Franco Debono watched The Pianist, and in the suffering of Wladyslaw Szpilman, he saw himself
Franco Debono walks alone through the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto in World War II
When Roman Polanski’s The Pianist made headlines the world over 10 years ago, I didn’t watch it, just as I didn’t watch Schindler’s List, La Vita e Bella and others in that genre, and just as I leave the room or switch channels whenever anything similar is on the television.
I cannot bear it. The magnitude of that cruelty and suffering is too much for me to come to terms with.
The Pianist is the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman (the pianist of the title), who is a Jew in the Warsaw ghetto in World War II. It is about the terrible suffering there, and includes dreadful scenes like that of SS officers ransacking a home and throwing a disabled man to his death off a balcony and shooting those who try to help him.
Then there is a graphic account of the tragic Warsaw ghetto uprising, the hope shown on screen made more awfully poignant by knowledge of its disastrous result. I can handle a great deal, but not that sort of thing, not when I know that it really happened.
Szpilman’s family are depoprted to the Treblinka extermination camp, where they are killed, but Szpilman himself is taken as a slave labourer by the SS. He is eventually kept alive by a Wehrmacht captain who is moved by his piano-playing.
Szpilman died in 2000. The man who saved him died in a Soviet gulag in 1952.
Now Franco Debono has posted this on his Facebook wall.
Franco Debono
i watched ‘THE PIANIST’. it is about the cruelty of trying to rob people of their humanity, of their soul, of their dignity, their achievements and their legitimate aspirations and expectations. EDGAR GALEA CURMI should watch it
The film which I could not bear to watch, because the implied and overt horror overwhelms me, the film which made so many others weep with sorrow and empathy, he watched and in it, he saw himself.
Instead of ringing Franco Debono to find out what he thinks about the government’s every move, the newspapers should ring a couple of psychiatrists to find out what they think about Franco Debono.
Is it ethical? Of course it is. The man is a legislator, for heaven’s sake. He makes our laws. That is what a member of parliament is.
At the very least, this type of comment should make the headlines, because it offers insight into a very disturbing (note, Franco, that I didn’t say ‘disturbed’) personality.
And please, Franco, do not post another comment on this website, marked NOT FOR PUBLICATION, telling me ‘this must stop’ and filling in the name field as ‘Dr. Franco Debono’, bit-titlu.
When you ring me and I don’t pick up, it’s because I don’t want to speak to you. Get the message. Even Jeffrey did eventually, and with those brilliant school reports, you’re supposed to be brighter than he is.
Who are you to believe that you have a divine right to throw your weight around as a politician without being criticised or held to scrutiny and account?
You and Jeffrey are two of a kind. No wonder you don’t like each other and can’t work as a team in damaging the Nationalist Party and holding the country to ransom with your personality problems. Imagine how much more successful you would be if you could cooperate.
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I didn’t know Edgar Galea Curmi could play the piano.
What has Edgar Galea Curmi done to Franco Debono?
Like you, Daphne, I do not watch these types of films but I also do not watch films with IRA connections from the USA and films with children as protagonists.
When I tried watching “Raid On Entebbe” in a Maltese cinema in the Golden Years, I was unable to, because it was banned so as not to offend the cannibal-dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin, and his best buddy Muammar Gaddafi.
You mean you didn’t see ‘Mary Poppins’? Tsk tsk.
Baxxter, trust you to find an exception. I must apologise because I told an untruth; I saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!
wow – limited range of movies you’ve got there
Very well said. I couldn’t agree with you more.
He is in politics for himself. Typical narcissism.
I am with you there, Daphne. I dislike that type of genre.
Franco likes them not because he feels any pity for the suffering of others, but because in the SS he subconsciously sees himself: a hungry, power-seeking individual who wants to break anyone who stands in his way.
It is OK for him to criticise others and use parliament to do so (you see, by Form II C standards, this is ethical) but wails when others criticise him.
He wanted his moment of glory and he got it, thanks to his friends at The Times and on Fatty’s Tea Party TV show.
Once you put yourself in that kind of limelight, then be ready to get criticsm, Taparsi Onorevoli.
May I suggest another film for his delectation? One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Jack Nicholson.
Very well said.
I think by Sunday we will have a better picture of what is in peoples’ minds. A big loss for the PN will embolden Franco and JPO to continue to do embarrass the PM.
Unlike Labour supporters the Nationalists are not eager to vote on Saturday. The Nationalists to their detriment seem uninterested.
[Daphne – Yes, I know. I’m one of them. Labour supporters are obviously going to be more motivated. With people like me, it’s a matter of caring who runs your local council. I don’t care at all. I never did. I don’t know any of those people anyway.]
Personally, I don’t think the PN’s secretary-general has done enough to encourage people to vote.
Their grass-root work and organization have been absent.
Seems to me the PN is going to sit for an exam unprepared, without doing all the syllabus and hoping to wing it.
Never happens.
Daphne, x’inhu dak li sofra Wladyslaw Szpilman taht in-Nazisti, hdejn dak li sofra DR Franco Debono taht l-idejn dittatorjali tal-Prim Ministru Lawrence Gonzi w n-Nazzjonalisti?
Franco biss jista jghid u Franco biss ghandu jkun emmnut, ghax hu persuna ta’ integrita, infallibbli, certifikati ta’ Form IIc bl-aqwa marki fir-religjon w tant u tant akkwisti fl-universita ta Malta, anke jekk tkaxkar ftit l-hemm u l-hawn u kellu joqghod ghal moghdrija ta xi professur jew tnejn.
I never watched the film for roughly the same reasons you outlined above. However, if you do get hold of the book, I would wholeheartedly recommend it. It is sad but it is also very moving.
With regards to Dr Debono, it is so tragic that he cannot distinguish between a personal tragedy and a tragedy of humanitarian proportions.
Franco Debono is narcissistic. Could you expect any different from him?
I have seen all three of the films you have mentioned (The Pianist, Schindler’s List, La Vita e Bella) and others like it (The Killing Fields, Full Metal Jacket) and via television I have experienced the immediacy of the assasinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, and the living-room presentations of the Vietnam War and its parallel “incursion” into Cambodia.
Stanley Kubrick, Roman Pulanski, and Sterphen Spielberg have portrayed some of the violence and horrors of the 20th century–and there are so many others to the present day on our doorsteps, throughout Africa and in Syria, and continuing in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
I watch those films and the horrors of contemporary warfare and violence in empathy to the victims and in commitment to reason and justice against the forces of violence that surround us. Because of the pain and suffering, my wife, too, like you, often chooses to avoid these films.
However, similarly, I have always refused films of the horror genre–the invention of violence as entertainment seems such a sacrilege against the reality of genuine human suffering, where empathy is justified–and perhaps where we can find a way to relieve actual violence.
But there is something intrinsically deeply disturbing about Franco Debono’s comments after viewing “The Pianist”, who seems to observe objective violence in the world, but then seems to fail to see such violence objectively, and while he seems to view it only in terms of self-perceptions.
Alarm bells should be ringing. If not for so-called journalists, I would hope the electorate would be intelligent enough to discern. But how much of the electorate is emotive-based rather than rational and analytical?
Where are the analytical journalists? Or do “journalists” in Malta simply serve their political masters?
.
I don’t think he knows it is a true story (or at least I hope he doesn’t). I could understand someone using a fictional character to make such comparisons but doing it with an actual person who has really gone through all that is ….. I can’t even think of the right word for it.
People who makes such comparisons have no idea how offensive they are to Holocaust survivors and their relatives, whether Jewish or not.
Trivialisation is as bad as denial.
As I told someone on timesofmalta.com this morning, some people have no sense of proportion and, in this case, no sense of the ridiculous.
As Carly Simon would say about Franco:
You probably think this film is about you
You’re so vain
I’ll bet you think this film is about you
Don’t you don’t you
You’re so vain
“There’s only one thing I value in this world. That’s loyalty. Without it, you’re nothing”
I have the same problem, Daphne. I just can’t stand those type of films.