Video: ‘The piano lesson’ | Anatomy of a scene

Hello, I’m Malcolm Washington, co-writer and director of “The Piano Lesson.” So this scene right here is the climax of the movie. So, all spoilers forward. Within the movie, Berniece, performed by Danielle Deadwyler, has a sophisticated relationship with the piano and is afraid to play it as a result of, in her phrases, she does not wish to awaken the moods that the piano evokes. His brother, Boy Willie, who has been attempting to promote the piano all through the movie, is preventing to the loss of life with a ghost upstairs whereas having to face a type of religious reckoning occurring inside himself. So at this second, Danielle’s Berniece decides that she should face this factor, lay palms on it and play the piano for the primary time. This was a sequence that we spent plenty of time speaking about throughout filming after which within the reducing course of. All our themes converge right here. The concept of ​​shadow and light-weight, of reality and secrets and techniques, and of confronting the deepest elements of ourselves to beat. And transcend. Name them, Berniece, name them. I really like what Danielle does right here. She simply goes someplace else, actually. And I feel in the event you talked to her now about that sequence, she would not even keep in mind filming it. This right here. We needed to inform a narrative of black religious apply in America. So in our religious apply, there are two totally different traditions, the southern black Christian custom and the West African roots of religious apply. And right here we interact with each in recognizing the iconography of some West African religious practices in Berniece’s white costume. The concept that you may name upon your ancestors and that there’s a borderless relationship between the residing and the lifeless. So right here she is looking on the spirits of her ancestors, chanting their names. “I would like you to assist me, I would like you to assist me, I would like you to assist me, Mama Berniece, I would like you to assist me.” Declaring their identities and discovering energy in that. In order this scene unfolds, you will see the reducing rhythm intensify, the lighting intensify as she conjures these spirits in an try to exorcise this ghost. Avery can be there representing our Christian religious apply. And it opens the portal to all of this. At this second of sound, you’ll start to listen to the noise of the home, the drums of Africa enter, adopted by a choir of voices representing our ancestors and the sweetness they carry with them. All through this film, there was a haunting and the haunting was scary at some factors. However right here we see that it’s mighty in magnificence. I at all times like this picture right here as a result of it is a type of household portrait. I used to be wanting, there is a Japanese photographer referred to as Masahisa Fukase, and he did a collection of household portraits that actually impressed the household frames right here. And after they enter, she is ready to lastly exorcise this ghost and clear the trauma of her household’s previous when everybody places their palms on her and the flame ignites. Peace was restored. Household is related to one another and to the ancestors earlier than them. And there may be magnificence there.