"...Polanski's films depict a Godless world in which the good do not always triumph, the outsider is always persecuted and the innocent is always abused."
It is arguable that the violence, evil and sense of dislocation prevalent in the films of Roman Polanski is directly derived from the dramatic, even horrendous details of his life. Nevertheless, such is his talent that his work transcends mere autobiographical considerations, standing in its own right as a pessimistic but compelling vision of contemporary experience.
Daniel Bird's new study, for Pocket Essentials, begins with an erudite discourse tracing the development of Polanski's oeuvre to animate the trajectories of the styles and influences that are synthesised in making cultural mythologies that allude to cultures of the past as well as the present. Polanski is a filmmaker whose sensational life has at times threatened to overwhelm and prematurely curtail his career. In this survey Bird traces the themes that link the early films, from film school experiments through Knife in the Water (1962), Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-Sac (1966), to the critical and sometimes commercial successes of the later Rosemary's Baby (1968), Chinatown (1974), Tess (1979), Frantic (1988) and The Ninth Gate (2000). He examines the recurrent subjects of the films - the malevolence lurking beneath the surface, hints of sadism, the fascination with pagan superstition, and the vulnerability of his protagonists, especially in the regard of their existence as outsiders in a hostile world.
The book begins with a section considering the broad aesthetic and political significance of Polanski's early years in Poland. Polanski's parents returned to Poland two years before World War II broke out; both were later taken to concentration camps - his mother dying at Auschwitz - while the boy's strategy for survival in the ghetto included frequent visits to cinemas. He was active in the avant-garde theatre as well as in student film groups. The personal hardships he suffered as a Polish Jew show up in a cynicism about political and religious issues and in a complex sympathy toward social outsiders. In the 50s he took up acting appearing in Wajda's A Generation (1954) amongst other films, before studying at the Lodz Film School. His early works - shorts such as Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958), The Fat and the Lean (1963), and Mammals (1962) - displayed a taste for absurdist black humour and a fascination with bizarre relationships involving dominance and submission.
The narrative continues to examine the influence of two important modernist movements, absurdism and surrealism as themes in Polanski's shorts and full-length features Knife in the Water, Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac These stylised and abstract films are the director's most personal statements, made under conditions of relative freedom. They develop themes of power, victimization, and sexuality that Polanski would elaborate more fully in later works. Bird's analysis in these sections is particularly strong, displaying recondite comprehension of the central European background and its resonance throughout Polanski's oeuvre.
After the elegant but frequently predictable horror-spoof, Dance of the Vampires (1967), Polanski went to Hollywood to make Rosemary's Baby, a chilling supernatural thriller in which a mother-to-be comes to fear that she is pregnant with Satan's child. As before location - a rambling old New York apartment - psychological angst and a protagonist isolated from a treacherous outside world are central, although Polanski's hitherto almost abstract visuals are here replaced by images of a more classical nature. Precision is still foremost, however, and the move to more commercial filmmaking entailed no artistic compromises. Unlike the early modernist work, however the "horror" films often focus on specific, realistic environments and explore the inner workings of the protagonists' psychology. Though sensational, they nevertheless engage serious aesthetic, social, and psychological dilemmas, not least of which is the question of why we enjoy watching such films in the first place.
Macbeth (1971) (whose explicit violence was thought by many to be inspired by the appalling murder of the director's wife Sharon Tate by the Manson "family") is within Bird's study a subject that clearly fits what by now can be recognised as Polanski's major themes, yet the author illustrates how it stands apart from the horror films as such. The psychological terror so familiar from Polanski's films is here related to a nightmare of history, for the first Polanski explicitly considers issues of social change and stability.
The consideration of historical forces and the experience of working through popular genres served Polanski well in the making of Chinatown in which the director effortlessly revealed he could cope both with a complex, labyrinthine thriller script - set in 30s LA and concerning murder, incest and political corruption - and with the detailed, credible re-creation of a vanished world: again an acute awareness of the human capacity for evil combined with black comedy to mesmerising effect.
The narrative examination of The Tenant (1976) continues the recent positive re-appraisal of this comic/tragedy. This meditation of hallucinatory insanity now stands by Performance (1970), Brazil (1985), and Fight Club (2000) as a fascinating drama of the self. The Tenant represents Polanski's most radical attempt to blend the realistic techniques of the popular horror films and the fragmented antiforms of his more personal modernist work. Like Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby, it plays on the ambiguities between real conspiracy and paranoid delusion. But, if Rosemary's Baby's reliance upon supernatural explanations effects a false closure, The Tenant, like Repulsion betrays the ambiguity by simply at the end revealing its protagonist as insane. In The Tenant Polanski pushes the psychology of the horror story to its limit.
By now resident in France, he made Tess, which stands out as one of the finest mainstream period dramas of the 1970s. Polanski subsequently stretched his talents to include occasional work in the theatre; sadly, his next film the spoof swashbuckler Pirates (1986), was, as Bird notes, "not particularly interesting in any sense". Frantic (1988), though, showed a partial return to form, its thriller plot allowing for a homage to Hitchcock, and once again was sprinkled with moments of dark humour as it followed an American doctor (Harrison Ford) around Paris, confounded, isolated and menaced by the sudden, mysterious disappearance of his wife.
In the ensuing "late" films Bitter Moon (1992) and The Ninth Gate Bird constructs a persuasive justification in asserting Polanski's successful and adroit return to the black and cruel sophisticated menace that vitalises his most accomplished work. It becomes clear that Polanski's vision treats events and relationships of an often-nightmarish nature with a sharp irony and an engaging sense of the absurd. Even though he adapts his style to the material at hand, his camera is consistent in framing people and places with economic precision. However his versatility and idiosyncratic vision are such that his own influence on Western directors may be minimal.
Daniel Bird has produced an insightful and elegantly written survey punctuated with original and cogent observations - sections on Krzysztof Komeda, Jan Lenica, and Roland Topor in addition to re-appraisals of The Tenant and Bitter Moon - constantly displaying an accomplished and distinctive perception.
Reviewed by Adrian Gargett
