I remembered Schindler's List was good, but there was a moment I tried to recall what the story was. The Pianist was great too, in a way, you find it elegant, probably partly because of the music, but it doesn't give you the usual "sensational enjoyment" that you normally get from watching a film.
Schindler's List has a vivid hero, whose fate is to rescue as many people as he can, by recruiting them under his company. This hero is an unwilling hero, where he, not only once blamed his assistant for bringing in incompetent people to work. He is detached with the favour and the charity he is doing for his staff. However there is a scene where he is about to flee, and he suddenly breaks into tears, bragging about he hasn't done enough for the people. It is moving, yet the intention of the scene is too obvious. Schindler, breaking into tears and kneeling down, doesn't seem like the tough guy he used to be previously. Nevertheless, overall, the hero in the Schindler's List is someone we look up onto, and on the other hand, the protagonist in The Pianist is someone we identify with.
The Pianist has a protagonist, who is not set to go out and fight his enemies, but he has one simple objective - to live. He is a character, whom we, as the normal people, would identify with. He lost his career, his family, he lost everything. What would you do, if you were him, a powerless citizen? You'd probably do the same. On the day he is separated from his family, knowing that they would die, and he wanders back to the house, I felt a total lost, just like him. What is life? What is hope? How do you live on?
Schindler's List describes brutality in large scale - the mass showering of a group of naked women, citizens losing all their properties at the railway station, etc. The overall emotion evoked was sympathy. In The Pianist, we were brought into that realistic experience as if we were there. The Germans are so absurd, and the Jewish not fighting back, evoked an emotion of utter rage in me.
In The Pianist, the brutality portrayed is much more subjective, coming from the point of view of the protagonist, hence more raw and realistic. Perhaps the fact that the director himself, Roman Polanski has been through the experience, he tends to present these ruthless incidents as they were, without trying to give a reason. One German comes, picks some Jewish out, and starts shooting. That's it. At night, they rush into the house, throw somebody out of the window. That's it. We never understand why. Thus, many times, we feel shocked, like the protagonist, because they were unpredictable, unreasonable. Whereas in the Schindler's List, the German General guy often talks to Schindler, and sometimes his weakness is shown. It seemed to have some moral justification there, or the attempt to make him more humanised, or trying to ingest certain reasons behind all these insanity. It makes him a complicated character, but at the same time, it takes too much for us to try to understand him, or even pity him.
In The Pianist, time passes, he wakes up, he sleeps, he tries to find food. This routine is torturous, restless and hopeless (like in the "Cast Away"). We follow him all the way through, because we want to see the day he is reborn. The drama was heighten when he was almost dead - he was beaten until fainted, he was almost killed by the Russian because of the German coat he was wearing. These are the ordeals in the principles of mythology, and we find it utmost rejoicing to see him survive, and reborn again. At last, he is back at the radio station where he used to be.
All in all, the Schindler's List provides a more informative view. It motivates me to find out more about the racism and the war after watching the film. The Pianist initiates more psychological and philosophical thinking about human survival in individual and in groups. (Maybe there were no belief, or seemingly plausible way, or set of rules for each races to live harmoniously together, and so one must demonstrate his power or guarantee his survival by imposing fear onto another.)
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