The piano key has a beginning and an end, it is finite; and "you" is infinite. The earth is an overly large ship, an overly long journey, an overly beautiful woman, an overly intense perfume, a music he cannot play. The pianist of the sea does not belong to the earth and is destined to drift with that ship on the sea.
Text | Rubato
When I was in college, I watched "The Pianist at Sea" and fell in love with every piece of music in the film. What filled me with confusion was that the pianist, who had never set foot on land in his life in 1900, at that transitional moment when he was trying to move from the Virginian to the real world, he only took a few steps up the gangway and then stopped until he died on the ship.
As a young man, I couldn't understand what he was thinking when he stood on the gangway in 1900. He had never been off the ship, so how could he know the world beyond the ship and decide not to go to that world? Was his imaginary land world too beautiful, or was it dangerous? Or did he already experience the whole world in music, and thus realized at that moment that his complete world could only be preserved on the ship?
Revisited more than a decade later, perhaps with some increased experience, the film also presents me with multiple meanings that have not yet appeared in the past.
This is a film that starts with "nothingness". 1900 was not born somewhere in the world, but on a ship. The name "1900" implies more temporal meaning than spatial. He has no citizenship, no birthday, no family, and no archives in the land world. His birth was the most unique mystery before he came into contact with music. The sea is loved and feared, and it reminds people of the vastness and wrath: people on land, life is unstable, like floating on the sea; this kind of flutter is nothing to 1900.
On the ship he was born on, the world flowed on the scale of two thousand people carrying two thousand people each across the ocean. There was lust, but there was no way to go beyond the space from the bow to the stern; 1900 played his own happiness on a limited 88-fold piano keyboard. His adoptive father, a mechanical worker on a ship, belongs to the lowest level of the ship's purgatory, and he has also been hiding 1900 at the bottom to prevent him from being plundered by the real world.
Educated on board in 1900, he was taken care of by the lowest cooks, sailors, mechanics and entertainers from all over the world, giving him the best education they thought they could be; the travelers described the outside world and told him many stories.
Late one night, he heard the "King of Ragtime," black musician Scott. After Joplin's compositions, he became a pianist without a teacher. He never recorded the music he played, no notes, no symbols, just improvised music that existed only in the here and now. The music had never existed anywhere before he played it; when he got up from the piano, it was gone forever.
The Virginian appeared at a time when Europe had just ended World War I, and people who had experienced the pain and poverty of war longed for the United States and longed to start a new life there. In this way, the ship is loaded with a special meaning, that is, the desire to reach its destination. People abandon the original world to pursue a new world; the dance party on the boat and the carnival are all celebrations before arriving at the destination.
1900 Peering into the human world: "People on land waste too much time asking why, never tire of traveling, always looking for out of reach." He never arrived, there was no direction; for him there was no distinction between Europe or America, he existed only between the alternation of old and new.
By the age of eight, in 1900 he had shuttled between the Americas and Europe more than fifty times. He had never been on a ship, not a single foot on land. As far as the world was concerned, he did not exist: he did not have an identity card, a passport, a visa, or any institution issued; from the city, the hospital, the parish prison, his name left no trace; he had no homeland, no homeland, no family, and had never been officially born in human society.
The ship at sea is an "extralegal land", but it is not a primitive jungle, but a place where modern rationalization rules and has an institutional existence. The captain of the ship, the captain, was a man accustomed to living in uniforms, and his thoughts often dissipated in the uniform, pronouncing a verdict of "irregularity." In 1900 came the adoptive father at the bottom of the ship who told him, "Fuck the rules", and in 1900 learned to rebel against all the rules in a sweet way.
When I played the piano in 1900, it was a state of being somewhere else: people are here, and the heart is wandering. In music, he "goes to a beautiful country where women have fragrant hair and are full of sunshine, but they are full of tigers." He sometimes went to the heart of London, to the gardens of Paris, to wait for the sun to rise and fall on the Bridge of Nafoe, to see trains in the wilderness, snow-covered mountains, to count pillars in the world's largest church, and to face the crucified Jesus.
It is through this wandering that he learns about churches, snow and tigers, and can accurately depict the breath of Birmingham Street after the first stop of summer rain. By playing the piano, he has breathed air from all over the world, in his own very authentic way. He spent nearly 30 years on this ship, never seen the world on the shore, but kept peering into the world and falling in love with the world, which stole his soul through music. He already had a map of the world in his mind, a beautiful map of cities, bars, rivers, swamps, airplanes, and lions.
As his fingers slid across the keyboard, caressing the arc of the blues music, God took him on that map. He can also read people, and just by looking at them, he can read the imprints of their identity, voice, breath, homeland, and story, and judge their character and desire.
In the Italian writer Alessandro. In Barico's original novel, the narrator of the story, "I", from New Orleans, UNITED States, boarded the Virginian with a trumpet in January 1927. After the First Frontier War, the center of the world shifted from Europe to the United States. The United States, which made its fortunes from war, entered a materialistic, flashy "jazz age" in the 1920s, during which Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby. During this decade, a large number of blacks poured into New York, and their jazz music became popular in the streets, and the saxophone played the melancholy tune of "Beale Street Jazz" all night. "I" took the trumpet on board, blew the trumpet, and there was a few brief conversations between the 1900 and the 1900. 1900 asked:
"What was that just now"?
"I don't know either"
His eyes lit up.
"When you don't know, it's jazz."
On a rainy night, 1900 with "I" playing the piano on a stormy swaying boat. It was also a dance with the ocean — the ocean is a crazy dancer, and 1900 has a very close relationship with it. The storm was a source of his entertainment, and when it came, he danced revelry, which was also the essence of jazz music and piano playing. Those upcoming notes with the fluctuations of the sea and the movement of 1900 fingers and body, merged into his body, and man and piano became one and became a dance.
The imagination of the world that music brings to him is carved into his body, heart and bone marrow. When he saw through the porthole the innocent face of a girl from the countryside, he did not know how to express this love, and turned her and his liking for her into music purely.
This relationship with music going deep into the flesh makes 1900 itself a metaphor for jazz. This may be the reason why he felt a mortal danger when he faced the real world: he must have smelled of unnatural death as he faced the urban jungle of New York and tried to walk down the steps of the Virginian; even the desire to go to a specific address in New York to find the girl made him feel dangerous.
Another impressive scene in the film is the douqin. The black jazz pianist who had achieved success in the United States came to the ship in 1931. He is like a light shining into the story, and then the light fades, and the complex desires that rush by cause an earthquake in the body of 1900.
It was a "duel" of the keys expressing love and hate, dignity and oppression. The black jazz musician who launched the challenge was convinced that 1900 was sitting in the position he deserved. In 1929, a protracted and profound Great Depression broke out from the United States that swept through the capitalist world, and not only peace and stability passed away with the wind, but also the values and institutions of liberal civilization in the 19th century. Black people who were still in a very low social position in the United States found their place in jazz, and in the face of 1900, the "successful people" from jazz were bent on winning completely. In 1900, "Christmas Eve" and imitation of opponents' music were used to show respect, but in exchange for the other side's disdainful and more aggressive bombardment, the theme of the final round was "how to sink this ship".
Even in the kingdom of music, people who are discriminated against, oppressed, and humiliated in the real world create their music from the lowest levels of society, and once they gain worldly power, they override others and betray the original intention of their music—which is not uncommon in the increasingly barbaric land.
In 1900, he fought back with a magical phantom "Enduring Movement", a song from the classical era. When he lit a cigarette with a fiery silk and handed it to his opponent, saying, "I will not smoke," he saw an insurmountable gulf between him and the coming, extreme, and barbaric era—a chasm that was not so much a chasm of the times as it was a gulf built by the paradoxes of human nature itself in civilian society.
In fact, in this limited journey of two thousand people, everything that is about to happen in the world has happened: hatred, competition, friendship, betrayal, decline, love and death. The time of 1900 in port to prepare for disembarkation was 1933. The brief peace is drawing to a close, and the world is sliding toward another world war.
The Polish poet Zbignev Herbert once wrote: "I am a citizen of the earth, not only the heir of Rome and Greece, but almost the entire infinite heir." This is the pride and faith of mankind that has been cast into the magnificent picture of heaven and time and space." The despair in his personal life is to find his own historical situation in a huge scale, shuttling back and forth between infinite time and space and tiny individuals. The choice in 1900 was the opposite, he was so pure that he could not live in the real world. The Virginian, which sailed on the sea, echoed Noah's Ark, but no longer sailed toward eternal life, but toward natural death.
1900 says that when he stood on the gangway, he stopped not because he saw something, but because he was about to see it. For him, the keys have beginnings and ends, and the music that can be created on these keys is infinite. The city on the continent, on the other hand, was the thousands of keys in front of him, not for mortals, but for God's piano.
"A woman, a house, a piece of land of your own, a view outside the window, a way of dying, all these questions come to you, and you don't know the end. Haven't you ever been scared to death by this thought? I will never leave this boat, but I can choose how to end my life." In that glimpse of the human world, 1900 saw through the impermanence and impermanence contained in modernity, and he no longer belonged to the human world.
Towards the end of the film, 1900 tells the trumpeter "I", who revisits him, that he will never give up the ship, but fortunately, he can give up his life. "No one remembers that I existed anyway, and you are the exception, you are the only one who knows I am here, you better get used to it." I think this sentence is also jazz's farewell to New Orleans. He eventually exploded with the steamship and died with him.
At the end, trumpeters take his dilapidated trumpet and a 1900 broken record and disappear into the alleyways of the industrial age. But I think 1900 is still alive, living in that broken record, living in this legend.
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