Polish Reception of Roman Polanski’s Films. Outline of the Main Tendencies in Film Criticism and Film Studies

Abstract

The article is devoted to the reception of Roman Polanski’s cinema in Poland. The author examines both critical-film articles (opinions formulated in reviews after the first viewing of a movie) and academic articles and monographs. Instead of criticizing the existing readings of the director’s works, the author considers which frames they were inscribed into by the reviewers and how this placement influenced the interpretations and evaluations of the films. As he argues, Polanski’s artistic propositions did not quite fit the vision of great cinema shared by Polish journalists at a given moment. The author shows that the reception of the artist’s work is a testimony to the changes in Polish critics’ attitude towards genre cinema and to the gradual mending of the division between high and low art. When commenting on the director’s works, Polish critics and scholars have had to struggle with a socialist realist view of art, an aversion to popular culture, and finally, postmodern prejudices against the “classic” form of cinema. The Polish researchers have not always overcome the limitations of dominant discourses, but it seems that Polanski’s cinema shaped and changed these discourses to some extent.

Keywords:

• Roman Polanski
• reception
• Polish cinema
• journalism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Cf. Nycz 1998.

2 This has changed in the 2000s. Polanski’s films have rarely been studied in Poland using the tools of Deleuzian poststructuralism, gender studies or production studies, which were gaining popularity in Polish humanities from the 1990s/2000s. However, there were attempts to analyze his works using the theory of haptic cinema (see below).

3 I use the notion of a ‘frame’ after the theoreticians such as Mieke Bal, pointing to the dependence of the act of interpretation on the discursive practices which determine the interpretative horizon of the text. Cf. Bal 2006, 289–312.

4 See Stachówna 2002, 11. The film – called in USA The Fearless Vampire Killers – had its Polish TV premiere in 1987.

5 See more Birkholc 2022, 13–28.

6 In the column called „Nine Angry People” in the magazine “Film,” Polanski’s debut received (on a scale from 1 to 6) one 3 (from Aleksander Jackiewicz), five 4s and three 5s. The ‘angry people’ judging the film were Leon Bukowiecki, Stanisław Grzelecki, Aleksander Jackiewicz, Stanisław Janicki, Zygmunt Kałużyński, Tadeusz Kowalski, Bolesław Michałek, Zbigniew Pitera and Jerzy Płażewski. See. Dziewięciu gniewnych ludzi 1963, 15. Moreover, Polanski’s movie was well received by the audience – Knife in the water received Złota Kaczka – an award granted by the readers of the “Film” magazine – for the best Polish film of the year.

7 It is worth adding that Jerzy Raczkowski, the journalist of a Catholic magazine “Więź,” evaluates the film much more positively than the representant of official communist discourse. However, he interpreted the film as a morality tale and also inscribed it in a sociological frame. See Raczkowski 1962.

8 All quotations from the Polish-language works cited are in my own translation.

9 In the column „Nine angry people” in the magazine “Film” Repulsion received (on a scale from 1 to 6) six 4s and two 5s. See. Dziewięciu gniewnych ludzi 1967, 24: 15. Cul-de sac received five 4s and four 5s. See. Dziewięciu gniewnych ludzi 1967, 33: 15. The ‘angry people’ judging films were Leon Bukowiecki, Bogumił Drozdowski, Jerzy Eljasiak, Stanisław Grzelecki, Stanisław Janicki (who only rated Cul-de-sac), Zygmunt Kałużyński, Bolesław Michałek, Zbigniew Pitera and Jerzy Płażewski.

10 Unexpectedly, because Jackiewicz was irritated by Knife in the Water. See Jackiewicz 1962.

11 It should be added, however, that there were also different opinions. Janusz Zaremba from “Ekran” claimed that Cul-de-sac should be treated as a very good, funny entertaining movie (Zaremba 1967: 31, 6).

12 Mirosław Ratajczak assessed the film completely differently: ‘Well, in my opinion, the fact that Chinatown exceeded the limits of typical crime fiction, that it has become a work of a deeper meaning, an outstanding work in the history of cinema, is due to the individual style of this director, his artistic personality’. See Ratajczak 1976.

13 However, there were also different opinions. For example, in an essay about the film, Krzysztof Toeplitz noted that ‘the director seems to be interested not so much in the clinical study of the disease as in tracing this elusive, very thin line between the so-called normality and mental illness, between objective reality and delusions’. See Toeplitz 1978, 73. About the reception of The Tenant see also section Analyses and interpretations of this article.

14 Stodoła is a very popular music club in Warsaw.

15 Although it should be added that in 1984, the genre of horror started to be the subject of interest of Polish film critics. In that year, “Film na świecie” published an issue devoted to this genre (see “Film na Świecie” 1984).

16 As one of the few, Tomasz Kłys argued with such opinions. He pointed out that Pirates contained some of Polanski’s favorite motifs,smuggled into the ‘secondary genre’. See Kłys, 1987, 12. See also Płażewski 1986, 8. It should also be mentioned that, according to Cezary Wiśniewski the film’s audience would be the 50- and 60- years old rather than young. See Wiśniewski 1988.

17 According to the data cited by Grażyna Stachówna, between the premiere of the film and 1991, Pirates were watched by 2 479 289 viewers in Polish cinemas. This is the best result out of all Polanski’s movies which premiered in communist Poland. See Stachówna 1994, 18.

18 In the column „Nine angry people” in the magazine “Film”, Bitter moon received five 3s, one 4, one 5 and one 6. See. Dziewięciu gniewnych ludzi 1993, 4. The film was rated by Tomasz Jopkiewicz, Andrzej Kołodyński, Maria Oleksiewicz, Jan Olszewski, Maciej Pawlicki, Jerzy Płażewski (who gave the film a rating of 6), Cezary Wiśniewski and Piotr Wojciechowski. See also Kałużyński, Raczek 1993, 11:82–83.

19 In the column „Nine angry people” in a magazine “Film”, Death and the maiden received three 3s, one 4, one 5 and one 6 (also from Jerzy Płażewski). Dziewięciu gniewnych ludzi 1995, 12. The film was rated by Elżbieta Ciapara, Bożena Janicka, Tomasz Jopkiewicz, Maria Oleksiewicz, Jerzy Płażewski and Oskar Sobański.

20 See also Kałużyński, Raczek 1995, 86–87.

21 18 contemporary Polish critics gave the film an average score of 6,1/10 on a website Filmweb. See https://www.filmweb.pl/film/Dziewi%C4%85te+wrota-1999-10682#critics Accessed 28 January 2023.

22 See Dziewięciu gniewnych ludzi 2002, 98. The Pianist received seven 4s and two 5s The ‘angry people’ judging films were Wiesław Chełmniak, Elżbieta Ciapara, Bożena Janicka, Tomasz Jopkiewicz, Wiesław Kot, Jan Olszewski, Zdzisiław Pietrasik, Jacek Szczerba and Michał Libera.

23 Janusz Wróblewski stated that the assessment of the film could be perceived as an assessment of Polanski himself. ‘It is impossible to say, for example, whether critics praising the genre fineness and calling he film the best commercial venture since Chinatown are not expressing solidarity with the director locked in the Swiss resort of Gstaad. It is also not known whether, by attacking him for the outdated, Hitchcockian way of filmmaking, they mean only artistic values, or whether they distance themselves from the case of Polanski in general’ (Wróblewski 2010).

24 The author called what Polanski did to Samantha Geimer ‘disgusting.”’ However, he pointed out that the filmmaker’s lifestyle was a cultural norm in his environment in the 1970s. Bratkowski also suggested that the director managed to break free from the situation, just like the hamster in the end of the Carnage (Bratkowski 2010, 86–87).

25 Although some critics and scholars recognized that Polanski breaks this division. See section “Polanski’s auteur cinema – attempts to define the specificity”.

26 Grażyna Stachówna also wrote a popular ‘encyclopedia’ of Polanski (see Stachówna 2002).

27 Stachówna refers to such scholars as Janusz Sławiński, Henryk Markiewicz, and Michel Foucault. See Stachówna 1994, 7–15.

28 The author published her text about Knife in the Water for the first time in 1987. See Stachówna 1987, 4-7, 24–26.

29 The first edition of Labirynt Polanskiego was published in 2000, the second, extended, in 2002. It is worth adding that the author developed the concept of modernism in a monograph of Agnieszka Holland’s work. See Jankun-Dopartowa 2000.

30 Cf: ‘If we want to find a ‘taste of the cinema’ by Polanski without a kind of defense of modernist culture, without a broad description of the context of the cinema of the 1950s and 1960s and without an equally insightful presentation of the culture paradigm shift in the late 1960s, it will not be possible’. See Dopartowa 2003, 68.

31 ‘The artist who calls himself a postmodernist resembles Deana Corso from the film The Ninth Gate: a hunter of books he does not much care about anymore, but thanks to which he will surely ‘make money’’. Dopartowa 2003, 35.

32 The article was first published in 1978 in “Kino”.

33 The article was first published in 1983 in “Kino”.