In August 2023, Roman Polanski (Polański in his native Poland), turned 90. This is a cause for celebration, especially given that in his advanced age he is still active as a filmmaker, with his new film, Palace, awaiting its premiere at the time of writing this editorial. However, this anniversary passed largely unnoticed. The most internationally renowned filmmaker to originate from Poland is now looked by many, even in his native Poland, as a problem which is better to avoid, rather than analyse. This is because of his sexual encounter with a teenage Samantha Geimer, which took place in 1977 and his escape from the USA, to avoid a possible long custodial sentence, which resurfaced many times in the twenty-first century, in a large part due to an unsuccessful attempt to extradite him from Switzerland and the #MeToo movement.
This special issue, to commemorate Polanski’s 90th birthday, was conceived as an opportunity to look at Polanski’s films, especially those which are less well-known, afresh, and examine the controversies surrounding his personal conduct, and their effect on the reception of his movies. It begins with an article by Ewa Mazierska, ‘Roman Polanski (and Others) on Trial’, which engages precisely with this issue, discussing Polanski’s crime and its aftermath in the context of changing attitudes to sexual behaviour and male-female relations in the workplace. It also uses debates about Polanski to shed light on the changing attitudes toward cinema and art at large, pointing to the growing importance of an artists’ personal and especially sexual conduct, in regard to the assessment of their work, including making spotless behaviour a condition to reach anaudience.
The next article, authored by Robert Birkholc, also looks at the reception of Polanski’s films, rather than their content. Specifically, Birkholc limits himself to the discussion of the reception of his films in Poland, examining both popular and scholarly work, devoted to it. He considers frames and contexts in which the reviewers considered his works and asks how this placement influenced their interpretations and evaluations. 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 also 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 critics have not always overcome the limitations of dominant discourses, but it seems that Polanski’s cinema shaped and changed these discourses to some extent.
The following articles shifts the interest from Polanski the man and the reception of Polanski’s films to their textual characteristics. Andrés Bartolomé Leal in ‘The Sense of an Ending: Culture, Capital, and the Fate of (Late) Modern Europe in Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999)’, as the title suggests, reads Polanski’s fifteenth film as a reflection of various anxieties, occurring during the turn of millennium. Equally, the author regards it as a self-conscious exercise in the trans-European filmmaking which was promoted at the time in Europe. On the back of a border-crossing journey in search for three demonic books, Leal argues that The Ninth Gate manages to discursively interlace both facets, being a cynical, self-deprecating reflection on the precarious state of Europe at the time, caught between the memories of glorious but long-fading splendour and a crippling uncertainty about its future and place in an increasingly globalized world.
The next two articles discuss Death and the Maiden. First András Lénárt in ‘Approaches to Crime and Punishment in a Historical Context: Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden’ discusses this film, which premiered in 1994, largely in the context of Polanski’s biography, especially its most tragic episodes: surviving the Holocaust, the period of state socialist authoritarianism and the brutal murder of Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate by the Manson Family, as well as being found guilty of unlawful sex with a minor. Lénárt uses Polanski’s biography to explain the film, but also uses the film to look back at the director’s life. Next Aleksandra Piętka in ‘Image of the Perpetrator, the Victim, and the Bystander in Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden (1994) examines the cinematographic means used by Polanski in this film to portray its characters. Piętka discusses how Polanski toys with the thriller convention to create a cognitive dissonance in the viewer and uses artistic devices to reflect the process of restoring the identity by the protagonist. Particular attention is devoted to the visual means Polanski uses to evoke specific associations in the viewer. She compares selected scenes with René Magritte’s paintings, to show how the director depicts the experience of the main character and the blurring of boundaries between the perpetrator and the victim. She also analyses colours, props, and landscape motifs associated with each character to explain their symbolic and dramatic function in the film.
Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith Suresh in some ways continue the investigation of crime and punishment, violence and victimhood in Polanski’s films, proposed by the two previous authors of this issue. However, they use the concept of ‘transgression’ as their main tool of analysis, drawing on work of such authors as Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault. Raj and Suresh explore how different connotations of transgression play a major role in defining Polanski as a filmmaker, both on and off-screen. They reference a large number of Polanski’s films, including Repulsion, The Tenant and Rosemary’s Baby.
Żaneta Jamrozik in ‘An Officer and a Spy: Roman Polanski in the Benjaminian Interior’, like Piętka, in her analysis privileges visual codes used by Polanski, although in a different film. She argues that An Officer and a Spy (2019) represents France of La Belle Époque not through cafés, cabarets, and literary salons but as a military state of dilapidated army offices filled with half-asleep soldiers, dust, stink, and clouds of suspicion. The Third Republic seems suspended between its revolutionary past and the bleak present: the lost war with Germany and constant governmental scandals. The country recedes into the interior to try less grandeur methods like plotting, spying and surveillance. Polanski recounts the era through the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906), treated as a logical outcome of the bureaucratic system of the state. Jamrozik analyses Polanski’s film alongside Walter Benjamin’s writing on the interior.
The final long article in the issue, again authored by Jamrozik, offers a comparative perspective on one of Polanski’s least known films, Based on a True Story, comparing it with Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper. Jamrozik treats these two films as post-horrors, whose purpose is to create horrific atmospheres rather than chains of events. She notes that their themes of family and loss are focalised through a single, female character. Sound design, rather than the visuals, becomes key in creating an aura of suspension as the films tend to omit dramatic events and focus on their aftermaths when the characters struggle to re-establish their daily routines.
The issue also includes a number of shorter pieces. Jordan R. Young discusses ‘Sexual Humiliation in Polanski’s Bitter Moon and Venus in Fur’. Agnieszka Piotrowska engages polemically with Mazierska’s article in ‘The Artist and the Work. A Response to Ewa Mazierska’s Article “Roman Polanski (and Others) on Trial”’. Finally, Robert Birkholc reviews a recent addition to the scholarship about Polanski’s cinema: Jordan Young’s Roman Polanski: Behind the Scenes of His Classic Early Films, published in 2022.
The issue on Polanski is devised also as a continuation of the cycle of special issues devoted to the important filmmakers from Eastern Europe, who worked abroad or achieved recognition beyond the boundaries of their own country, reflecting our special interest in transnational filmmakers. By this point these series included directors such as Wojciech Has, Dušan Makavejev, Věra Chytilová and Želimir Žilnik. What is different about this issue, in comparison with the other, is that the authors not only discuss Polanski’s transnationalism, but themselves, metaphorically, cross national borders, when discussing Polanski’s work, coming from many different countries. In this group we have Poles living in Poland and abroad, as well as authors from Hungary, Spain, Canada, India and the United States. Never before have we had such a varied collection of authors in an issue, dedicated to one filmmaker. This, of course, testifies to the continuous global resonance of Polanski’s cinema.