missing from the darkest moments.
His father’s career ascent has them moving from state to state, adding a strain to their friendship with “uncle” Benny, played by Seth Rogen, who Sammy starts to realise is more than just a friend to his mother.
There’s already talk of this finally being Williams’s Oscar to lose (she’s been nominated four times before) and it’s certainly a performance that goes for it, unusual and specific, propelled by an indefinably weird energy that we’re not used to seeing in suburban mothers from the 50s and 60s.
Release date: November 11, 2022 (USA) Edited by: Michael Kahn; Sarah Broshar
Steven Spielberg
The architect of the modern blockbuster and a master of historical storytelling. From the terror of the deep in 1975 to the deep humanity of the Holocaust, his lens has captured the dreams and fears of generations
Few filmmakers have shaped the landscape of modern cinema as profoundly as Steven Spielberg. As a central figure of the New Hollywood era, he practically invented the summer blockbuster, yet his filmography seamlessly bridges the gap between pure popcorn spectacle and deeply serious historical drama.
His work is often defined by a few distinct visual and thematic hallmarks: the "Spielberg Face" (characters staring in silent, low-angle awe at something off-screen), a masterful use of tracking shots, striking silhouettes against strong backlights, and recurring themes of fractured families or ordinary individuals thrust into extraordinary circumstances.
To look at his massive career, it helps to split his essential work into two distinct formal lanes:
The Master of Spectacle & Tension
Spielberg fundamentally understands pacing, spatial geography, and visual suspense. He doesn't just stage action; he engineers tension through what he leaves out of the frame as much as what he keeps in.
Jaws (1975): A masterclass in editing and suspense born out of technical limitations. Because the mechanical shark rarely worked, Spielberg was forced to use subjective camera angles, yellow barrels, and John Williams' iconic score to build dread.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): A flawless exercise in classic adventure serial storytelling, defined by dynamic blocking and immaculate physical staging.
Jurassic Park (1993): A landmark achievement that pioneered the integration of CGI with practical animatronics, grounded entirely by a patient, suspenseful buildup before the chaos erupts.
The Historical & Serious Dramas
When shifting away from genre filmmaking, Spielberg often adopts a more grounded, textured visual language—frequently collaborating with cinematographer Janusz Kamiński to use desaturated colors, harsh lighting, and a more documentary-like camera presence.
Schindler's List (1993): Filmed in stark, high-contrast black and white, it remains one of the most devastating and formally rigorous examinations of the Holocaust ever put to film.
Saving Private Ryan (1998): The opening Omaha Beach sequence redefined how combat is depicted in cinema, utilizing shutter-angle manipulation to create a jarring, hyper-realistic, and chaotic image.
Munich (2005): A deeply cynical, atmospheric, and formally complex geopolitical thriller that explores the moral decay of cyclical violence.
"I don't dream for a living. I change dreams into images." — Steven Spielberg
When we look closely at Steven Spielberg’s late-career filmography, a striking shift occurs. The wide-eyed, Spielbergian awe that defined his early blockbusters ripens into something far more complicated: deep ambivalence, moral ambiguity, and acute self-reckoning.
While Munich (2005) and The Fabelmans (2022) seem worlds apart on the surface—one a gritty, geopolitical espionage thriller and the other an intimate, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama—they are deeply connected companion pieces. Both films dismantle the myth of the "righteous crusade" and expose the steep, devastating cost of creating a narrative or pursuing a mission.
Munich (2005): The Moral Decay of the Mission
Released during a period of intense global conflict in the mid-2000s, Munich stands as one of Spielberg’s darkest, most cynical films. It follows Avner Kaufman, a Mossad agent tasked with leading a covert assassination campaign against the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.
1. The Trap of Cyclical Narrative
In his earlier historical dramas like Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg maintained a clearer boundary between good and evil. Munich completely erases that line. Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner structure the film as a grueling loop: every time Avner’s team eliminates a target on their list, a more radical replacement rises to take their place. The film argues that vengeance is an infinite, self-cannibalizing cycle that solves nothing.
2. Formal Deconstruction of Genre
Spielberg uses the vocabulary of a sleek 1970s espionage thriller (taut pacing, slow zooms, paranoid blocking) only to weaponize it against the audience.
The Hotel Bombing: The sequence where the team targets a Palestinian diplomat in a hotel room is stripped of any "action movie" catharsis. Instead, the camera lingers on the collateral anxiety—the fear of hurting an innocent child, the chaotic mess of the explosion, and the physical exhaustion of the assassins.
The Ending Shot: The film concludes with Avner in exile in New York City, refusing to return to Israel. As the camera pulls back, the twin towers of the World Trade Center dominate the background skyline. It is a devastating visual thesis link, directly connecting the historical trauma of 1972 to the contemporary war on terror, underscoring that the cycle of violence never truly ended.
The Fabelmans (2022): Art as an Act of Violence
If Munich examines the cost of political action, The Fabelmans is Spielberg’s profound, sometimes terrifying confession about the cost of making art. For decades, Spielberg used broken families as a backdrop for genre storytelling (E.T., Close Encounters). Here, he finally turns the camera directly on his own childhood, mapping his parents' divorce alongside his own development as a filmmaker.
1. The Camera as a Weapon and a Shield
Spielberg treats the camera not just as a tool for magic, but as an instrument of exposure and emotional detachment. This is distilled into two critical sequences:
The Camping Trip: While editing 8mm home movie footage of a family camping trip, young Sammy Fabelman discovers—purely through the frame-by-frame mechanical analysis of a lens—the secret love affair between his mother, Mitzi, and his father's best friend, Bennie. The camera captures a truth that life was trying to hide.
The "Ditch Day" Film: Later in high school, Sammy films his tormentor, a charismatic anti-Semitic bully named Logan. Sammy cuts the footage to make Logan look like a literal golden god on the beach. When Logan watches it, he breaks down in tears, furious and terrified because the camera has created an idealized, mythic version of him that he can never live up to.
Through these scenes, Spielberg acknowledges that cinema is a form of manipulation. To edit a film is to control human emotion, to expose secrets, and, occasionally, to inflict a strange kind of psychological violence on the people you love.
The Converging Theme: The Obsessive Director
Ultimately, Avner (Munich) and Sammy (The Fabelmans) are avatars for Spielberg himself. Both characters are "directors" of a high-stakes production.
Avner must meticulously stage assassinations, manage a crew of specialized personalities, control the geography of a scene, and deal with the psychological fallout when the script goes off the rails. Sammy must stage miniature train crashes and war epics, organizing his peers and rewriting his family's reality to cope with pain. Both men are driven by an obsessive compulsion to see their vision through to the end, even as it tears their personal lives apart.
In these late-career masterworks, Spielberg looks back at his life's work and arrives at a profoundly mature conclusion: the stories we tell—whether written in blood on the world stage or captured on celluloid in our backyards—always demand a sacrifice.
Cinematography & Craft
Visual Language: Cinematographer Janusz Kamiński used a variety of film stocks (35mm, 16mm, and Super 8) to differentiate between the "real" world and Sammy's films. The lighting evolves from a warm, nostalgic glow in New Jersey to a harsher, more clinical light in Northern California.
Recreating the 8mm Films: Spielberg personally directed the recreations of his childhood films (Gunsmog, Escape to Nowhere). While he tried to keep them amateurish, he admitted he couldn't help but find "better" camera angles than he did at age 11.
The Final Shot: In a famous "meta" moment, as Sammy walks away from John Ford's office, the camera frame physically tilts to adjust the horizon from the middle to the bottom, signaling Sammy has instantly applied the master's lesson.
Real-Life Parallels
The Divorce: Spielberg famously blamed his father for his parents' divorce for years, only to learn much later that it was his mother’s heart that had wandered. This film acts as a public "apology" to his father.
The Scout Films: Many of the films Sammy makes are shot-for-shot recreations of Spielberg's actual Boy Scout films, including the war epic Escape to Nowhere.
The "Ditch Day" Film: The high school sequence where Sammy films his bullies and turns one into a "hero" through editing is based on a real event where Spielberg realized that film could be used to manipulate perception and power.
Key Awards & Nominations:
Toronto International Film Festival: Won the People's Choice Award.
Golden Globes: Won Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Director.
Academy Awards (95th): Received 7 nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress.
Musical Score
The film marked the 29th (and one of the final) collaborations between Steven Spielberg and composer John Williams. Williams used a minimalist approach, avoiding sweeping orchestral themes in favor of piano pieces that feel like they could be played by Mitzi herself.
