110.1Abstract (summary)
Translate
MAURICE YACOWAR is professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Calgary. His latest book is The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television's Greatest Series (Continuum Books).
Reflecting on the scope of the Holocaust is daunting for writers, philosophers, or ordinary people, and proves just as challenging for each new generation. A new film tracing one remarkable true story of survival is imbued with this most bizarre, and yet utterly understandable, phenomenon - that even for those experiencing genocide, it is somehow impossible to accept completely that this is really happening.
[Graph Not Transcribed]
[Graph Not Transcribed]
AS ROMAN POLANSKI has often said, he remains haunted by the fact that he was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. The Nazi occupiers' hatred for the Jews is well known, but they were also contemptuous of the Polish nation in general, and their rule in that country was particularly savage. Polanski's harrowing new film chronicles Wladyslaw (Wladek) Szpilman's survival during the nightmare years of German occupation. By the end of the story, Wladek (Adrien Brody) has retained his life and his music, but he has lost his family and his love, and he bears the seared memory of all he witnessed. An early reflection may continue all his life: "Sometimes I'm still not sure which side of the wall I'm on."
Though the Szpilmans are Jewish, they do not appear to be religious. As a famous performer of Chopin, Wladek is more Polish nationalist than Jew. Indeed, he courts the blonde shicksa cellist Dorota (Emilia Fox) even as the occupiers ban the Jews from cafes, parks, public benches, and even the sidewalks. At one point, Wladek naively leaves the line of ghetto deportees in order to chat her up. Like many others whose lives are incrementally devoured by the Holocaust, the Szpilmans find it hard to believe that all this is really happening, and hard to conceive that things can get any worse. His family is so middle class and arty that they make a thorough mockery of the Nazis' stereotype of the Jews as aggressive, grasping, and materialistic. In fact, until the family is forced to wear the Star of David on their sleeves they show no signs of Jewishness. They flaunt no difference. The Szpilmans are modest Polish bourgeoisie, broadly respected in the Polish music community. But their long, uneventful residence in Polish urban society will provide them no security.
Unique for the genre, this Holocaust film depicts no Jewish religious ceremonies or other cultural references. In one scene, two bored German soldiers force mismatched Jews to dance together for their amusement, but that's a disdainful coercion, not an assertion of Jewish culture. Polanski broadens Jewish alienation by omitting the Jewishness; consequently, the targeting of the Jews seems arbitrary. It leaves the Szpilmans - and properly us - shocked and astonished as their persecution intensifies. They seem targeted not because of anything they have done or even are, but for what they are called.
[Graph Not Transcribed]
THE VIOLENCE here is always random; German soldiers kill impulsively. Early in the occupation, the Gestapo arrive in the Szpilmans' neighbourhood, and the family fearfully awaits a knock at their apartment door, but instead find themselves watching the horror visited on a family across the street. On one soldier's whim the Szpilman family is broken up for transport to Treblinka. By chance they are reunited, then by a whim separated again. A Jewish policeman, Itzhak Heller (Roy Smiles), saves Wladek's life by pulling him away from his doomed family. Later, when the stormtroopers charge into the building where Wladek is being hidden, he again prepares for the worst, only to watch another fugitive hauled away instead. Later still, the Germans will broaden their scope, hunting down "Jews, non-Jews, anybody, everybody" - including Dorota's brother. Of course, "they hang [Poles] for helping Jews."
A bitter dramatic irony reinforces the theme of chance. When Wladek's father (Frank Finlay) celebrates Britain and France joining Poland's war against Germany - "All will be well!" - Polanski promptly cuts to the German troops entering Warsaw. Repeatedly Polanski undercuts a character's confidence immediately, as if all hope were mere delusion. "I've stopped believing in God," says a man waiting for his arrested grandson at an early stage of the monstrousness. No sooner does Wladek finally secure his father's work permit than the family is sent to Treblinka. Later, Wladek is hidden in a flat across from the military hospital and police station: "the safest place you can be," he is assured. But the Nazis raze the block. Experience teaches Wladek to doubt even the most realistic predictions: "You just have to wait a few weeks, no more," he is advised, regarding the Russians' imminent arrival. But until the Germans are finally gone, it feels as if this young man is only managing to postpone his disappearance into the inescapable maw of the Holocaust.
[Graph Not Transcribed]
Though sympathetic Poles hide Wladek in vacant flats, even these individuals are an unknown quantity. For a time, a radio technician who used to broadcast Wladek's recitals is his chief contact with the outside world, installing him in an apartment and promising to bring him food. Instead, the technician solicits donations on Wladek's behalf all over Warsaw, keeps the money, and leaves the pianist alone to starve. Conversely, there is The Good German. A Nazi officer, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann), is so moved by Wladek's impromptu piano recital - in a ruined house surrounded by blocks of devastation - that he becomes the pianist's final wartime benefactor. Perhaps the cultured German officer sees something of his own polished, compromised self in the ratty Jewish fugitive. But any humanity extended in such times carries its own perverse complications; when, as a parting gesture, Hosenfeld wraps Wladek in his officer's greatcoat to protect him from the cold, he inadvertently puts him in danger of the cruellest end. After Hitler's army is finally gone, Wladek joins other civilians staggering out of their hiding places to greet the Red Army liberators - and is almost shot as a German. Doubtless Polanski invests in Wladek his own memories of witness, flight, and urgent furtiveness.
[Graph Not Transcribed]
And, in the end, Wladek is not saved by his music so much as by Hosenfeld's awareness that the Nazis are doomed, and that he needs a good deed to square himself. When Wladek wistfully plays air piano, he may be holding his mind together with that visceral memory, but what pulls him through is not his music but chance interventions and opportunities. The musician plucked from the gas chamber to perform - that's a different movie, not Polanski's nihilism. If the pianist's art is scrupulous harmony, this hero's survival is an accidental chord out of cacophony. It leaves his identity uncertain. He tells Hosenfeld "Ich bin - Ich war - pianiste." "I am - I was - a pianist." Not until he plays for him can he be confident of recovering that identity. From the film's conclusion, all we know about him is that he has returned to his music. We see no signs of other life.
[Graph Not Transcribed]
As Captain Hosenfeld points out, "Szpilman" (i.e., one who plays) is a good name for a pianist. (For that matter, "Hosenfeld" is a good name for a nearly Jewish cultured German, a cleansed form of "Rosenfeld.") The pianist is no more mystical about his music than about his Jewishness. In his first scene he tries to play through the bombing as his studio world crumbles around him. He shows no passion or principle here, just carrying on with his job. That's how he manages to survive. Wladek makes no passionate speeches in this film, nor any flamboyant gesture. He leaves that to his firebrand brother Henryk (Ed Stoppard), who is arrested and quotes Shylock on his way to Treblinka. Wladek doggedly does his job, which includes taking what chances he gets to save himself. As heroic as this character gets is depicted when he atavistically clutches a precious can of scavenged pickles and struggles desperately to open it - until finally Captain Hosenfeld provides a can opener. This stolid hero makes the casual explosions of violence not just harsher but intellectually disturbing for being so unpredictable, pointless, and unpreventable.
The piano playing defines Wladek as abstracted from life. Bound for Treblinka, he tells his younger sister, "I wish I knew you better." She thanks him for this apparently unusual attention. He is declared "too musical" to be useful as a conspirator, or even an underground journalist. So when others rise up against their oppressors, Wladek finds himself only an observer - looking down on both the ghetto and the Polish uprisings from the safety of his window. Apart from two scenes when the protagonist succumbs to despair and weeps, Polanski gives us very little sense of Wladek's interior life. He expresses guilt for the inefficacy of the work permits he has secured for his family and for not being a part of the ghetto uprising. But, he reflects, "What good did it do?" Dying with dignity is still dying. On the other hand, the survival strategy of the corrupt Jewish policeman is summarized in his name: Itzhak Heller - an infernal version of a father of Israel.
A woman sobs with remorse after smothering her crying baby to avoid detection. Her question - "Why did I do it?" - looms over all the survivors in the film. Is survival worth its moral costs? There is a Pyrrhic triumph in Wladek's survival to play the piano again.
The Pianist also differs from other Holocaust films in its quiet observation. No one character represents either a concentration of evil or divided conscience, like Ralph Fiennes' SS officer in Schindler's List (1993) or the Nazi doctor in Costa-Gavras' Amen (2002). Instead the evil is pervasive. Soldiers extinguish a life as casually as a cigarette, and punch Wladek's elderly father for failing to bow to them in the street. Nor is there any overpowering virtue. Here there are bad Jews as well as good, good Poles as well as bad - and even the guilt-ridden Good German, wondering how he and millions of his compatriots could have been part of all this. Wladek rarely acts to help anyone outside his immediate family. Mostly, he spends these horrific years stumbling through whatever opportunities arise to save himself. Polanski's theme of accidental survival respects the real dead more than the usual, atypical stories of people who survived by heroic courage or prowess. Polanski refuses to sentimentalize.
The images are of indelible loss. People are left lying in the street where they died, and as the story progresses Wladek steps out into increasingly ghastly landscapes. Indeed, the black-and-white ruin outside the hospital parallels the film's opening footage of prewar Warsaw bustle. A forlorn child clings to her doorless birdcage, searching the horizon for her bird. In the ghetto an old man fights an old woman for her soup, then laps it off the ground while she pummels him in frustration. Wladek is twice accosted by a well-dressed woman blindly seeking her husband. "If you see him, write to me, yes?" Wladek plucks the eyes out of his last, shrivelled potato and halves it to prolong it. Earlier, Wladek's father spends the family's last twenty zlotys for a caramel, which he carves into six slices for his family. It's their last sweetness until Hosenfeld slips Wladek some jam. With money useless, the exorbitant caramel makes sense. Wladek climbs and stumbles through the skeleton of Warsaw, foraging like a rat ravenous for crumbs. But back at the piano his humanity pours into him again.
THE FILM'S primary value is survival, however compromised and guilt-edged. An optimistic friend helps Wladek get the work permit: "The historical imperative in action." But the German boss knows that despite the coveted piece of paper the men are bound for Treblinka. One persists, however futile it may be. Hosenfeld leaves Wladek with the words: "Thank God, not me. He wants us to survive." Closing titles informs us that Hosenfeld died in a Russian POW camp, but Wladek lived to 88.
[Graph Not Transcribed]
Word count: 2037
Copyright Queen's Quarterly Spring 2003
No comments:
Post a Comment