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The Pianist Analysis

Decent Essays

The film The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski uses many significant scenes throughout the film to portray certain themes and ideas to the audience, however I found one scene in which Szpilman is playing for life. Polanski uses aspects including lighting, camera angles and shots, and character actions, to emphasise the importance of this scene, and to portray the theme of “it’s possible to retain hope through music”. And “it is unfair to call a nation completely evil or completely good” The main purpose of this scene is to reveal to the audience that not whole nations are “evil” or “good” but on an individual level, there are good and bad people from every nation. A great example of camera work that shows this is in the scene is when the SS officer finds Szpilman. At the start of the scene we think that for sure Szpilman is about to be executed, the SS officer is portrayed using a low angle shot to make him seem far more dominant than Szpilman who we are looking down on from a high angle shot, but when Szpilman starts playing the piano we see the SS officer in an eye-level medium close up shot, and Szpilman in an eye-level medium long shot, this change in angle reveals to the audience that the SS officer sees Szpilman as an equal human being and not as we originally thought he would as an animalistic Jew. By using a combination of different angles of shots Polanski shows the change in the Szpilmans view of the SS officer, he goes from seeing him as a certain death sentence

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