Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller
Ewa Mazierska
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN: 1845112970
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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cultures are relatively infrequent in Polanski’s films, so are his allusions to other places and national Nikola Todorov in Teethful Smile (1957) 19 ROMAN POLANSKI traditions, and the lack of knowledge of them rarely prevents understanding their narratives and deeper messages. This is also an important reason why Polanski’s films ‘travel’ so well, as opposed to those of many other Polish filmmakers, including Andrzej Wajda and Andrzej Munk (see Chapter 7). Moreover, his films are often made
testified by the large proportion of his films which are literary adaptations. Only through reworking stories and characters that Polanski has found in someone else’s novels, plays or scripts, or which he himself has invented, does he somehow ‘return to himself’. Thus autobiography, rather than being a raw material of Polanski’s films, is their final product or by-product. Or, more exactly, this was the case until The Pianist. From the perspective of autobiography this film differs on two
deduce that the position of women in socialist Poland does not allow them to live independently, but forces them to rely on men. Following such a reading we can view her as a woman who attempts to preserve some dignity and independence in a patriarchal society. Treated with less sympathy, she might be regarded as a lazy consumer who is sucked in by the pleasures of the Polish nouveaux riches. Either way, we can regard her as a forerunner to some heroines of Polanski’s later films, especially
non-being is that he focuses on his head (as a result of being incapable of identifying himself with his body as a whole) by ‘strengthening’ it by an attribute of power – the crown. This is not long before his death by decapitation. Macbeth’s fear about his physical wholeness is also reflected in the numerous images of dismembered people: enemy soldiers mutilated, traitors hanged, the Thane of Cawdor executed by putting an iron collar around his neck, and the human body parts buried by the
message, but rather that he was enchanted by the medium itself. Moreover, his later decision to make films, and particularly to make a film about Szpilman, perfectly testifies to the view, espoused also by Szpilman, that one is morally entitled to engage in art ‘after Auschwitz’. The original scores for Death and the Maiden and The Pianist were written by Wojciech Kilar. One of the best Polish composers of the twentieth century, he is the author of such works as Exodus, Ko´scielec, Bogurodzica,
