Roman Polański in "Magic Bicycle / Zaczarowany rower", 1955, photo: courtesy of the Lodz Film Museum
"Comedy, suspense, psychological thriller, surreal fable or straightforward drama", the British Film Institute is showcasing a lively retrospective dedicated to the expressive filmmaker, which presents the theatrical releases of Chinatown and Repulsion. The Institute also presents the high-definition premiere of Tess on DVD.
Screening range from earlier works The Tenant, Tess, What?, Pirates, Frantic, Bitter Moon, to more recent work including The Pianist, The Ninth Gate, Oliver Twist, Death and the Maiden and Carnage from 2012. "What distinguishes the films of Roman Polanski", as the Institute's Geoff Andrew argues, "is the expressive precision of his filmmaking style." Revolving around highly diverse topic material, film and theatre director, scriptwriter, actor and producer Roman Polanski typically bases his plot on a few protagonists isolated from the surroundings. This method, more usual in the theatre than in movies, makes it possible to follow evolution of characters and mutual relationships in laboratory-like conditions, allowing the viewers to study human nature, a subject in all Polański's films. "The world he evokes is unstable, marked by sudden and shocking tendencies towards violence", as Screenonline writes.
Critics have often pointed to his fascination with systems of the dominant and the subordinate, which in extreme cases becomes a relationship between the hangman and the condemened. This happens in Death and the Maiden, Bitter Moon and other films. In the gruesome The Tenant and in the comedy The Pirates, as Janusz Wroblewski observes in Polityka magazine, "the oppression of the weak by the strong leads to the sanctioning of violence and changing of what is almost a primeval ritual".
The British Film Institute exhibition contains over 40 posters from various countries, all related to three of Roman Polański's releases: Tess, Chinatown and Repulsion. In Repulsion, from 1965, evil is shown originating from the human psyche's depths, from mental illness; it is born out of the untamable need to torment others. Filmed from the perspective of the protagonist (Catherine Deneuve) whose mind slowly gives in to mental illness, the film shows how fear, instigated by the sick image of the world created by her imagination, pushes her to murder. In Rosemary's Baby in 1968 and The Ninth Gate in 1999, on the other hand, evil appears as an undefinable, metaphysical protagonist of its own that is natural to the world and seeps, unnoticed, into ordinary lives.
Organised in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute in London and prepared by the Museum of Cinematography in Łódź, the exhibition takes place at the BFI Southbank cinema and runs until the end of February 2013. The BFI website has given Polański considerable exposure, including a commentary by Geoff Andrew (head of BFI's Film Programme), a biography, an image gallery with stills from Polański's movies and his portraits and a "Polanski competition" running till the 30th of January 2013.
For more information on the screenings see: BFI
Thumbnail credit: Roman Polański on the set of "Frantic", 1988, photo: Courtesy of the Łódź Film Museum
Sources: culture.pl, PISF, BFI
Editor: Marta Jazowska