The art of survival

In the film "The Pianist", Polanski's directorial approach imposes simplicity. We often get the impression that we are dealing with a documentary film that the camera, from our time, goes there in the years 1939-1945, follows the life of the pianist Wladislaw Szpilman and returns to us, to give us these impressive images

Writing by Blerim Shala, published in 2002 in the Albanian Political Weekly - Zëri

"Music was his passion, survival was his masterpiece"!

With this short order, common for Hollywood where the simplification of a film's message is done in order to reach the widest possible audience, the film "The Pianist" directed by Roman Polanski was advertised.

ALL PHASES OF A HELL

Based on the many awards he received in 2002 ("Palme d'Or" at the Cannes Film Festival, the most prestigious in Europe, the French "Cesar" and the English "Bafta" which are equivalent to the "Oscar", and also the "Oscar" for Adrien Brodyn, the main protagonist of this film), "The Pianist" deserves to be called the most accomplished work on the film stage in 2002, although the "Oscar" for the best film went to "Chicago", a musical film.

The film "The Pianist" is a filmic recreation of the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, written immediately after the war, with the title "Death of the City". This book, along with the Diary of Anne Frank and the book by Primo Levi (Auschwitz survivor), are considered the three most significant and influential books written by Jewish victims of Nazism themselves.

Wladyslaw Szpilman was one of the most famous pianists of the time, who in the years 1939-1945, was forced to fight for survival in Warsaw because he was Jewish: A man without any rights.

Szpilman will live a long life and will die in 2000, or at the age of 89.

Oscar Wilde would say in this case: A new century and a new millennium would be too much for Szpilman who lived six years in the real Nazi hell and then another 45 years in the communist regime which was also a variation of hell .

The film "The Pianist" is therefore based on a true report. Both Szpilman's memoirs and the film begin on the day Warsaw, the capital of Poland, is attacked by Germany in September 1939. The attack finds Szpilman in the Warsaw radio studios, where he performs a work by Chopin, the great Polish composer. . From the first look, the viewer realizes that Szpilman is a man so devoted to music and the piano that the bombings of Warsaw do not impress him at all. He will interrupt the performance on the piano, only after the studio is hit by a shell.

The viewer then follows the life of the Szpilman family, which is a little worried about the arrival of the Nazis, a little more concerned with hiding the last money they had left, is overjoyed when they hear on the BBC that Great Britain and France have declared war Germany precisely because of the attack on Poland and is extremely surprised when he learns that the Jews of Warsaw (we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people), must have a ribbon with the Star of David on their arm.

Then, they (the Szpilmans) find themselves in the Warsaw ghetto, together with all their compatriots. In the ghetto there are no laws, no values, no humanity and everything is measured by the box of remaining alive. Szpilmani, in order to support the family, will become a pianist in a jazz club in the ghetto, which is run by Jews who are "keepers of order and peace" on behalf of the Nazis. The evil that befell the Jews in 1939 begins to take on the proportions of their extermination when they are sent to concentration camps. It is known that the largest camps were in Poland, where the "final solution" of the Jewish question had to be carried out.

Pianist Szpilman escapes thanks to the intervention of Jews - collaborators of the Nazis. Then, the difficult phases of his life in the ghetto and outside the ghetto, in occupied Warsaw, are lined up. He is almost always lonely, with little bread, a lot of will for music and always close to the abyss (death).

POLANSKI'S OWN EXPERIENCES

Fate abandoned him in the last days of the war, as the entry of the Red Army into Warsaw was expected. He is discovered by a German captain, who realizes that he was hiding in the ceiling of his apartment. But the misfortune here turns into a big turn for him because it turns out that the German captain has an understanding for a Jewish pianist who executes Chopin wonderfully. The German officer, who also likes Szpilman's last name (Player, translated from German), feeds him and ensures that he waits alive for them, the Germans, and the Russians to come.

The German captain will die in the POW trenches, somewhere in the Soviet Union, in 1952. Szpilman had done his best to save his savior, but had failed to find his whereabouts. Szpilman will then continue his career as a pianist and visit all continents (except Australia), including with the Warsaw orchestra.

So this is the brief content of this great film by Roman Polanski.

Polanski was almost in his 70s when he decided to shoot this film, which took him back to his childhood years, when he himself lived in a Krakow ghetto. His mother will die in Auschwitz, while his father will survive the concentration camp. Little Polanski will escape by hiding in the Polish Catholic families of Krakow.

After the war, Polanski will study directing at the Lodge Film School. After his first successes as a director, he will go to England and then to America. There, the director who was most often compared to Hitchcock (if you have seen Polanski's film "Frantic" with Harrison Ford in the lead role, shot in 1988, you will understand that Polanski is rightly compared to Hitchcock, the great master English), there will be ups and downs in his career and in life, when he will be accused of raping a 13-year-old girl. He will leave America to settle in France, in Paris, where he was born.

Connoisseurs of the film claim that "The Pianist" is the climax of Polanski's artistic biography. It seems that this, like Jorge Sempruni, the famous Spanish writer, did not have the courage in his youth, or even in his mature age, but in his old age to return to the memories of the great pain of life in the ghetto.

Ghetto, birthplace of a state

Polanski did not intend to make a film full of spectacular scenes, which is Spielberg's "Schindler's List", which is now classified as the most successful film dedicated to the Holocaust. Polanski demonstrates, through Szpilman's biography, how the extermination of the Jews, their humiliation, was done with a plan, without haste and until recently, without Jewish resistance.

Elie Wiessel, the Jewish Nobel laureate, who did so much for the liberation of Kosovo by calling on President Clinton's administration to undertake all possible measures to save the Albanians, in his book "Nata" will affirm that the illusion and not the Nazis controlled the ghetto. The illusion that the accounts of the murders of Jews in concentration camps are pure lies, the illusion that the whole thing is transitory, that they will soon be freed, etc. But perhaps the illusion was the most logical reaction to all that crap that had befallen the Jews of Warsaw. The horror they were experiencing could not be based on any logic, therefore the vast majority of them thought that this will pass like a nightmare and that the dawn will make everything clear. One of the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto will say to Szpilman: "They are exterminating us and they will exterminate us...". It seems that precisely in the Warsaw ghetto, in the uprising of 1943, which was suicidal when the disproportion of force between the Jews and the Nazis was known, the creation of the state of Israel will begin.

Szpilman is not a hero, a warrior, an insurgent spirit. He remains without a family, without a piano, without music, without food, without his city. He does not fight for his salvation. And, salvation follows him all the time, to take him, finally, to the day when he is waiting for the Russian army in the city that was turned into ruins. A pile of bones, unshaven, almost a ghost, in a German officer's coat (the German captain had given him this coat in parting), which almost costs him his life, because the Russians think that this is a German officer. Such is this on the day when Warsaw is liberated.

Adrien Brody in the role of Szpilman is very successful and he never makes an extra gesture, an excessive action, which would damage the role of Szpilman, a man whom the story grinds daily in those heavy years of horror in Warsaw . Special are the scenes when Szpilman imagines the piano and the performance on it. The melody is carried by his imagination and it appears before us, the viewers of the film.

In general, in the film "The Pianist", Polanski's directorial approach imposes simplicity. We often get the impression that we are dealing with a documentary film that the camera, from our time, goes there in the years 1939-1945, follows the life of Szpilman and returns to us, to give us these impressive images.

Simplicity is the master of great directors, what Kieslowski was and what Polanski is in this film. /Telegraph/