If you have not seen the movie, stop reading right now.
I'm serious. Stop now!
The movie ended about twenty or thirty minutes ago but it's the type of vision that never really ends.
My first knowledge of the Warsaw Ghetto was from reading "Mila 18" by Leon Uris when I was so young that I really wasn't so long graduated from reading "The Wind in the Willows." The book was devastating and the memory of it stayed with me all these years. "The Pianist" is the same way as I watched it quite a while ago - it was released in 2002 - and didn't really want to go through it again but I thought it was important.
The brilliance of the movie, in my view, is that shows beautifully and horrifyingly, the complexity of human behavior. The Nazi brutality is obvious but it's also a Nazi officer, Hosenfeld, who saves Wladyslaw Szpilman's life. The suffering of the Jews is also obvious but Polanski doesn't spare the ones who became German trusties or 'cops' and they were quite brutal. Nevertheless, it is one of them who saves Szpilman's life in preventing him from being boarded on one of the trains for Treblinka.
Polanski throws out stereotypes altogether as he shows the courage of the non-Jewish Poles but he also shows the radio technician who collected money to support Szpilman but then kept it for himself. His portraits of the people in the movie present the complexities of behavior rather than simplifying things in offensive stereotyping.
What put me on the floor was when Szpilman said, in all humility, "Excuse me, can I have a piece of bread?"
While the brutality of the treatment of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto was devastating, that single moment brought it all to me and that's when the tears started flowing and likely will again. Here was one of the world's most brilliant pianists reduced to asking out of starvation for a piece of bread to survive.
The key thing about "The Pianist" is that it's true. I've read the Wiki on it and it backs up everything in the movie. What isn't entirely clear in the movie is at the end it was Hosenfeld who was imprisoned and he needed Szpilman's help to save the life of a German violinist who, as a soldier, was also imprisoned. Szpilman tried to do it but was not successful.
Whether the triumph in the movie is music, human love, or anything of that nature is for you to determine. I draw no conclusion except to admire the brilliance of the portrayal. Szpilman and his music survived but his family did not. Hosenfeld survived the war but he never got out of a Russian prisoner of war camp where he died in 1952.
I'm serious. Stop now!
The movie ended about twenty or thirty minutes ago but it's the type of vision that never really ends.
My first knowledge of the Warsaw Ghetto was from reading "Mila 18" by Leon Uris when I was so young that I really wasn't so long graduated from reading "The Wind in the Willows." The book was devastating and the memory of it stayed with me all these years. "The Pianist" is the same way as I watched it quite a while ago - it was released in 2002 - and didn't really want to go through it again but I thought it was important.
The brilliance of the movie, in my view, is that shows beautifully and horrifyingly, the complexity of human behavior. The Nazi brutality is obvious but it's also a Nazi officer, Hosenfeld, who saves Wladyslaw Szpilman's life. The suffering of the Jews is also obvious but Polanski doesn't spare the ones who became German trusties or 'cops' and they were quite brutal. Nevertheless, it is one of them who saves Szpilman's life in preventing him from being boarded on one of the trains for Treblinka.
Polanski throws out stereotypes altogether as he shows the courage of the non-Jewish Poles but he also shows the radio technician who collected money to support Szpilman but then kept it for himself. His portraits of the people in the movie present the complexities of behavior rather than simplifying things in offensive stereotyping.
What put me on the floor was when Szpilman said, in all humility, "Excuse me, can I have a piece of bread?"
While the brutality of the treatment of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto was devastating, that single moment brought it all to me and that's when the tears started flowing and likely will again. Here was one of the world's most brilliant pianists reduced to asking out of starvation for a piece of bread to survive.
The key thing about "The Pianist" is that it's true. I've read the Wiki on it and it backs up everything in the movie. What isn't entirely clear in the movie is at the end it was Hosenfeld who was imprisoned and he needed Szpilman's help to save the life of a German violinist who, as a soldier, was also imprisoned. Szpilman tried to do it but was not successful.
Whether the triumph in the movie is music, human love, or anything of that nature is for you to determine. I draw no conclusion except to admire the brilliance of the portrayal. Szpilman and his music survived but his family did not. Hosenfeld survived the war but he never got out of a Russian prisoner of war camp where he died in 1952.
2 comments:
"Szpilman's son, Andrzej Szpilman, had long called for Yad Vashem to recognize Wilm Hosenfeld as a Righteous Among the Nations,[citation needed] non-Jews who risked their lives to rescue Jews. Along with him, the Szpilman family and thousands of others asked that Hosenfeld be honoured in this way for his acts of kindness throughout the war ....On 16 February 2009, Yad Vashem finally announced that Capt. Wilm Hosenfeld would be posthumously recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations. On 19 June 2009, Israeli diplomats presented Hosenfeld's son, Detlev, with the award, in Berlin"
Cat
I'm very glad to hear that as I felt tremendous sympathy for him. That wasn't because of my relatively new-found love of Germany but rather because I was thinking in part of the Obedience experiments we reviewed not so long ago. Hosenfeld rose above the Nazi attempts to force obedience and he must have had quite a strong and beautiful mind to do it. I don't mean to minimise anything the Polish Resistance did but their motivations were not the same as they were fighting to defend brothers, friends, countrymen and their nobility is beyond question but it's not the same thing. We have talked previously about why did not the death camp soldiers say no and in Hosenfeld we have an example of one who did.
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