Film Criticism

Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller

Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller

Ewa Mazierska

Language: English

Pages: 448

ISBN: 1845112970

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Polanski is well known; the name of the director of Knife in the Water,  Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist  is recognised and respected internationally.  Yet even film critics find it difficult to say what a 'Polanski film' is.  This welcome book unravels the meanings of Polanski's films, devoting each of its chapters to an important aspect: the autobiographical factor, characters and narratives, literary adaptations like Tess and the recent Oliver Twist, Polanski's use of many genres, his music, represented ideology and so on.  In so doing, it uncovers both the common elements in his films and the ambiguities and paradoxes of his cinema. Ewa Mazierska reveals the essentials of Polanski the 'cinema kid', influenced by many people and movements, but like a magpie interested in everything that he encounters, moving easily between Europe and America, between low budget and big budget endeavours.  This book is the perfect introduction to Polanski's films and at the same time delves deep into their complexities - sharing a real joy in their riches.

Detour (BFI Film Classics)

Xiao Wu/Platform/Unknown Pleasures: The Hometown Trilogy (BFI Film Classics)

Seven (BFI Modern Classics 1999)

Withnail & I (BFI Modern Classics)

Shane (BFI Film Classics)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

security, fear, loss of dignity, death of close relatives and friends, and institutionalised objectification. In such situations madness is a form of escape from reality; it is a way to find inner harmony in a world which has become extremely discordant. However, the hope for harmony is not fulfilled. The mentally ill in The Pianist come across as unhappier than those who have remained rational. 42 THE ABSURD AND HOW TO DEAL WITH IT We can also assume that all of them went on to die in the

bunker by a well-known Kraków crook who 13 ROMAN POLANSKI promised to sell him a bicycle for a bargain price. There the thug robbed Polanski and beat him so severely that the future author of Knife in the Water narrowly escaped death. Ironically and meaningfully, from the perspective of the blurred boundary between victim and predator in Polanski’s life and cinematic character, and his fondness for doppelgangers, the man who attacked Polanski shared with him his first name. His full name was

swashbuckler is by its nature a nostalgia film as its action takes place in the seventeenth century in an exotic location, and historic accuracy is not its objective. Instead it tries to evoke the myth of some famous buccaneer without suggesting that he possessed the features attributed to him by the film or even that he lived at all. As pirate films do not take their myths seriously, it is next to impossible to demythologise them. Moreover, from the beginning of their history, films about

greed and selfishness for granted, and even tries to add charm to Red’s singleminded pursuit of gold. Pirates was not a successful nostalgia film at the time it was created, and the passage of time has only added to its obsolescence through unfavourable comparison with later examples of this genre, especially Pirates of the Caribbean. In this sense Polanski was as unlucky with Pirates as he was lucky with Chinatown. It could be argued that the greatest virtue of this film was to demonstrate to

identical to the goals of human life itself: to survive, to find a home, to earn one’s living, to escape serious problems or avoid boredom. The idea that not being able to move fast is tantamount with being a loser already appears in Polanski’s first film The Bicycle and is reiterated in his most recent film Oliver Twist – both films featuring young men who bear strong similarities with Polanski himself. Because travelling for Polanski is not very different from living, his films lack the

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