The Pianist
The film "The Pianist" chronicles the story of a musician named Władysław Szpilman and how he, like many others, survived the Holocaust. The movie, directed by Roman Polanski, was based on the best selling book by Szpilman. Polanski himself survived the Holocaust as a young child and was helped and hidden by Polish families. Szpilman's story really touched Polanski and he felt that he was destined to make a film out of it. When watching "The Pianist", it is easy to recognize that the director must have lived through this experience as well and this makes the movie really become alive.The action of the film begins on September 1st, 1939. Szpilman was a popular pianist who often played live for the Polish Radio. On that day, his performance was interrupted by German aerial attacks on Warsaw. Szpilman was the last live performance of the Polish Radio before the station was destroyed by bombs. That day completely changed Szpilman's life. He was transformed from a young, successful and much admired artist into a person hunted by the German authorities only because he was Jewish. We follow his life and watch its deterioration. We could see his status lowered to almost nothing, watch him move into the Warsaw ghetto along with 400,000
During the uprising, German soldiers used machine guns and rifles as well as a flak cannon to fight the Jewish insurgents. The increasing horrors of war are reflected in the way the characters and their surroundings are shown. It is particularly disturbing to see how people were trying to benefit from the misery of their compatriots or how one person would denounce another one. Also, several signs and some dialogue occur in either Polish or German only. The steady deterioration of Szpilman's own life is mirrored by the destruction of Warsaw, the city where he is hiding. If we were to suggest any changes to how the movie was made, we would provide the viewer with a more in depth understanding of what is occurring in the background. He spends the last 3 months of the war in the attic of a destroyed villa where a compassionate German officer brings him supplies and listens to his music before he in turn is arrested and sent to a camp. other Jews, get beaten by German officers, face death nearly every day, and watch his family get deported to the concentration camp Treblinka. This movie portrays all the three nationalities involved in the military conflict - the Jews, the Poles and the Germans - in a very realistic way. Both the director and the writer of the book on which the screenplay was based were Polish and so this movie assumes certain background knowledge of historical events that affected that part of Europe. These, however, are very minor faults. They did this by either killing the Jews or deporting them to concentration camps. They were collecting weaponry in preparation for the ghetto uprising. "The Pianist" is an excellent movie overall and we recommend it very strongly to anyone interested in understanding World War II through a personal history of a Holocaust survivor. Since Szpilman was in hiding after he escaped from the ghetto, we witness those events in a fragmentary way as we only see them through his eyes.
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,
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Acceptance Essays
