Darth Vader and the Sylphide, Part Deux

                                                             II: Darth Vader (1977)

Iconic Darth

Last week at the Comic Con convention in San Diego, preview a clip for the newest film in the Star Wars collection was shown, and (surprise!) the three best-known surviving stars of the original 1977 film (Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford) made an unannounced appearance to hysterical acclaim.  Even better, they will reappear in the new epic, along with other stars of the first film.

Then

Now

If I certainly wasn’t around for the opening performance of La Sylphide, in 1832, I did see Star Wars with friends the weekend it opened in San Antonio in 1977.  From the first opening scroll to the giving of the final medal, we were completely entranced.  The vividness and fast pace of the action, the sweeping sense of sheer adventure and quirky fun, real heroes and villains and the battered world of that galaxy “a long time ago and far, far away,” swept us into a complete and gleeful suspension of disbelief, and just let us be carried along.  John Williams’ exciting score helped too, with its echoes of Holst’s The Planets and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring amalgamated into its own originality enhanced the action.   When, regretfully it was over, we all bounced out of the theater, high as kites—or spaceships.

Like la Sylphide, Star Wars arrived at a moment in popular culture when the audience was ready for it.  After all, otherworldly nymphs had been wafting around story lines long before The Sylph ever floated by, but it was the supernatural in that exotic Scottish setting and Doomed Love that resonated with the audience caught up in Romanticism.  For us, science fiction and fantasy had already existed for 80 years or more.  Both George Lukas and I had grown up with the klunky Flash Gordon serials, made in the mid 1930’s on the cheap with recycled sets, blimp-shaped rocket ships spewing exhaust and reused costumes from second-rate movie musicals, seen 20 years after their creation on ten-inch TV screens.  The first Star Trek series had already come and gone as well, not to mention Kubrick’s acid-tripping 2001, a Space Odyssey.  But Lukas, over a period of four years, had created a visually rich and very accessible space world at a moment when the digital age and all its possibilities and overkill hadn’t yet arrived. 

Reviews contemporary with the 1977 premier reflected an almost universal (forgive the pun) intoxication. Vincent Canby of the New York Times, after summarizing the plot said:

That's about all the plot that anyone of voting age should be required to keep track of. The story of "Star Wars" could be written on the head of a pin and still leave room for the Bible. It is, rather, a breathless succession of escapes, pursuits, dangerous missions, unexpected encounters, with each one ending in some kind of defeat until the final one.

The initial movie became  the first of a trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi continuing the story, a sort of cinematic Ring Cycle, Wagner more than Tolkien.  Not leaving well enough alone, three more films were made, prequels to the first three, putting the original Star Wars as episode IV.  These three, necessarily with different casts, over-explained the Jedi story and Anniken Skywalker’s fall from grace and metamorphosis into Darth Vader.  With newer digitization techniques, all sorts of magic became effortless—and for me, it was certainly overkill and very forgettable—like so many Sylphide knockoffs.  And of course all of them, like La Sylphide, generated all sorts of Star Wars commercial paraphernalia, on a far greater level, due to all of the improvements to mass media.

The first Star Wars was actually a great stand-alone film, and has influenced the science-fantasy world to this day.  Like La Sylphide, serious scholars of popular culture, as well as religion and philosophy have endlessly dissected it, and like La Sylphide’s scholarly literature, basically dehydrating the miracle in the process.

Princess Leia of Alderaan

For the rest of us, we can delight in Lukas’s archetypes, but not explore it too deeply (has anybody noticed, for example, that Princess Leia’s hairdo echoes an earlier powerful heroine’s—Ozma of Oz)?  The heroes are all recognizable in type, even the bots, priggish R2-D2 and that wonderful garbage-can computer C-3PO.  And what about our favorite Wookie—an extraterrestrial who looks like an amalgamated lion, chow dog and great ape?  And then, there are all of those critters in the famous bar scene.  On the other hand, the villains of The Empire, with their gray-black uniforms and the anonymous white troopers certainly invoke all-too human Nazis.  Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Laia are all humans too, and so is the Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobe.  There’s just enough human population here for us to identify with, mixed with those crazy extraterrestrials to make this film appealing to us humans.  Once again, this is similar to all those Scots in La Sylphide versus the Sylph and her companions.  The fascination of both is that we’re suspended between the familiar and the fantastic.

 

Princess Ozma of Oz

And then there’s my favorite villain, Darth Vader.  His appearance, all black, implied massiveness (though human in scale) made monolithic by his black cloak and his both fly-like and skull-like mask, and that wonderfully wheezing and menacing voice! It took three humans to produce this character, the body, provided by David Prowse, the lightsaber fighter by Bob Anderson, and the raspy voice by James Earl Jones (uncredited in the initial movie), plus costume designers and other production folk. All the “human” actors merely needed stunt-doubles.

Vader evolves through the other films in the series —indeed as everyone who follows Star Wars in all of its manifestations knows, how Aniken Skywalker, Jedi knight, went over to the dark side and became Darth Vader (and a cyborg, no less), is the theme of the Prequel.

But in the initial film, Vader is a stand-alone figure, a former Jedi master with the Force still with him, and already tragic.  He is a space-age equivalent of a World War I – era Prussian General, imbued with an older chivalry of war, who lives long enough to become a Nazi, but is clearly uncomfortable within the New Order.  In short, a formidable foe for Obi-Wan Kenobe and Luke Skywalker.

 

Darth Vader and Other Neighboring Gargoyles

            Darth Vader’s mythic status has been elevated to the world of art as well: he is one of the gargoyle figures added to the Washington National Cathedral in the 1980’s (and they sell his bobble-head in the gift shop).  He has become as universal a figure in black for the 20^th and 21^st century as the Sylphide was in white during the mid-1800’s.

 

Darth Vader as Bobblehead

            We can’t recreate the initial euphoria and wonder we had in 1977, not only are we older perhaps more jaded now and over-bombarded with CGI images, but the film itself has changed.  George Lukas modified it somewhat and added digital footage in 1997 and tweaked it further later on, partly because of new technologies, but partly to synchronize better with the succeeding episodes.

            Meanwhile, the iconic Darth Vader mask has been immortalized on the Cathedral, and it keeps serving as a model-type for other fantasies: just have a look at the costume of Ant Man, a film that debuted last week!

 

Ant-Man!?

            In the original Star Wars, George Lukas took universal fantasies and contextualized them for the 1977 world, much as Filippo Taglioni did for the romantic imagination of 1832, and both emblems for their times.  Can the upcoming Star Wars VII bring any of that initial magic back?  If so, it will have to satisfy both the 2015 mindset and the nostalgia for the 1970’s--pretty much what Laclotte tried for in his 20^th century Sylphide reconstruction.

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Some Sources:

Wikipedia has an excellent article on Star Wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_%28film%29

For an old original episode of Flash Gordon see:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1MOvthQYz4

Vincent Canby's 1977 review in the New York Times is at: http://www.nytimes.com/1977/05/26/movies/moviesspecial/26STAR.html?_r=0

A complete study of the changes that George Lukas made to Star Wars when it was rereleased and made into Episode IV can be found at: http://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=4334040

Darth Vader and the Sylphide, Part I.

I. La Sylphide: 1832

            If you were in Paris on March 12, 1832, and decided to catch the premiere of the new ballet at the Paris Opera that night, you were in for a rare experience: the ballet was La Sylphide, and she was played by the soon-to-be-superstar Marie Taglioni.  The plot was simple: Scottish Highlander James, about to be married, gets tempted away on his wedding day by an otherworldly Sylph.  She looks like a girl, but has wings and can fly, and lives in the nearby woods.  He follows her there, but she keeps flitting away until a witch named Madge offers James a scarf that will ground her, so that she can be his forever.  But when James puts the scarf around her, the Sylph loses her wings—her life force—and she dies.  James is left with his dead dreamgirl, carried away skywards by her sister sylphs, while his ex-fiancée marries his best friend. It’s a flimsy plot, so why was this ballet a landmark?--Because it came at the right time, in the right place, and with the right girl. 

Cholera in Paris

What would it have been like to be there at that moment?  Paris in 1832, like most cities at the time, was not a healthy place: it still had its narrow medieval streets, sewage was a problem, disease was rife, with tuberculosis common.  As a matter of fact, two weeks after this performance, Cholera appeared in the city, and would eventually take 20,000 lives.  The average life expectancy in 1830 was around 45.  If you want an evocation of Paris in 1832, think Hugo’s Les Miserables; the episode of the barricades chronicles the brief uprising in the city in that year. Certainly the precariousness of life, and the preoccupation with the supernatural, helped to fire up the Romantic movement, now just coming into vogue.  Theater, music and literature provided escape, and ballet, emerging into its own as an independent art form did too. 

To understand 1832, we have to modify our mindset even more: Just last week, the actress Patti LuPone, miffed at a woman who was texting on her cellphone  all through a play in which she was performing, grabbed the phone from the lady’s hands at the end of the second act.  We all know how distracting texting can be, and in a darkened theater, those bright screens shine like beacons, not to mention the dings and boings.

In 1832, the Paris Opera was not the one we know now, but on the much narrower Rue de Peletier.  Unlike modern theater, the house lights were kept on, so people could socialize, chatter and flirt particularly if the entertainment were mediocre.  I have the feeling that audiences then could have at least as much A.D.D. as they do now.  The curtain never went down between acts, so scene changes (and stagehands), could be seen by everyone. There were also boxes right at the stage, so that rich playboys could ogle their favorite actors, singers and dancers up close and personal, and proposition ballerinas and ladies of the chorus afterwards in a salon adjacent to the stage.  Before 1800, stage and house lighting was provided by flickering candles.

The Opera, Rue la Peletier: Robert le Diable in full tilt

But by the 1820’s, the advent of gas lighting at the beginning of the century allowed for much more dramatic theatrical special effects.  In 1831, the Opera presented Giacomo Mayerbeer’s Robert le Diable (Robert the Devil) with a spectacular ballet involving Robert, the Devil’s son, cavorting with the spirits of lascivious long-dead nuns in a ruined cloister at night.  Theatrical illusion was

aided by the new custom of lowering the curtain during scene changes. Devilish Robert caused a sensation, the opening shot of fifteen years of hybrid spirits, ghosts, fatal and insanity-causing love, often occurring in exotic locales—if not the extraterrestrial, at least the supernatural. Such creatures can tempt humans, but can’t really be life partners; and the Sylphide doesn’t have a name, human or otherwise. They constitute the Romantic notion of the Unattainable Ideal, and they usually end badly.

Marie Taglioni seemed to have epitomized the unearthly/earthly dichotomy of the Sylph, or at least her contemporaries thought so.  Critics of the day wrote elaborate, wordy paeans of praise, but beyond that, everyone who saw her in this role was enchanted.  It’s interesting because she had rather long arms as well as a stooping posture, and was not a particularly pretty woman, which set her apart from most ballet dancers of the period, who were considered fair game for dalliance among men of the leisure class.

Foyer de la Dance, where Rich Guys and Ballerinas meet; Taglioni isn't here

Taglioni on her toes

But she made viewers believe that she was beautiful and not quite of this world.  Great dancers are great athletes—musical ones.  Marie was all this, and also had an exceptional genetic pedigree: her maternal grandfather was a celebrated Swedish opera singer, her mother a dancer, and her Italian father’s side formed a veritable dynasty of dancers (grandfather, father, aunt, uncle, brother).  Most of her extraordinary ethereality, though, was formed by years of rigorous training, and sustained by very hard work—she would practice two hours a day for her whole career, and to prepare for her debut in Vienna in 1822, her father put her through an exhausting boot camp (pardon the pun), working her six hours a day. She was also fortunate to have her father, Filippo, not only her personal trainer, but also a personal choreographer and business manager.  She was said by legend to have invented toe dancing.  In fact she didn’t, but with her father’s training and her own personal determination, what she herself did was to extend the technique and so integrate it into her dance style that she really seemed to float—and she did all this while wearing a corset and soft shoes!

Taglioni's Costume and a shoe, both in St. Petersburg.  Photo by Emma Johansson

Taglioni Corsets

By the time she created the Sylph, she was 28, and had been dancing in public for ten years, and appearing at the Paris Opera for five.  But La Sylphide made the most perfect use of her talents and though she danced many other roles until her retirement at age 43 in 1847, she would always be THE Sylph, and appeared in it in many European capitals, including in Russia, where crazy fans once cooked one of her shoes (used or new?) and ate it.

It is not surprising that La Sylphide became an instant Romantic Movement icon.  For the next decade and a half, sprites of water, air, fire and even trees continued to haunt (and elude) mortal men.  Though the basic lines of her white costume was really a shortened version of ladies’ fashion of the time, it turned around and made evening wear lighter and more gauzy, and there was even a line of “La Sylphide” corsets. An English stagecoach line was named in her honor, as was a new type of flower.  One of Taglioni’s most enthusiastic fans, the future Queen Victoria, had a doll with her costume, and there were paper dolls too.  The commercial possibilities spread—and eventually, years later, the sylph graced a brand of American bourbon.

Taglioni cutouts

La Sylphide Bourbon (1860).  At least one sylph appears to be topless

We can try and evoke that magic evening of March 12, 1832, but we can’t really.  In the pre photographic era, pictures of dancers are stylized to a period ideal, and can assume postures impossible in the real world. Performance in any genre, be it ballet, opera, popular songs, or theater are ephemeral things, and even works with a long history change over time as new artists conform to their own times.  After all techniques and fashion both evolve. La Sylphide didn’t outlast its performer for that long; art and style move on, and by 1858, when it was last seen in Filippo’s version, it was already charmingly archaic, and its last performer, Emma Livry died tragically young in a fire.  A second version, choreographed by August Bournonville in 1836 with new music, does survive to this day, but now altered by modern reinforced toe shoes, changes in dance technique, if not choreography, and of course the only lights during performance are on the stage.

In the 1970’s Pierre Laclotte attempted a reconstruction of Filippo Taglioni’s ballet, and tried to come as close as possible to the original by careful research.  You can watch two different performances of it on Youtube.  But he wasn’t at the original debut, and once again staging, lighting and the darkened theater prevail (if nobody is using a cell phone).  It remains a loving tribute, but its producer is a 20^th-21^st century guy in a different culture.

La Sylphide has been studied, analyzed, deconstructed and reconstructed many times during the last 30 years by critics and dance history scholars.  To us, here, now, it will always be a quaint and charming anachronism.  Dissecting it is like trying to dissect the dead goose to find out how she laid golden eggs.  Nobody can really know how Taglioni danced.  It was a pop-culture golden moment, and changed everything for that time on.  And we can still have that kind of experience.  Wait for Part 2!

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The two best books dealing with the Sylph and Taglioni are:

Ivor Guest, The Romantic ballet in Paris, Alton (Hampshire), Dance books Ltd., 2008.

            Guest offers a complete view of the period 1815-1847, putting La Sylphide,

And Taglioni into superb cultural and artistic context.  He is the preeminent ballet historian of 19^th century Paris and London, and all his numerous books are fascinating.

Marian Smith (ed.), La Sylphide: 1832 and Beyond, Paris 1832 and Beyond, Dance Books, Ltd. 2012

            This is a multi-authored volume of scholarly decostructions of many aspects

            of La Sylphide.

The Web: Just Google ‘Taglioni” and “La Sylphide” and you will find a plethora of websites, information and images, a lot of it solid, a lot of it not.  Interesting for the curious, but read Guest first to get the Right Stuff.

You can watch two performances of Laclotte's La Sylphide on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm-9_OpzWUE   1972 - a little blurry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=710JId_pjjM  (2004)

Aurora, Audie and Roman: Enactors and Reenactors

AURORA

Aurora 

Just two weeks ago, I was in Armenia.  On the last day, we visited the impressive Genocide Memorial, chronicling the tragic events of 1915.  As a Jew and old enough to have been alive through most of the Holocaust, the story of Armenian genocide really resonated, even more so because they have never had closure on the systematic slaughter of so many: a Non-Event Perpetrated by Those Who Must Not Be Named. We were rushed through the museum adjacent to the Memorial, and, since it was close to closing time, didn’t get much of a chance to see anything in detail, but I was struck in passing by what looked like some gruesome newsreel footage as awful as a lot of the World War II Nazi films of Jews being slaughtered or packed into boxcars.  Upon inquiry, I was advised to Google “Ravished Armenia.”

I did that later and found this footage on YouTube, but it turned out to be twenty minutes of surviving clips from a now-lost silent Hollywood movie made about the genocide, based on the harrowing memoir of a survivor named Aurora Mardaginian.   Her story is still in print, and online as well.  The latest printed edition, published as Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiginian, (2014), edited and with an introduction by the film historian Anthony Slide and the shooting script of the original film, came out just in time for the Armenian Genocide centennial commemorated this year.

I have read a lot of memoirs of holocaust survivors, and Mardiginian’s story is as gruesome a chronicle as any of them: the systematic murders of entire families, multiple rapes, sexual slavery, wholesale slaughter often preceded by torture, targeting an entire people for extermination, not because of anything they did, but for what they were born into, much as Jews were by the Nazis. 

When Slide interviewed Mardaginian shortly before her death, she revealed to him that she had sanitized the story somewhat—for instance, the death of a group of girls by crucifixion (an irony for nice Christian girls), was actually carried out by impalement on the low crosses through their vaginas.  But Slide’s introduction revealed even more: Aurora didn’t live this nightmare once, but twice, because she played herself in the film version too.

She had arrived in the United States in 1917, with her original name Arshalouys Mardigian, after a long odyssey including her escape to Russian-held territory, passing through Petrograd during the chaos of the October Revolution. She was 14 when her ordeal began, and only 16 when she immigrated. By this time, America was fired up by the plight of the Armenians, and Aurora soon met an American screenwriter, Harvey Gates and his wife who realized her potential for the cause of Armenian relief.  Since she as yet spoke no English, the Gates got her to dictate her story in Armenian, and an interpreter helped them to transcribe it.  The Gates then had it published, and sold the film rights to William Selig.

Aurora was persuaded to go out to California to star as herself, and act as a consultant on the film.  The former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and an outspoken critic of the Genocide, Henry Morgenthau, also played himself in a brief vignette. 

Aurora (2nd from right) playing herself in the movie, with actors as her family

And so, Ravished Armenia, otherwise known as Auction of Souls, was made and raised millions for the Armenian refugees.  Something of its impact can be gleaned from a press release reproduced by Slide:

“‘RAVISHED ARMENIA’

The story of the girl who survived

Is the greatest motion picture achievement in theme, human interest, seriousness of purpose and thrilling development of dramatic conception ever attempted”

That was the good part.  Aurora had to sue to get the money owed her for the project, and soon returned to New York.  She lived on to marry, have a son and die at age 94 in California, but, given her early experiences, it is not surprising that for the rest of her life she displayed severe symptoms of P.T.S.D., harboring fears that Turks would come to assassinate her in revenge for the memoir and movie. She eventually became a virtual recluse, and died alone, estranged from her son. 

By now, we know well that enduring an experience as she did makes it difficult to survive whole and sane.  I still have scary childhood memories of tattooed Holocaust refugees, wandering around at a Jewish summer resort, who seemed to me at the time to be very weird people.

In Aurora’s case, for all the money raised, it seems beyond my comprehension to have escaped alive, been through such an ordeal, and then have to reenact the whole thing all over again.  Even considering the fact that she was treated well on the set, and it was make-believe (she was even given a romantic interest in the film), was it possible that the reality and the make-believe didn’t merge?  She had to act with American actors portraying family members; actually, she had witnessed many of the real ones’ deaths.  Slide quotes Aurora about her terror of confronting American actors dressed like Turkish forces for the first time.  Later, she broke an ankle during filming, but continued anyway.

Where can we draw the line between reenactment and reality?  Is it ever justifiable to make someone experience such horrors again, even for the sake of charity? 

AUDIE

Audie, 1945, Most Decorated WW II soldier

Aurora was not the only person to play their selves in a movie reenacting traumatic events in their own lives.  In 1955, Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of World War II, played himself in the film of the war memoir he had written with David McClure, To Hell and Back. True, by this time, Murphy had been kicking around Hollywood for a number of years, with relatively little success, but in playing himself, he hit pay dirt.

Like Aurora, he had his war experiences behind him by the age of 21, having enlisted in the army at 17, and ten years had passed between his very honorable discharge from the army, and six between the publication of the memoir, and the film, and he was certainly far more savvy about the ways of the film industry.  He had subsequent success as an actor starring in westerns for another twenty, and also was successful as a country-western songwriter.

To Hell and Back had the biggest box office gross until the release of Jaws.  Contemporary critical views have been less kind, the consensus being that it in itself is a period piece: not to World War II, but the way of making war movies in the 1950’s.  Perhaps, because war movies are a genre unto themselves, and because Murphy’s role was proactive, he could avoid confusion between real life and action movie.  He was never a great actor, but his presence in this reenactment gives it an authenticity that an over-the-top recreation by another actor would lack (he allegedly wanted Tony Curtis to play him before accepting the role himself

Audie Murphy plays himself, 1955

Murphy was forthright about his own P.T.S.D. resulting from the war: he slept with a gun under his pillow, became temporarily addicted to sleeping pills and had a hair-trigger temper. However, he was able to benefit from his disabilities and later became an advocate for the recognition of P.T.S.D. as a legitimate condition, unlike Aurora’s promotion as a fundraiser by others.  He died at the relatively young age of 47 in a plane crash.

ROMAN

Roman, 2009

The celebrated film director Roman Polanski, like Aurora, was a Genocide survivor, who had experienced the Holocaust as a child and young teenager in Krakow, Poland, managing to escape during a roundup and then passing as a Catholic Polish child with a sympathetic family.  Like so many survivors, P.T.S.D. would mark him, and the cause was double, with the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson gang in 1969.  The biography of this talented filmmaker is full of evidence of this, from the brilliant quirkiness of his films (think Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and Chinatown) to the “statutory rape” charge of 1977.

Polanski had been given the opportunity to direct Schindler’s List, but had declined, partly because the action took place in and around Krakow.  He had certainly skirted around Holocaust subjects in the intense psychological drama Death and the Maiden, (1994) though the Fascism here was Latin American.  He finally tacked the Holocaust directly in the superb film The Pianist in 2002.

This movie is someone else’s memoir, Wladyslaw Szpilman, which took place in Warsaw, not Krakow, with the protagonist played by Adrian Brody, though Polanski has had numerous acting roles over his career.  For me, it’s the best Holocaust film ever made, and I invite the reader to read Clive James’s masterful review and analysis of it, available online.

Adrian Brody in "The Pianist"

Roman Polaski on the set of "The pianist"

The parallels and resonances between Polanski’s own experiences in the Holocaust in this film can perhaps be summed up by a statement made by Thomas Kretschmann, who played the sympathetic German officer, Captain Hosenfeld, in an interview with Carlo Cavagna:

“……if you have the chance to meet with Polanski on set, you want to know things. I tried the whole time to get information out of him, out of his own experiences. He was very closed. He didn't talk very much about himself; he didn't talk very much about the scenes. He wanted you to be a part of it, but he didn't want to take the whole thing apart. He just went with you around the corner and played around with the lines a little. Then after the film was done, he opened up. He took me to the first [screening]. Afterwards he says, "This scene happened to me. This scene I watched. This scene…" You get the feeling that the whole thing is packed with stuff out of his own life. But he didn't let you know. I think he didn't want to be distracted. He said all the time, "Concentration is my big passion. I need concentration! I need concentration!"

So The Pianist isn’t a reenactment, but it’s more: the chronicle of two individuals, just guys, faced with the mundane task of day to day survival in an untenable dehumanizing situation: the making of P.T.S.D.

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Though the full text of Ravished Armenia can be found online at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ravished_Armenia

I recommend:
Anthony Slide (ed.), Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi Press, 2014.

The preserved footage of Ravished Armenia is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3nTw2D07Lk
the film is blurry, the inter titles and music are both modern.

A surprisingly good discussion of the Armenian Genocide is at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide; it has a great bibliography and good links to other sites.

For a modern discussion of "To Hell and Back, see Matthew Sweet 2009 Guardian review at:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/dec/03/audie-murphy-to-hell-and-back

And Murphy's own promotion when the film came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF1F1kRTpWE

Clive James' wonderful on The Pianist is at: http://www.clivejames.com/polanski-pianist

And interviews with both Thomas Kretschmann and Adrien Brody are at:http://www.aboutfilm.com/features/pianist/interview.htm

But you can hear Polanski's take on the film in a bonus interview with the DVD of The Pianist.