Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Pianist
2002 · Roman Polanski · The Pianist on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how often Szpilman is at a window. (staging)
Polanski keeps putting him back from the glass, in the dark of a room, looking down at a street he cannot enter. Whole historical events arrive that way, at a remove, glimpsed.
Payoff: You are handed his exact helplessness: a man who can see everything and reach none of it. In the reading: pure optical & sound situations (opsigns). The reading calls these pure optical situations: images a person can only look at, with nothing to do about them.
Notice how long the hard scenes run without a cut. (cutting)
Herve de Luze lets the worst passages play out whole. There is no montage compression and no music laid over them to soften the blow. The camera stays where it is.
Payoff: The horror comes out flat and unarguable because nothing in the cutting is arranging it for you.
Look at how gray and cold the picture stays. (light)
Pawel Edelman works in ash, gray and wintry light with the color drained down. The framing stays clean and legible. Nothing is heightened and nothing is made pretty.
Payoff: The photography refuses nostalgia, so the film reads as a record rather than a memory of a period.
Listen to how much of the film is quiet. (sound)
Long passages carry only footsteps, breath and the distant noise of a city at war. Wojciech Kilar's score stays out of the way, and Chopin arrives only where the story puts a piano.
Payoff: Silence is the default here, which is why one sound in a hiding place can stop your breathing.
Watch Brody get smaller through the film. (performance)
Brody loses weight, then speech, then almost all movement. He plays everything inward, so horror registers in the eyes and the shoulders. Kretschmann underplays Hosenfeld nearly to blankness.
Payoff: The performance is built by subtraction. What is left is a man who mostly watches and waits.
Once you have seen it
Look at the empty city Szpilman walks through. (setting)
Warsaw has been flattened into a snow-dusted field with nothing left in it to do. Allan Starski built the ruin. Polanski withholds music and lets the scale arrive on its own.
Payoff: Nothing happens in that walk in the sense of action, and everything the film is about happens in it. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. The reading calls this the crisis of the action image: seeing no longer leads to anything a person can do.
Count the stretches where nothing in the story moves. (structure)
He waits. He listens for footsteps on a stair. He works at a can with a poker. The film keeps whole passages where the plot does not advance and the day has to be got through.
Payoff: You are made to spend the time he spent, which is the film's argument about what surviving actually was. In the reading: dead time (temps mort). The reading calls these stretches dead time: intervals where the story stops and ordinary duration is simply held.
Watch his fingers move above the keys without sound. (performance)
In hiding he plays a piano he does not dare touch, hands working over the closed lid. Much later the Ballade for Hosenfeld is the first time an instrument answers him.
Payoff: Art rescues nobody here. It keeps one man's interior intact, and then by accident it keeps him alive.
Carry this in: Szpilman survives by luck and by other people. Watch what he sees rather than what he does.