The second thing I noticed about The Pianist was that as I watched it, I found myself looking out the window, and struggling not to hate the people living around me. (The German national anthem just started for the World Cup semi-finals, just as I wrote that).
Now I know that most of these people weren't alive for WWII, and even if they were it doesn't mean they were pro-Nazi. But that's the thing. As we watch films like this, it can be really hard not to do exactly the same thing that Nazi Germany did - project and generalise.
It's easy to project my issues with people onto subcultures, and it's very easy to generalise. The makers of The Pianist wanted me to do this (for the sake of a couple of hours of convincing entertainment), but it's so wrong!
Apparently when Gallipoli, with Mel Gibson, was showing in cinemas roughly 30 years ago, people came out of the cinema and beat up anyone with a British accent. I can sympathise, I wanted to do the same. But it doesn't take a genius to realise how wrong that is.
So I don't know what I think about this. On the one hand I feel like films like The Pianist, Schindler's List, and even Life is Beautiful, are a bit cathartic for us. They help us to dela with the issues and move on. But on the other hand, I wonder whether they're just a little too manipulative. On the other hand, it makes me wonder about myself. Why can't I separate my hatred for Nazis during WWII (which I think is justified), and my feelings toward the German people who in general I have found to be lovely people.
I'm pretty confident Germany will win tonight. My prediction - 2:1 to Germany tonight, and then 3:0 vs. Holland on Sunday.
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Nice prediction. You should have listened to the octopus.
ReplyDeleteI watched the Pianist after reading your post. I hadn't seen it before, and I liked it. I read an article once about movies and other media about the holocaust and how we are being overexposed to it. It sugested that there are still many influential Jewish people who are still mortally offended by the holocaust and they are very eager for everyone else to remember it also. I don't think this is a bad thing, but it was interesting to see the author's perspective on why it is so influential in movies and the like today.
It was also interesting to read a book about Simon Wiesenthal and he cites a time, in the late 1990s when he was on a train traveling across Europe when he found himself sitting across from a man in his mid twenties. The man was reading a newspaper and as he read about the woes of Poland he commented aloud that all of the problems faced by his country men were the fault of the Jews. When Simon quizzed him on this he found that this man hated Jews for the same reason that Poles before and during WW2 hated the Jews and that nothing had really changed. So while we tend to think of it as a distant thing here in Australia, I think that the issues surrounding it are still very much on the minds of Europeans, particularly those from Eastern and Central European nations.
I'm sorry to digress, but I also found it interesting to see this video of the winner of Ukraine's Got Talent (she really is talented) as she drew sand pictures depicting Nazi Germany's occupation of the Ukraine and seeing the audience's reactions as many are moved to tears by images that have no historical significance to me.
See the video at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo
Hahah - that octopus does seem to have a gift...
ReplyDeleteThat girl is incredible. I've never seen anything like it. The video you linked to is not available in my country, but I watched a different performance and it was amazing.
The question about over-exposure is a good one i think. In a way, a constant reminder is good. It helps self-reflection. But then you can see bad reasons too.
Our discussion about everyone being evil/capable of evil reminds me of yet another film, Good.
It had Aragorn which was good. But aside from that it really wasn't so good at all.
Anyway, Aragorn is an academic (in fiction... literature or something) who writes a paper with euthanasia in it. The Nazis pick it up and run with it to justify killing people with disabilities and eventually Jews.
Aragorn himself can't bring himself to euthanase his mum, who wants it. But in the meantime contributes to the killing of his marriage, his best friend, these people with disabilities, and Jews. The viewer is protected from any explicit reference to how bad everything gets throughout the film. So Aragorn is always a little bewildered, always trying to protect himself from the paranoia of the Nazis, and ends up having a job of overseer of death camps. And it's not till the final scene when he actually inspects one that he finds out what he's been a part of.
I thought it was interesting because he was a Good guy (as the film wanted you to think). He tried to be a good husband, and his wife defended him post-divorce about this. And he tried to be a good man, but got caught up in things he didn't understand. But the most interesting thing for me were these degrees of separation, which I can really identify with. He couldn't kill his mum, it was his mum. But he could remain sufficiently ignorant to be complicit in these other deaths which he was more removed from.
At the end of The Pianist, it said that the dude who helped him died in a Russian prison camp in 1952 - 7 years after the war. I would like to see a film about someone like that who goes to a pow camp post-WWII and after it's all over has to deal with his own demons, but also this ongoing pow thing.
I realised that I don't even know how long people were in these camps for post WWII. At least as long as the war though. My guess is a lot longer.
Thanks for the comment Graham.