Concertos in confinement

The Polish director, Roman Polanski, who has lived long years in exile, won the Grand Prix at Cannes a year ago for his film The Pianist, ba...

The Polish director, Roman Polanski, who has lived long years in exile, won the Grand Prix at Cannes a year ago for his film The Pianist, based on his personal experience during the German occupation of Poland in the 1940s. The film is adapted from Warsaw concert pianist and composer Wladyslaw Wladek Szpilman8217;s lucidly written and moving 1946 memoir by the same name.

The film, many scholars believe, has some autobiographical elements filtered through the protagonist Szpilman, the pianist, caged in the 8216;8216;ghetto8217;8217; set as a trap by the Nazis. It is not so much a film on the life of a pianist as it is a heartfelt indictment of fascism. The pianist is just one representative victim of such fascism. As Polanski put it, 8216;8216;We are still haunted by the spectre of fascism and at any moment we are its victims.8217;8217;

The Pianist is a film made on an epic scale, evoking the history of the German occupation of Warsaw between September 1939 and May 1945, when the Jews were forced to wear armbands emblazoned with the Star of David. It shows how Wladek and his family, along with half a million other Jews, are 8216;8216;penned into the teeming, rolling one and a third square miles of a Warsaw ghetto8217;8217;. It also vividly depicts a brave socialist and his family cheerfully printing anti-Nazi pamphlets and helping to organise 8216;8216;the ghetto resistance movement8217;8217;. It traces the escape of Wladek, the pianist. He hides in a flat from where he despairingly watches the horrible sight of members of the vastly outnumbered resistance movement heroically holding out against the Nazis. The ghetto goes up in flames with the few survivors are lined up and killed.

In a sense this is one film that shows Polanski examining his own 8216;8216;confinement in ghetto8217;8217; when he was young. He enlivens it through a string of elegiac images the pianist suffers and, finally, like Polanski, gets out of the 8216;8216;trap8217;8217; to live the present.

The film explores how Wladek makes his relationship to his music the 8216;8216;key to his identity8217;8217;. Yet, it never hints that 8216;8216;music saves him8217;8217;. The benefit of the doubt is given to a Nazi officer, a very religious man, who takes pity on the pianist and allows him to escape in a bizarre way. Yet, there is no attempt to exonerate the Nazis, the perpetrators of the 20th century8217;s most heinous crimes, nor even the Nazi officer specifically.

One can only hope that audiences at the international film festival in New Delhi later this month will get a chance to see this extraordinary film for themselves.