The dehumanization of «The Pianist»

Cinema Wednesdays - Special edition: Polanski's cinema - Loris S. Musumeci

Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Oscar for Best Director for Roman Polanski, Oscar for Best Actor for Adrien Brody, seven Césars, among many other awards. The Pianist, adapted from the autobiographical novel by Wladyslaw Szpilman, is undoubtedly Polanski's best-known film and his greatest success. It is one of the most important films on the Holocaust. The work is indeed grandiose. It tells the story of Jewish pianist Szpilman, who escaped deportation to Nazi-occupied Warsaw.

The Pianist is extremely rich. Two and a half hours of film for two and a half hours of detail, subtlety, revulsion, pain, hope and even enchantment. Two and a half hours of emotion and reflection. The richness of the content is matched by the richness of the form. It's all there. From the silences of the dialogues to the brief, incisive statements, from the changes in color tones to their disappearance, from Chopin's music to the cries of distress in the Warsaw ghetto, from Szpilman's heroic, courageous outbursts to his petty villainy, from Nazi barbarism to their ability to be human too, to know pity too. The Pianist, A rich, complete work. Moving.

Losing humanity

Among so many valuable aspects of the film, we have to choose. There is one issue which, in my opinion, reaches its peak: that of dehumanization. The Jews, cattle loaded onto wagons to be slaughtered. Jews, the scourge of humanity. The Jews, a malignant, parasitic beast. They must be treated as such. Nazism almost succeeded. But humanity knows how to spring from a force in man that reason ignores. Subjected to torture and inhuman living conditions, the victims of Nazism either died or resisted. Faced with absolute suffering, faced with evil, man is tempted to behave like a beast, lashing out at his fellow man, stealing his food and cultivating indifference even towards his own children.

The Shoah showed dramatic examples of this, undoubtedly the worst, but the processes of dehumanization have threatened in all the most barbaric wars and other genocides. In Rwanda, mothers went so far as to kill their children. In The Pianist, Jews denounce each other, exploit each other, beat each other up. Fortunately, not all of them. The fact remains that humanity is put to the test when it suffers horror.

The whole film revolves around Szpilman, from his point of view, with the exception of two sequences, one at the beginning showing real black-and-white images of Warsaw, and the other at the end showing a prison camp for German soldiers captured by the Russians. The victim we focus on at the beginning is the city of Warsaw, normal life, Polish culture, the culture of a civilized world where Chopin is played on the radio and we all live together, without any discriminatory distinction of race or religion.

Les victimes sur lesquelles on se concentre à la fin, plus polémique, ce sont les soldats nazis faits prisonniers. Tous jeunes, frais et forts, mais d’ores et déjà condamnés. On suit pour un instant le point de vue de l’officier nazi qui a sauvé Szpliman. Il incarne la part humaine des nazis: en oppresseur, il a néanmoins sauvé un juif d’une part en ne le tuant pas, d’autre part en lui rendant son humanité lorsqu’il lui a demandé de jouer du piano. Chez Polanski, dans sa vie comme dans ses films, les bourreaux et les victimes se confondent souvent.

Rediscovering humanity

The process of dehumanization is most obvious with Adrian Brody playing the main character. He's an artist, a pianist. A handsome, noble-looking man. Nobility in his physical and moral posture. Magical fingers that dance across the piano keys, making him a virtuoso. Elegant young man, flirting with one of his admirers, a charming blonde. Morally upright, he seeks to help his fellow man. He cares about others. He joins the resistance. But oppression is such that he takes advantage of the resistance to flee and save himself. He wanders the streets of Warsaw. Hides, dirty. Crawls, alone. Szpilman is the handsome pianist who becomes a rat. The animal to which Jews were compared by Nazis and other anti-Semites.

De ses griffes, le personnage recroquevillé sur lui-même, affamé et misérable s’accroche à une boîte de cornichons. Seule chose qui garde encore une valeur à ses yeux. Sa boîte, il l’entraîne avec lui dans son trou de grenier. Et il se retrouve face-à-face avec l’officier nazi. Il peine même à parler. La bête s’est emparée de lui. Est-il encore un homme? Ou un rongeur qui vit dans la survie? Lorsqu’il joue à nouveau du piano sous l’ordre de l’officier, l’image s’éclaircit par un faisceau de lumière qui envahit l’écran. Il retrouve une posture humaine. Le salut lui est venu de l’oppresseur. Paradoxe inhérent à la nature humaine. Le mal déshumanise ceux qui le subissent comme ceux qui l’infligent. Mais la sensibilité artistique et la compassion sauvent l’un et l’autre. A l’heure du transhumanisme, des eugénismes en tout genre, l’humanité n’a encore pas dit son dernier mot. Si à l’instar de Szpliman, l’homme a résisté à la barbarie nazie, il peut résister à tout. A condition qu’une petite lumière en son cœur lui rappelle qu’il est encore et toujours humain.

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Photo credit: © Bac Films