In The Pawnbroker, there are mainly three types of races: white, black, and latino, and the blacks were depicted the superior of them all. The first scene of a black man comes out when Sol gets a phone call from Rodriguez. The camera first shoots Rodriguez from the back, then from under him, showing authority and power. Then, there is another scene where two black men and one white man come into the pawnshop and Ortiz looks a bit uncomfortable. While the other people come into the pawnshop begging for more money for their belongings, these men walk in with the whirring lawnmower and ask for the money with authority. They look down on the pawnshop, especially Ortiz, who works there. And it seems as if the Latino are the lowest in status of the three, as shown through the contrast between Ortiz’s and Sol’s houses. The scenes of the two men in their houses are put together to show the difference between the cramped house of Ortiz and the neat, moderately large house of Sol. Also, Ortiz is only an assistant to Sol, who constantly yells at him.
The Pawnbroker showed me that the Holocaust took away not only millions of lives, but also souls of those who survived. I thought the film was well-made in the way that it juxtaposed the passionless, aimless life of Sol Nazerman with his post-traumatic flashbacks, thereby somehow relating the 1960s Harlem to the concentration camps. The violence and immoral things that go on in Harlem remind Sol of what happened in the camp. There is a scene where a boy is getting beat up by a group of guys, and the boy tries to escape by climbing the fence. This reminds Sol of the man who was trying to escape the concentration camp over the barbed wired fence. As no one helps the Jewish man who was trying to escape, no one comes to the boy’s aid. This is one of the first “long” flashbacks that the film gives us. As Hirsch mentions, classical flashbacks would lead to it step by step, from plot to dialogue to camera zoom, etc. But The Pawnbroker gives the audience little time to prepare for the flashbacks, many of which last for a split second. The flashbacks are set in a way that it seems as if we are in the mind of the protagonist, who has no control over their brevity or timing. The main connection between the two “ghettos” seems to be the fences that imprisoned Sol in the concentration camp, and the fences that imprison him in the pawnshop. And it is ironic that the fences through which Sol desperately wanted to escape from at the camp were now his haven at the pawnshop.
