War Is A Plunderer
---An amateurish film review of The Pianist
Today I watched the movie The Pianist which is a story about a Jewish pianist who tried to survive from World War II and he made it at last in Warsaw.
Thanks for the existence of the art form of film, without which something we may not know forever. From an objective perspective, films do contributes to the exposure and spread of something. Through films, we can feel the roles’ sad, the joy, the anger, the desperation, the hope just like we were the people in the film. We often feel and get something from a movie, more or less.
I watched The Pianist with a heavy heart. I felt a lot from the movie, however, what touched me most is war and I have thought a lot about war. In a word, war is a plunderer who deprives us of everything we have in a violent way. We may not realize the importance of something until we lose it. The past misery makes us value what we have today.
At first, war is a plunderer who takes away food without which nobody could live. In the movie, the main actor Wladyslaw Szpilman was the most famous pianist in Poland, maybe the whole world. His Jewish family also had good jobs. So we can give the conclusion that his family was rich. However, when the war broke out, they could hardly feed themselves. All of the family just fed on some potatoes. During his later
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escape from persecution by Nazi, Szpilman almost starved to death several times because of the lack of food.
Besides, war is a plunderer who takes away freedom from us. In the beginning, the Jew were forbidden to enter café, to have a walk in park, even forbidden to have a seat in bench. Later, they were forbidden to get out. In fact, they were confined to a little housing estate. Then, they were forced to work hard just like a machine. At last, they were carried away by train and got killed. They were deprived of lives, let alone talk the freedom？
What’s more, war is a plunderer who takes away dignity from us. For people, the most important thing is dignity. Dignity is something that can’t be spoiled in human soul. It is dignity that makes us stand erectly. However, all this is based on peacetime. Once war breaks out, dignity will be replaced by food and survival, just as showed in the movie. At last, war is a plunderer who takes away humanity from us. I firmly believe in that it is very humanity that makes us human instead of beast. Biologists tell us: vertebrates are born offensive; Christians hold the view that human nature is evil, it’s destined by our genes and blood, because human is cursed by God. War is a powerful lunatic as well as plunderer. He gives weapons to human and makes them kill each other. As we all know, power drives man crazy, and war usually gives power to human as well as weapons. In the movie, Nazi was the most typical representative
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who had lost their humanity. They showed no love, no sympathy and no mercy but only atrocity, blood. They shot people they disliked even only for joy. They were beasts only driven by evil nature without rationality and humanity. Indian poet Tagore has a word of poem Man is worse than an animal when he is an animal. How appropriate the word is when pointed to those people like Nazi.
It’s undeniable that war is a powerful and greedy plunderer who can and will take away almost everything from us. Fortunately, thank goodness, it’s just almost instead of all. When a war breaks out, as Pandora's Box is opened, all kinds of evil are released, only with hope left. As a plunderer, a war can plunder all the people almost everything some of the time and some of the people almost everything all the time but it cannot plunder all the people everything all the time. At the beginning, only a few people were desperate. Later, the desperate was becoming more and more. The good news was there were a lot of people who had not been deprived of hope. At last, they witnessed the victory and hugged new life.
We may not be able to understand all the director wanted to express through the film because it’s too much to catch. And I’m in confusion all the time when I watch the movie that why the Jew didn’t fight against at all when they were facing the massacre as the most intelligent nation in the world. The Pianist is not only the memories of the past suffering and
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brutality, it’s also the query to the cowardly Jew: When the disaster occurred, what were you doing? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? The line is from The Merchant of Venice. It indicates that not only their bodies were conquered by Nazi, but also their soul was enslaved. What a lamentable thing it is.
The movie makes us rethink war profoundly again. Just as we say, a war is a plunderer who takes away almost everything from us. But please hold hope and keep humanity even we are in the worst case. The reason why God gives us a door of luck is informing us of the truth that the light of victory is just behind the door.
May wars break out next to never, may we live in a world without wars but only peace.
Originally written by Yu Hang
2nd, April, 2016.
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