Finding the key to life
February 20 2003
Roman Polanski's latest film, The Pianist, is one of many in a century of
movie history where the piano - and its player - take centre stage. Philip
Kennicott reports.
The credits at the end of Roman Polanski's The Pianist could have included
this disclaimer: No actual pianos were harmed in the making of this film.
The movie (which last week received an Academy Award nomination for best
picture) about a Jewish pianist struggling to survive the predations of
Nazi-occupied Warsaw, shows the world shattered and in flames, but it
treats pianos with a distant, unsentimental respect.
They are sold for food, and as shell-pocked houses become permeable to the
elements, they suffer some inevitable weather damage. But even as Warsaw is
transformed from a cosmopolitan cultural capital into a charnel house,
pianos are given some measure of protection.
That makes The Pianist better than most piano movies - and the piano movie
is definitely a genre unto itself, with some distinguished exemplars:
Casablanca and Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, to name two familiar ones.
Polanski avoids almost a century of piano cliches. Indeed, one way to read
this film is as his studious, methodical effort to avoid making a piano
movie. The pianist is usually a hero or a neurotic, and occasionally both
(as in 1996's Shine, in which the heroic pianist battles his inner demons);
the piano is his religion; his perfect spouse; he cannot live without his
piano; the piano stands for all of civilisation.
The equating of the piano with civilisation - sometimes with its attributes
of culture and learning, and sometimes, as in Jane Campion's The Piano
(1993), with its repressive, colonialist shadow - has led to the orgy of
piano wreckage in cinema. Pianos are burned, smashed, crushed, dropped and
thrown overboard in movies. In Campion's film, a piano is dropped into the
ocean; a piano goes down with the ship in James Cameron's Titanic (1997);
an almost ruined piano figures prominently in The English Patient (1996).
Furniture removers dangling a piano high above urban streets like the sword
of Damocles are, in television advertising, a standard representation of
fate and its quirks. Laurel and Hardy mined all the lowbrow comic
possibilities of piano destruction in 1932's The Music Box, while, in 1928,
Luis Bunuel created an image in Un Chien Andalou that remains one of the
most recognisable moments in all of avant-garde film: Two grand pianos,
their lids open, each one filled with a dead donkey.
The pianos in Bunuel's surrealist fantasy are Bechsteins, a lovely German
instrument. The protagonist in The Pianist, Wladislaw Szpilman (played by
American actor Adrian Brody), ownes a Bechstein. It sits in his family's
Warsaw apartment until keeping it any longer becomes an unjustifiable luxury.
Szpilman's brother opposes selling it for an insulting price to an oily war
profiteer; Szpilman waves him off and takes the money.
Polanski's pianist is a sensible man. In that, he stands apart from the
long tradition of the pianist as a romantic hero, perhaps best represented
by a film so bad it's good, A Song to Remember (1945).
By converting Chopin from a foppish consumptive to a butch exponent of
truth, justice and the American way, it takes more liberties than an Oliver
Stone film. Worse, it equates artistic effort with political courage.
The pianist makes music for his people; he contributes "muscle" in the
struggle for freedom (in this case, Polish freedom from Russian hegemony)
by making muscular music. He sets aside the trifles of salon music, the
waltzes and short ditties, to write a grand heroic polonaise and thus
creates a universal music that inspires a transcendent struggle for
self-determination. It's pure codswallop. But after long and gruelling
years of world war, it was influential codswallop, and a certifiable hit
with multiple Academy Award nominations. It also helped bring Chopin's
music to a wide audience (and boosted the career of pianist Jose Iturbi,
who played on the soundtrack).
It cemented, in the popular imagination, the connection between Chopin,
Poland and the struggle against tyranny.
The romanticisation by moviemakers of the piano, as opposed to, say, the
bassoon or kettledrums, is fascinating. In the era of black-and-white
films, there was a certain built-in visual richness to the piano; its ebony
bulk is imposing and its black-and-white keyboard creates an instant rhythm
of sharp contrasts on-screen.
And the piano doesn't distort the face of the instrumentalist;
clarinetists, no matter how hard they try, always look as if some rigid
serpent has a death lock on their mouths.
The pianist can be a composed and regal figure (though many directors
insist on making the pianist sway and grimace and stare rapturously at the
heavens).
But the piano may also appeal to filmmakers because it is a machine.
Moviemaking is the most mechanical of the arts, the art form that requires
the most collaboration from technicians, and the most expensive equipment
to produce. And all the while, the artist - the director - is hidden.
The piano thus becomes a place marker for the director's own aspirations to
partake of the heroic, romantic, artistic spirit of yore. Directors love
the piano because it is the ideally transparent artistic machine, a
mechanism that produces poetry. Polanski will have nothing to do with
cliches of the heroic artist. His pianist watches stronger souls resist the
Nazis from a distance. He helps out only briefly and in the most
surreptitious way. The pianist simply wants to survive, which, perhaps
alone among piano movies, shows a sound understanding of Abraham Maslow's
"pyramid of needs".
Art comes after food; it comes after shelter; it comes after family and
politics. Hiding alone in a room with a piano (with anti-Semites all around
him), the pianist opens the lid and pretends to play, without touching the
keys. Survival first, music second. And after the war, he goes back to his
former career, as a concert pianist.
Polanski's pianist picks up where he left off, at least musically. He is,
perhaps, the only real professional pianist depicted in the movies, for
whom music is both a trade and a love, but not a destructive or solipsistic
passion.
Polanski begins his film with a sly hint that the director knows the
literature of piano films: Szpilman is in a recording studio and continues
playing even as Warsaw is being bombed (a reference, perhaps, to the 1957
Soviet film The Cranes Are Flying, in which a pianist plays during the
bombing of Moscow). But he ends it, after the war, back in the studio, with
the pianist happily distracted by the arrival of a friend in the control room.
At the end of the day, the pianist knows his priorities; he has a life.
- Washington Post
The Pianist opens on March 6.
http://theage.com.au/articles/2003/02/19/1045638356148.html
