Tran: The Pianist

Warsaw after the war.

For this week, I watched The Pianist first before I read the book. In a way, it really allowed me to have a define perspective on the Warsaw ghetto and Szpilman’s story. In the film, we get a boarder sense of Warsaw and the war. Scenes of Warsaw are accompanied by the piano as the film navigates us from the city center to the boulevards, to the streets of the ghetto, and finally the ruins of a once great city. As I read the book I was able to see it exactly from Szpilman’s perspective with his personal feelings put into it.

I don’t know if I would say that there is a huge difference between the film’s third person perspective and the memoir’s first person perspective. The film wasn’t an ensemble cast so we mostly follow Szpilman’s story and don’t look at the lives of any other characters. I would say the biggest difference would be that we get inside Szpilman’s head in the book which we can’t do with the film. In the film, we saw Szpilman’s time hiding out in apartments and eventually in abandon homes, but it isn’t until you read the memoir to understand the full extent of his isolation, hunger, and detachment from life. You could only imagine it in the film, but you can feel it and understand it better by reading the book. The film does change a bit of Szpilman’s story by adding in Darota who is a Jew sympathizer and a sort of love interest for Szpilman though nothing happened. I think the character was added in there to help show that there were Poles who did care and weren’t accepting of the Nazi’s oppression against the Jews. Another change in the film was the promotion of Hosenfeld to Captain. In reality, he was just an officer, but Polanski wanted to emphasize that someone so powerful and of that magnitude would help a Jew like Szpilman. Since Polanski experienced the war too, he was able to understand it better and wanted to contrast the different types of people from the Jew hating Poles (the woman who discovered Szpilman in the apartment) and German, to the ones that were kind and helped them (Darota and Hosenfeld). I think the memoir shows more of Szpilman’s struggle to survivor and how he kept himself from going insane and the many other hardship he endured like the many hiding changes he had to go through (which was shown in the movie, but not as many as the book).

With the two articles we read for this week, they both make an argument that musical aesthetics is a way of coping and escaping the hardship of cruelty. Though the piano is well used in the movie to display Szpilman’s abilities and way of coping with the war, I don’t it was the main focus of the film or the book. Being a pianist was part of his life and though Cadullo’s article criticizes Szpilman for only worrying about his fingers and making sure they work after the war, I think that every single person focus on something to would help them imagine a life after the war and for Szpilman, it was his piano and career. I never thought for once in the film or the book that Hosenfeld spared Szpilman’s life just because he was a pianist. As we’ve seen in the film and the book, people were killed instantly whether they spoke out of turn, random selection, or for any reason whatsoever. If Hosenfeld wanted to kill Szpilman, he would have immediately and he saved Szpilman’s life because he wanted to and already had been doing so with other people. In the memoir, there was a scene where Szpilman, his father, and brother return home later after curfew and stopped by an officer and the officer spared them because he said, “It’s your lucky day, I am a musician too.” That may have been the only time he was really spared because he was a pianist.

These four weeks have made me think about a lot concerning the Holocaust and the treatment of people and trying to connect it to other events going on at the time. Every time I read or watch films about the Holocaust, I wonder how could people let this happen and did they not see what was going on or cared. I really thought about this in the sense of Britain, but especially in America even though they were occupied to fighting the war in the Pacific. I just watched the film The Help a few weeks ago and when you think about it, African-Americans were treated very similar to the Jews at that time, to a lesser extent. African-Americans weren’t allowed the same opportunities, had to use different facilities, were treated as second class citizens. Of course Americans weren’t trying to extermination, but I just mean in the way they were treated and people’s attitude towards African-Americans. Lynching went on and people weren’t brought to justice and they faced a segregation and abuse by law enforcement and other people. The Japanese at the time were put into internment camps which were labor camps, or simple relocation camps in the West. By no means I’m am trying to compare the two or saying African-Americans experience and suffered the same as the Jews, but just in terms of treatment and the way politics and laws were against them at the time.