Every time a new Steven Spielberg film opens, a divisive critical discourse emerges. Are Saving Private Ryan and Amistad heavily critical of American history, or are they glowing tributes to democracy? Is The Color Purple a progressive portrayal of a region mostly ignored by Hollywood, or a sugarcoated bastardization of Alice Walker's far grittier novel? Is A.I. sentimentalized Kubrick or cynical Spielberg? Does Schindler's List's high-contrast aesthetic provide a clear-eyed document of the horrors of the Holocaust, or does it overly stylize and even trivialize the genocidal atrocities? And is the film more fixated on life or death? And does one make it more valid than the other?

That the world's single most financially successful filmmaker can provoke so much debate with the release of each new work makes him the perfect candidate for this issue's Reverse Shot symposium. Rather than commissioning each writer to tackle a single film or to trace a glib trajectory through a large and quickly expanding body of work (over 30 films directed since 1971, along with TV and countless producer credits), we have five long pieces taking on works from the forgotten (Sugarland Express), to the reviled (Always), to the almost universally lauded (Schindler's List) and placing them in the context of his entire career. The symposium format is an approach that we think opens up provocative possibilities not found in other publications, and is especially useful in trying to get at a director like Spielberg, whose films are so complex and contradictory.

We feel that there is hardly enough serious critical writing concerning this one-of-a-kind filmmaker, a man who has used the Hollywood system to his advantage time and again, and even managing to occasionally impress the elitists. Is there any other studio director that seems to so often summarize film history itself? Within Spielberg's oeuvre, we can intermittently get Kubrick's visual grandeur, Hitchcock's audience penetration, Ozu's moral capacity, Renoir's social critique, and Ford's classical formalism, yet all of it arrives with Spielberg's own ethical baggage, a specific set of values and themes that pop up in whatever genre he's playing with. Ironically, the career of the world's most visible director deserves a second look. Hell, even if it was filtered through a succession of flat slapstick gags, 1941 now seems infinitely more politically advanced than any film that has since dealt with Pearl Harbor.

It doesn't hurt that Spielberg is coming off a two-year golden streak that has even heightened the inherent schism in his career: Minority Report (dystopic roller-coaster ride or serious political inquiry?), Catch Me If You Can flippant nostalgic breeze or melancholy rumination on withering patriarchy?), and, most dramatically, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, have all pushed the director (who publicly disavows auteurism itself, preferring to think of film as a collaborative medium) into even more contentious realms of audience response. A rumored Secret Life of Walter Mitty adaptation slated for 2004 only points towards a further probing of themes examined in these masterworks. Certainly since Schindler's List, his films have seemed more sober, more infected with a dubious view of humanity; he now more delicately treads between the light and the dark, the moral and the corrupt.

His ability to so easily make us cry leaves many viewers distrustful of their own tears. Perhaps the claims of manipulation are valid (movies are fundamentally manipulative), but the more important question would be, "What's he really touching upon?" No other Hollywood filmmaker wrings more earnest or honest emotions from his audience, and their anger at being moved deep in those alcoves of recollection long forgotten reflects his greatest strength. Does Spielberg seriously examine his oft-explored themes of historical remembrance, spiritual transcendence, and broken families, or are they just means to an end for a superior visual storyteller who's interested in finding ways to test out the technology he has at his disposal? Either way, everybody has their one "Spielberg moment," the one that surpasses the rest and lodges in the brain with sheer iconographic force: Jaws's skinny-dipper being pulled below the murky depths, the beatific landing of Close Encounters's mother ship, Empire of the Sun's Christian Bale exulting from the internment lookout tower as the B-51, the "Cadillac of the Skies," zooms by. This fact alone makes him impossible to ignore- validating Spielberg is like giving credence to our collective memories. - The Editors