'The Pianist' Essay Plans

Film is now available on Netflix.

Presentation of the holocaust:

A topic that has been covered extensively in the media. It’s a typical example in the late twentieth century in Western culture for the dangerous of bigotry, nationalism and bureaucracy.

·       De-contextualized images of the holocaust to transform the Jewish narrative into a universal moral paradigm that is applied to all the atrocities that happen afterwards in Europe.

Post memory by the second generation and the way it was expressed in the art form- Holocaust was the representation of all evil in the world and some critics argue that it has become decontextualized because there is no historical reference to what it truly means as it was mainly aimed at the third generation to show that they should not follow the same path. The well-used images of barbarism (the gaunt faces behind the barbed wire, vacant stare of the tortured) have begun to lose their meaning because they are always associated with the horror media. People see those images but they don’t truly understand what they mean “forgetting through images” because the media has taught them the appropriate way to respond to them.

“there is a move away from a historical focus on the past and towards ethical concerns directed at future generations.”

It does not follow the typical biography of saintly individual who commits heroic deeds as he is seen as a coward at times by hiding away from the fighting in the apartments even though it was based on the autobiography about his survival of the war. The German soldier is the one who commits the good deeds even though he is supposed to be the enemy but at the ending there is an ambiguity if he was doing it because he knew that the end was near and that he was going to need to be saved as well. Even though Szpilman survives it is not a happy ending because his family is dead, many people still do not know what happened to their family members during the war. He gets to play again in front of a large audience but Hosenfeld died before he could ever hear him on the radio.

Fixed stereotypical iconography and the desire to use the memory of the past as applicable to the present or the future

·       How those confined are able to retain their humanity under conditions that turn them into labor slaves and then eventually corpses when they have served their purpose. The holocaust was a fight for survival against the bitter odds and violence.

he returns back to the same place that he was at the beginning of the film which suggests that he has not let the war change him that much or made him forget his passions which defined him and he has achieved his dream of playing in front of a large prestige audience on the radio. There is no desire for revenge. There was not a lot of focus on the negative effects that the war would have left on those that had been prosecuted such as PTSD among other mental illnesses. The disappearance of the POW camp at the end and the lack of bodies suggests that people are trying to hide the atrocities of the war that happened because they are trying to move forward with their lives. In collective memory people remember the horrible events that were done to them but they do not remember the horrible events that they did because it does not reflect well on them.

·       Violence and de-humanization of the Jews

The star of David at the beginning meant that they were able to tell them apart by looking at them. The father was forced to walk on the road because he was not allowed to walk on the pavement and they were banned from many of the public places- they were at the bottom of the social hierarchy and they were seen as dirty and not even human because they could not interact with those that were seen as superior to them and were denied basic rights. As the film progresses Szpilman becomes more and more de-humanized because he is forced to rummage in the building ruins for food and he has given up all his pride and dignity for survival. His face is rugged and his cloths are torn, he is thin from the lack of food and there is a pathetic sense when he is trying so desperately to open something as simple as a can of pickles that people nowadays would not think twice of and they could afford to be picky about the food that they were eating. The Germans bullied the Jews- making the old people dance at the traffic crossroads and laughing at them which shows the power that they had and the sadistic nature.

Ref to the lengths that the actor Adrian Brody went to prepare for the role by losing weight and giving up all his material possessions so that he could understand, although on a much smaller scale, the feeling of loss that the Jews felt when everything was taken away from them.

Presentation of the victims:

 “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz” and it raises the issue as to how art was able to present the horrible events of what happened without doing an injustice while trying to represent it, especially since it was done by the second generation who had not directly experience those events but rather lived near to the consequences that it had caused.   

·       Music. Chopin to show that he is telling a story without words and is an emotional journey.

He is playing for his life in the German house. Nocturne in C sharp minor was played by the holocaust victim for a Nazi concentration camp commander and he liked the piece so much that he spared her life which is a reflection of the events that happened in the film- the power of music to save a person’s life. The power of music to make the victims be heard and in the middle of the film when he is not able to touch the piano for fear of being heard by the neighbors it shows that his whole race has been silenced by the oppression and the anger and fear that he is feeling at not being able to express himself properly. The bombs in the beginning that destroyed the recording studio he was in shows that the Germans were destroying the beauty of the life that they had before but he is able to maintain his passion for his music no matter the trails that he has been put through which shows that he is still human and still has a spirit. At the end he returns back to playing

·       De-humanization of the Jews and the suffering they had to endure  

·       Does not romanticize the Jews because he recognizes that they were not all victims and that they could be just as ruthless as their perpetuator which is honoring the truth of their history and not their memory.

Many different people had different experiences of the holocaust and it was only through collective memory were they able to be organized into a coherent thought that saw it in uniformed terms of suffering and the same generic images that were used to convey those events- the gaunt faces behind the barbed wire and the wreckages of the towns that used to be. People often remembered the horrible things that were done to them but they did not remember the horrible things that they did to other people. History means there is an objective view that is not biased to either side. The film also allows there to be a third perspective as the objective viewer that takes you away from the eyes of the perpetuator and the victims. The camera work was not heavily edited and moved in an objective manner.

Jewish police were violent against their own kind- the lengths that people would go to in order to survive. Many of the members of the underground movement were capable of just as violent acts as the Germans.  Szpilman is not seen as brave or heroic either- the only thing that makes him unique is his ability to survive and be able to tell his story when countless other people were killed. There were acts of kindness in the film but they were just as random as the acts of depravity and there was no logic or reason behind the actions but simply because that was the way of life and one did not question it.

·       De-contextualized images to transform the Jewish narrative into a universal moral paradigm of the horrors of the Holocaust

There is an experiential chasm between those that suffered through the Holocaust and those in the third generation that have neve been touched by such an event and therefore do not truly understand the magnitude of the ‘Final Solution’. It does not discount the moral lessons that have happened but it places it in the perspective of the current human rights in the 20^th century and there is a movement away from the historical focus.