At the close of Goeth's introductory scene (a long drive in the back of a cabriolette through the streets of the Krakow ghetto and then to the Plasow camp), Goeth selects Helen Hirsch as his house-maid. Once more, leaving aside for the moment the obvious libidinal parallel of Schindler choosing a secretary (Goeth chooses one, Schindler is unable to choose and takes all of the candidates), what is significant here for the valuation/exchange matrix is the sequence that follows - Goeth has another woman, the engineer, shot dead. In so far as Helen's selection represents the first contingency that eventually determined her survival, we see here a recurring pattern in the film, whereby one person's survival is shored up/counterbalanced by another person's death.
Before delving further into this scene, I'll give a few examples to support my claim that this is a recurring element, a motif, in the film:
1) In the first of many narrow-rescue scenes in the film, when Poldek pulls Schindler out of bed while he's having sex with his new lover, so that the latter could pull Stern from a moving train headed for extermination. Still both panting and shaken, while Schindler/Stern walk down the platform we see the moving wagons in the background, and this is followed by a long shot of the deportees' belongings being piled up (clothes, watches, shoes, photos, teeth with gold crowns). This is a double valuation/exchange - Stern vs. the whole train, and the people on the train vs. their movables i.e. their material, tangible traces. The teeth with the golden crowns at the end of the shot signify for the viewer (as well as for the awe-struck clerk who is busy appraising a necklace when the teeth are laid on the desk in front of him), that the persons on the train have lost more than their "mere" material possessions. Stern himself, however, is not shown to be explicitly aware of the exchange; he only gives the moving train a fleeting half-glance, and only the viewer sees the inside of the warehouse with the belongings.
2) Following the ghetto clearance scene, one of the women in the Plasow camp tells her companion (they both subsequently survive): "The worst is over, we are workers now"; immediately afterwards Goeth sharpshoots two idle women from his balcony overlooking the camp.
3) In the selection scene in Plasow, when the adults go through the summary medical examination that determines whether they stay or are sent away from the camp, directly after the people not-selected rejoice for their good fortune, truckloads of the camp's children drive by - here again we see the contrast between those who stay and live vs. those who depart and are now doomed (I'll come back to this scene again later, to analyze its use of the soundtrack).
4) Towards the end of the film, when the women are rescued from Auschwitz-Birkenau, there are several shots that throw the exchange motif into high-relief: right after leaving the showers, two of the women catch a glimpse of another transport descending the stairs (to what we know is the real gas-chamber), juxtaposed by a shot of the smoking chimney. Then, a little later, during the final narrow-rescue scene in the film, when Schindler plucks the young girls away from the paws of a kapo and sends them onto his train, the train that would leave Auschwitz to go to Brünnlitz, once more the camera lingers on a newly arrived transport being led towards the gas-chamber/crematorium.
I hope that the above clearly demostrates the salience of the valuation/exchange matrix, and how it functions very near to the film's central theme of survival - as at each turn of the narrative we see value lost to balance any value gained.
Before moving on, it is interesting to point out that Stern's rescue scene and the exchange it includes stands in contrast to the other three scenes (Goeth meets Helen, the Plasow selection and the departure from Auschwitz). In the latter three scenes, not only the viewer registers the element of exchange (saved vs. doomed), but also the protagonists - the women's gaze and their recognition of the price paid for their rescue are emphasized.
Please bear this gendered difference in visibility in mind, I'll come back to it in my next post.
Now I need to return to the scene in which Goeth picks Helen as his maidservant to highlight a a crucial detail.
This scene marks an important point of tangency between the Valuation Matrix and the Libidinal Economies structures. Goeth's choice of Helen (ach, the Beautiful Helen... who later stands between two powerful men... what better name for a female protagonist who would decide between two me vying for fame and fortune... but I'm getting ahead of myself again) which marks her for survival is measured up against his decision to shoot the female engineer. This is significant in that it foregrounds the tendency of both Schindler and Goeth to have libidinally charged relations towards unproductive persons. In other words, Goeth's choosing as his housemaid the only unqualified woman in the group of candidates (he asks the group of women whether they have any experience, and then ignores their answers and chooses Helen) , and then ordering the shooting of a certified engineer parallels Schindler's fixation on the little girl with the red coat. The attachment that Goeth forms with Helen is contrasted with his otherwise destructive attitude towards unproductive persons (shooting the two idle women, trying to shoot Lewartow for failing to produce more than a handful of hinges, shooting Liesek for ruining his bath).
A similar tendency can be traced in Stern's involvement with a succession of handicapped and "impractical" characters - Chaim Nowak, the literature and history teacher, whom Stern furnishes with a worker's hat, a Blauschein and a job; the one-handed Mr. Lowenstein (who does not survive); Lewartow the Rabbi; the blonde boy (need to look up his name...).
Stern's efforts to rescue Lewartow and the boy are then taken up by Schindler, who colludes with Stern's efforts to protect these individuals.
The filmic mechanism through which we see the rescue of the above individuals (as well as the Perlman couple, which Schindler adds as his first explicit act of rescue, besides Stern's life) constitutes THE core of the Valuation Matrix - in as much as it is fully explicit. That is, it requires no ferreting out or overreading, as it is exposed by the very narrative of the film.
I'll describe this mechanism in detail in my next post, but here I'll just say that the rescue mechanism consists of the exchange of Schindler's personal belongings - lighter, cigarette case, watch - objects which we the viewers recall from the opening scene involving Schindler.
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