Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller

By Ewa Mazierska

Polanski is celebrated; the identify of the director of Knife within the WaterRosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist  is recognized and revered internationally.  but even movie critics locate it tricky to assert what a 'Polanski movie' is.  This welcome e-book unravels the meanings of Polanski's motion pictures, devoting each one of its chapters to an enormous point: the autobiographical issue, characters and narratives, literary diversifications like Tess and the new Oliver Twist, Polanski's use of many genres, his track, represented ideology and so on.  In so doing, it uncovers either the typical components in his motion pictures and the ambiguities and paradoxes of his cinema. Ewa Mazierska unearths the necessities of Polanski the 'cinema kid', stimulated via many of us and activities, yet like a magpie attracted to every little thing that he encounters, relocating simply among Europe and the United States, among low price range and large finances endeavours.  This e-book is definitely the right advent to Polanski's motion pictures and even as delves deep into their complexities - sharing a true pleasure of their riches.

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From a philosophical point of view, one can't be a naive realist concerning one’s personal existence’ (Wróbel 2001: 149). Wróbel additionally indicates relating to human ‘life’ and ‘identity’ as items of narrating one’s existence, now not the wrong way around – tales approximately one’s lifestyles being a end result of dwelling a selected lifestyles and having a selected identification. If we use his technique, then developing if a piece of paintings is an autobiography eventually capability matching one partial and subjective illustration (autobiography) with one other one that can also be partial and subjective (life). an analogous argument is gifted by means of Stuart corridor, who continues: ‘Rather than talking of identification as a comprehensive factor, we should always communicate of id, and notice it as an on-going strategy. id arises, no longer lots from the fullness of identification that is already within us as members, yet from an absence of wholeness that's “filled” from open air us, by way of the methods we think ourselves to be obvious via others. Psychoanalytically, explanation why we continuously look for “identity”, developing biographies which knit jointly the several elements of our divided selves right into a team spirit, is to recapture this fantasised excitement of fullness (plenitude)’ (Hall 1992: 287–8). Accepting the aforementioned arguments of Wróbel and corridor ends up in the belief that the relation among existence and autobiography is symmetrical. simply because the artist’s autobiography is formed via his genuine lifestyles, so his existence, or what's considered as his lifestyles, is formed through his 12 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL impact within the CINEMA OF POLANSKI autobiography. certainly, critics who talk about autobiography in Polanski’s paintings function an idea of ‘Polanski’ that's motivated via his motion pictures. 1 for instance, after the prime of sour Moon critiques in regards to the nation of his marriage with Emmanuelle Seigner have been established principally at the assumption that the movie mirrored the director’s own existence (which Polanski robustly denied). apparently, the paintings of Roland Barthes who introduced the ‘death of the writer’ (see Barthes 1977) and different poststructuralists made the quest for authorial features in an author’s paintings glance outdated, methodically improper or even futile. even as a few biographies, according to research of the writer/painter’s paintings, equivalent to Walter Benjamin’s essays on Kafka and Proust (see Benjamin 1999a; 1999b), Deleuze and Guattari’s examine of Kafka (see Deleuze and Guattari 2000) and Susan Sontag’s paintings on Benjamin (see Sontag 1983b), proved persuasive and pleasing. for this reason, the perform of reconstructing the artist’s existence through the use of his paintings is now extra legitimised. Susan Sontag in her essay on Benjamin famously stated: ‘One can't use the lifestyles to interpret the paintings. yet you can use the paintings to interpret the existence’ (Sontag Ibid. : 111). i'll be contemplating Polanski’s movies as a mirrored image of his existence (as it really is identified to me) and searching at them to be able to achieve entry to his lifestyles and character, yet with the attention that either tools can't be absolutely passable.

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