A Polish Pianist Travels to Budapest: “Affective Geography” in Bruno Monsaingeon's Piotr Anderszewski: Voyageur intranquille (2009)

Abstract In Bruno Monsaingeon's 2009 film portrait of Piotr Anderszewski cinematic technique, voice-over commentaries and musical performances combine to create an “affective” geography in which the pianist moves between significant Central Eastern European places. Anderszewski is filmed traveling in a special train carriage (including a grand piano) which, the director said, “as a place of meditation and reflection … would facilitate the use of flashbacks.” Memory, identity, and origins become central to the film's symbolism. After Freud, railway journeys can be interpreted as a privileged “analogy” for unconscious and repressed thought processes. Train metaphors may thus facilitate an imaging of the mental apparatus and its “lines of conduction.” The essay focuses on three symbolic locations in Anderszewski's journey – Warsaw, Budapest and Zakopane – and on performances of music by Chopin, Schumann and Szymanowski (the first heard in the railway carriage, the second in the Liszt Academy, Budapest, and the third in Szymanowski's house in Zakopane). Each of these sites and musical examples are interpreted primarily through Freud's notion of “displacement” to reveal counterpoints and conjunctions of displaced musical “voices” and identities. These hearings reveal the complexities and dissonances between Monsaingeon's French vision of “Eastern” Europe and Anderszewski's Polish-Hungarian self-identity as “Central” European cosmopolitan.