THE PIANIST
Advisory: This film contains graphic violence
Director: Roman Polanski
Starring: Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann
Written By: Ronald Harwood(Screenplay), Wladvslaw Szpilman(Book)
First of all, something about the Director because as a person who has gone through the holocaust personally, it is really important to understand how the trauma has affected him and his views. This will give us a clear view of the world that the director has tried to recreate through this film.
Roman Polanski
He was forced into a concentration camp as a child, and his mother died there when he was seven years old, he escaped through a hole in a barbed wire fence. He has directed this movie with restraint and honesty, and has not let his personal views and perspective come into the way, instead has let the events and the actions tell the story. He avoids the opportunity to make his protagonist a hero in classic Hollywood fashion.
The biggest surprise of the film is that, even after showing us such horrors carried out by the Germans, Polanski brings out the both sides of the coin. We can see the sparks of hatred, prejudice, and violence in the hearts of his own community too.
The Pianist is a masterfully directed and brilliantly acted movie."
Adrien Brody
Adrien Brody is a revelation in this movie. His performance carries this movie particularly in the last half when he is alone and simply observing.
Great stretches of the last half of movie features no dialogue at all. This man portrayed the total feeling of hopelessness, being alone, being hated. The way I imagined this feeling is like in rugby where you have no one else on your team and you're the only one left standing, yet on the other team there is a group of big men that are just waiting to whack that ball at you.
Brody has done his homework for when his fingers are required, either on the keys or just above them. His performance is beyond Oscar worthy.
THE TRUE STORY
The true story is of Wladyslaw Szpilman who, in the 1930s, was known as the most accomplished piano player in all of Poland. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Szpilman becomes subject to the anti-Jewish laws imposed by the conquering Germans. He saw his world go from piano to the Jewish Ghetto and then he suffers the tragedy of his family taken to German concentration camps, while Szpilman is forced to live in German Labor Compound. At last he escapes and goes into hiding as a Jewish refugee.
MOVIE PLOT AND B.G.S
The story covers the years 1939 to 1946 in Szpilman's life. The entire film is from his perspective, and he is in every scene, except a few.
The movie begins with the bombing of Warsaw .The pianist; Wladyslaw Szpilman is playing live on radio station when the Germans begin bombing Warsaw. His insists on finishing the piece as the technicians flee when a bomb drops on the building. Szpilman and his family prepare to flee before the Nazi invasion. Just then news comes over the radio that England has entered the war and France will enter soon, they change their mind, thinking that the Nazi's will have to turn their attention elsewhere. This scene depicts the importance or the worth of the media in affecting the decisions of persons or society at large. Also, how a propaganda model of Nazis against Jews brings the whole race on the verge of extermination from the face of the earth.
This first half of the movie is shown through the Szpilman family. Their varying reactions, the father's weary acceptance, the youngest son's anger, the mother's worries over caring for her family, represent all of the differing Jewish reactions.
The Pianist answers the one great question everyone has about the Jewish experience. Why did they cooperate with their own destruction, in spite of being in huge numbers ?
The reason is the clever Nazi plan. Despite the allies entering the war, they begin slowly by passing laws restricting Jewish freedoms. It started with restricting Jews from going to restaurants, parks and other public areas. Particularly depicted when Wladyslaw steps out with a cellist he's attracted to, he can't take her anywhere, to a restaurant, to the park, they are even restricted to sit on a bench, so they just stand, and the dialogue here beautifully portrays the dilemma, the pain.
Then, Nazis restricted their other rights slowly. Always before the next round of restrictions, first there come the rumours, then the newspaper reports, and finally the enforcement. Forcing them to wear badges to show that they are Jewish, the exact measurements of which are carefully spelled out in the newspaper. The badges is a classic use of symbols used by the Nazis to separate out the Jews from the Germans and create a symbolic divide in the minds of Germans and Jews.( Not only by the Germans, the picture you see, on the front page is a promotion poster for the film ,which emphasises on two things pianist and the Star of David, clearly stating the theme of the film) In the final phase of the Nazi plan in Warsaw, all Jews are forced to move into a Ghetto which the Nazi's surrounded with a brick wall. They watched the neighbours being abused because they can’t respond to ridiculous and abusive commands fast enough - like the man in the wheelchair told to stand up. This scene is used as a symbol for the unrelenting cruelness showed by the Nazis. The many shocking scenes of cruelty go on and on, until they become commonplace. This makes the care for the dying give way to just trying to survive. These restrictions also helps us to analyse the extreme condition of government interfering with personal lives of people, here we can draw a analogy that if the regulations or restrictions in this strict sense can destroy a whole economy as is the case of country here, so governments need to keep a holistic view when deciding over regulation.
This slow build up of cruelties, removed the possibility of rebellion and resistance, allowed the Nazis to wear the Jews down, until the people were too weak and demoralized to be able to react. This also brings out the fact that power corrupts a person to any extent. The German soldiers were so seduced by the power assigned to them that they began taking pleasure in inflicting punishments on their fellow Jews. The other side of this corruption is the scenes depicting the German soldiers taking bribes from the Jews in return of doing small favours from them, this is a direct relation of the film to the present day society especially in India, where corruption has spread its roots, so deep that it has become a obvious fact in business and special liaison departments are setup, just for dealing with the government officials.
Once inside Ghetto, Wladyslaw finds a job of playing piano at a restaurant which was allowed to remain open because the owners are supporting the Nazis. It clearly brings out the point that profit is all that matters for a businessman and it governs the society at large. A former friend who has joined the Jewish police asks Wladyslaw and his brother to join the force, which they blatantly refuse. Food starts to run out. They are forced to live on potatoes. Wladyslaw and his brother try to sell books off to other Jews with no better source of income than they have. Even here, the movie depicts a few business owners doing illegitimate business by bribing the Nazis soldiers at the gates, bringing out the crude materialistic reality of the human nature. Members of the Jews family start disappearing mysteriously or growing sick with no help for it. A German soldier makes old Jews dance by the ghetto gate. We watch the atrocities mount but still life keeps the illusion of normality. There are work permits to be obtained, meals to be made. So that, even when the dead bodies of children are in the street and people are being stripped off everything and carted off to death camps. In one dialogue, Wladyslaw mentions the Nazi population as 400,000; his brother corrects him sarcastically that they are 360,000, so it will be easy to fix them in a small area. This is a fantastic use of numbers to bring out the enormity of the situation. The scene where Wladyslaw obtains permit for his father, through his contacts with an important person (who is a friend of his friend) brought out the importance of social networks to us in a very simplistic sense.
Once the Germans have their extermination camps set-up, the trains start taking the Polish Jews to their final destination. It is then, that the tale of Wladyslaw Szpilman begins to take extraordinary twists and turns that suggest surviving while surrounded by such inhumanity cannot be planned. When the Nazi's begin moving the Jews to the concentration camp, and the Szpilmans are being boarded on the trains with everyone else, Wladyslaw is offered a chance to escape.
He ends up in a work detail, relatively well fed and trusted enough that he's able to help smuggle weapons in preparation for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. But before the uprising he makes a decision to go into hiding. It’s an extraordinary situation--it takes six or seven people to keep one Jew alive. This whole story of escaping his tryst with death just because he had a few Germans and Police officer as friends makes us ponder over the fact how important social capital or in crude sense networking or personal relations are in life of a person or society at large. This uprising is also a classic example of people ,when put into the same conditions again and again tend to collude and here also , the revisiting atrocities of the Nazis brings the Jews closer and work for a common goal
He is not a hero, he is not a rebel that wants and lusts after revenge. He is a simple man who is doing everything in his power to stay alive. He is a desperate man and fears for his life and wants to stay as low as he can. Some scenes carry tons of emotions yet have little to no dialogue. The scene where Szpilman climbs over the wall and is walking through a veritable waste land of destroyed buildings is a powerfully quiet, cold image of death.
Ultimately it is his gift of music that perhaps saves his life and the final scene that he has with the German soldier is one of the most emotionally inspiring scenes I've witnessed. I think it is this scene that won Brody his Oscar. This is one of the all time great performances.
The opening performance by the pianist at the local radio station (with the sound of bomb explosions in the background) forming a harmonious link between the beginning and end of the film.
AFTER THOUGHTS
To say something is great that came out of such a terrible time is disconcerting. But this is a film that educates as well as makes you feel. Today, we have hardly put the Holocaust behind us. The world still teeters on the edge of war and chaos. Genocide still happens. Arrogant governments shove whole nations around and stereotype their peoples as lesser beings. What we need is art that shows how beauty and sustaining grace are provided in the midst of the madness. This brings in our view the role of media because this film being a small part of media colossal still has affected my point of view and with me of many others to look at this world in a different perspective where, we want to thank that, we were born in a free society.
This makes us think that how governments, their regulations affects the society, how it ensures the right of equality, right of freedom, right to speech or for that matter right to live. . It also shows that how a wrongly chosen or in this case, an ideological government can push its people or for that matter ,the whole world on the verge of destruction.
The power of media has grown tremendously in the present world, which is evident from the fact that the Oscar award (Best Actor in a leading role-Adrien Brody, Best Director-Roman Polanski, Best writing, Adapted screen play-Ronal Harwood) given to this film, has made this movie cross borders and reach to international community even to countries like India. This shows us the influence of media, how a award ceremony taking place in far off place has affected us and made us took notice of films like Pianist and many others.
Before writing this review, I did some random research over the movie and I found out that there is a view prevailing among some movie critics that the awards won by the movie are not solely based on its merit. They say that the movie was benefitted by the series of awards it won just before the Oscars and also by the faulty competitor’s strategy. The film promoters kept a low key promotion they did that by choice or they were forced to do so is not clearly evident. The whole point here is that it is the fame and success associated with Oscars that makes filmmakers to go any extend, to satisfy the needs of review committee which again reinstates the point that media has now the power to move masses or for that matter world and also, all that matters for production houses is not movie, but the profit that they can moake out of it..
The main story isn't about a war hero, but about people who don't want to die in this madness. Every aspect of the film is really done for a reason and in his place and you don't feel this as entertainment.There are many scenes in this movie where individuals are left with no choice but to save them and ignore the others in the process. That makes me think, can we really help anyone but ourselves in the extreme situations? I mean the really extreme situations. It will also cause you to stop and think about the riches we take for granted: family, food, music, freedom. In the course of showing us a struggle for survival, in all its animal simplicity, Polanski also gives us humanity, in all its complexity.
Starring: Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann
Written By: Ronald Harwood(Screenplay), Wladvslaw Szpilman(Book)
First of all, something about the Director because as a person who has gone through the holocaust personally, it is really important to understand how the trauma has affected him and his views. This will give us a clear view of the world that the director has tried to recreate through this film.
Roman Polanski
He was forced into a concentration camp as a child, and his mother died there when he was seven years old, he escaped through a hole in a barbed wire fence. He has directed this movie with restraint and honesty, and has not let his personal views and perspective come into the way, instead has let the events and the actions tell the story. He avoids the opportunity to make his protagonist a hero in classic Hollywood fashion.
The biggest surprise of the film is that, even after showing us such horrors carried out by the Germans, Polanski brings out the both sides of the coin. We can see the sparks of hatred, prejudice, and violence in the hearts of his own community too.
The Pianist is a masterfully directed and brilliantly acted movie."
Adrien Brody
Adrien Brody is a revelation in this movie. His performance carries this movie particularly in the last half when he is alone and simply observing.
Great stretches of the last half of movie features no dialogue at all. This man portrayed the total feeling of hopelessness, being alone, being hated. The way I imagined this feeling is like in rugby where you have no one else on your team and you're the only one left standing, yet on the other team there is a group of big men that are just waiting to whack that ball at you.
Brody has done his homework for when his fingers are required, either on the keys or just above them. His performance is beyond Oscar worthy.
THE TRUE STORY
The true story is of Wladyslaw Szpilman who, in the 1930s, was known as the most accomplished piano player in all of Poland. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Szpilman becomes subject to the anti-Jewish laws imposed by the conquering Germans. He saw his world go from piano to the Jewish Ghetto and then he suffers the tragedy of his family taken to German concentration camps, while Szpilman is forced to live in German Labor Compound. At last he escapes and goes into hiding as a Jewish refugee.
MOVIE PLOT AND B.G.S
The story covers the years 1939 to 1946 in Szpilman's life. The entire film is from his perspective, and he is in every scene, except a few.
The movie begins with the bombing of Warsaw .The pianist; Wladyslaw Szpilman is playing live on radio station when the Germans begin bombing Warsaw. His insists on finishing the piece as the technicians flee when a bomb drops on the building. Szpilman and his family prepare to flee before the Nazi invasion. Just then news comes over the radio that England has entered the war and France will enter soon, they change their mind, thinking that the Nazi's will have to turn their attention elsewhere. This scene depicts the importance or the worth of the media in affecting the decisions of persons or society at large. Also, how a propaganda model of Nazis against Jews brings the whole race on the verge of extermination from the face of the earth.
This first half of the movie is shown through the Szpilman family. Their varying reactions, the father's weary acceptance, the youngest son's anger, the mother's worries over caring for her family, represent all of the differing Jewish reactions.
The Pianist answers the one great question everyone has about the Jewish experience. Why did they cooperate with their own destruction, in spite of being in huge numbers ?
The reason is the clever Nazi plan. Despite the allies entering the war, they begin slowly by passing laws restricting Jewish freedoms. It started with restricting Jews from going to restaurants, parks and other public areas. Particularly depicted when Wladyslaw steps out with a cellist he's attracted to, he can't take her anywhere, to a restaurant, to the park, they are even restricted to sit on a bench, so they just stand, and the dialogue here beautifully portrays the dilemma, the pain.
Then, Nazis restricted their other rights slowly. Always before the next round of restrictions, first there come the rumours, then the newspaper reports, and finally the enforcement. Forcing them to wear badges to show that they are Jewish, the exact measurements of which are carefully spelled out in the newspaper. The badges is a classic use of symbols used by the Nazis to separate out the Jews from the Germans and create a symbolic divide in the minds of Germans and Jews.( Not only by the Germans, the picture you see, on the front page is a promotion poster for the film ,which emphasises on two things pianist and the Star of David, clearly stating the theme of the film) In the final phase of the Nazi plan in Warsaw, all Jews are forced to move into a Ghetto which the Nazi's surrounded with a brick wall. They watched the neighbours being abused because they can’t respond to ridiculous and abusive commands fast enough - like the man in the wheelchair told to stand up. This scene is used as a symbol for the unrelenting cruelness showed by the Nazis. The many shocking scenes of cruelty go on and on, until they become commonplace. This makes the care for the dying give way to just trying to survive. These restrictions also helps us to analyse the extreme condition of government interfering with personal lives of people, here we can draw a analogy that if the regulations or restrictions in this strict sense can destroy a whole economy as is the case of country here, so governments need to keep a holistic view when deciding over regulation.
This slow build up of cruelties, removed the possibility of rebellion and resistance, allowed the Nazis to wear the Jews down, until the people were too weak and demoralized to be able to react. This also brings out the fact that power corrupts a person to any extent. The German soldiers were so seduced by the power assigned to them that they began taking pleasure in inflicting punishments on their fellow Jews. The other side of this corruption is the scenes depicting the German soldiers taking bribes from the Jews in return of doing small favours from them, this is a direct relation of the film to the present day society especially in India, where corruption has spread its roots, so deep that it has become a obvious fact in business and special liaison departments are setup, just for dealing with the government officials.
Once inside Ghetto, Wladyslaw finds a job of playing piano at a restaurant which was allowed to remain open because the owners are supporting the Nazis. It clearly brings out the point that profit is all that matters for a businessman and it governs the society at large. A former friend who has joined the Jewish police asks Wladyslaw and his brother to join the force, which they blatantly refuse. Food starts to run out. They are forced to live on potatoes. Wladyslaw and his brother try to sell books off to other Jews with no better source of income than they have. Even here, the movie depicts a few business owners doing illegitimate business by bribing the Nazis soldiers at the gates, bringing out the crude materialistic reality of the human nature. Members of the Jews family start disappearing mysteriously or growing sick with no help for it. A German soldier makes old Jews dance by the ghetto gate. We watch the atrocities mount but still life keeps the illusion of normality. There are work permits to be obtained, meals to be made. So that, even when the dead bodies of children are in the street and people are being stripped off everything and carted off to death camps. In one dialogue, Wladyslaw mentions the Nazi population as 400,000; his brother corrects him sarcastically that they are 360,000, so it will be easy to fix them in a small area. This is a fantastic use of numbers to bring out the enormity of the situation. The scene where Wladyslaw obtains permit for his father, through his contacts with an important person (who is a friend of his friend) brought out the importance of social networks to us in a very simplistic sense.
Once the Germans have their extermination camps set-up, the trains start taking the Polish Jews to their final destination. It is then, that the tale of Wladyslaw Szpilman begins to take extraordinary twists and turns that suggest surviving while surrounded by such inhumanity cannot be planned. When the Nazi's begin moving the Jews to the concentration camp, and the Szpilmans are being boarded on the trains with everyone else, Wladyslaw is offered a chance to escape.
He ends up in a work detail, relatively well fed and trusted enough that he's able to help smuggle weapons in preparation for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. But before the uprising he makes a decision to go into hiding. It’s an extraordinary situation--it takes six or seven people to keep one Jew alive. This whole story of escaping his tryst with death just because he had a few Germans and Police officer as friends makes us ponder over the fact how important social capital or in crude sense networking or personal relations are in life of a person or society at large. This uprising is also a classic example of people ,when put into the same conditions again and again tend to collude and here also , the revisiting atrocities of the Nazis brings the Jews closer and work for a common goal
He is not a hero, he is not a rebel that wants and lusts after revenge. He is a simple man who is doing everything in his power to stay alive. He is a desperate man and fears for his life and wants to stay as low as he can. Some scenes carry tons of emotions yet have little to no dialogue. The scene where Szpilman climbs over the wall and is walking through a veritable waste land of destroyed buildings is a powerfully quiet, cold image of death.
Ultimately it is his gift of music that perhaps saves his life and the final scene that he has with the German soldier is one of the most emotionally inspiring scenes I've witnessed. I think it is this scene that won Brody his Oscar. This is one of the all time great performances.
The opening performance by the pianist at the local radio station (with the sound of bomb explosions in the background) forming a harmonious link between the beginning and end of the film.
AFTER THOUGHTS
To say something is great that came out of such a terrible time is disconcerting. But this is a film that educates as well as makes you feel. Today, we have hardly put the Holocaust behind us. The world still teeters on the edge of war and chaos. Genocide still happens. Arrogant governments shove whole nations around and stereotype their peoples as lesser beings. What we need is art that shows how beauty and sustaining grace are provided in the midst of the madness. This brings in our view the role of media because this film being a small part of media colossal still has affected my point of view and with me of many others to look at this world in a different perspective where, we want to thank that, we were born in a free society.
This makes us think that how governments, their regulations affects the society, how it ensures the right of equality, right of freedom, right to speech or for that matter right to live. . It also shows that how a wrongly chosen or in this case, an ideological government can push its people or for that matter ,the whole world on the verge of destruction.
The power of media has grown tremendously in the present world, which is evident from the fact that the Oscar award (Best Actor in a leading role-Adrien Brody, Best Director-Roman Polanski, Best writing, Adapted screen play-Ronal Harwood) given to this film, has made this movie cross borders and reach to international community even to countries like India. This shows us the influence of media, how a award ceremony taking place in far off place has affected us and made us took notice of films like Pianist and many others.
Before writing this review, I did some random research over the movie and I found out that there is a view prevailing among some movie critics that the awards won by the movie are not solely based on its merit. They say that the movie was benefitted by the series of awards it won just before the Oscars and also by the faulty competitor’s strategy. The film promoters kept a low key promotion they did that by choice or they were forced to do so is not clearly evident. The whole point here is that it is the fame and success associated with Oscars that makes filmmakers to go any extend, to satisfy the needs of review committee which again reinstates the point that media has now the power to move masses or for that matter world and also, all that matters for production houses is not movie, but the profit that they can moake out of it..
The main story isn't about a war hero, but about people who don't want to die in this madness. Every aspect of the film is really done for a reason and in his place and you don't feel this as entertainment.There are many scenes in this movie where individuals are left with no choice but to save them and ignore the others in the process. That makes me think, can we really help anyone but ourselves in the extreme situations? I mean the really extreme situations. It will also cause you to stop and think about the riches we take for granted: family, food, music, freedom. In the course of showing us a struggle for survival, in all its animal simplicity, Polanski also gives us humanity, in all its complexity.
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