POLANSKI DOUBLE-BILL

Programme Notes

Polanski's life has been marked by horrific hardships. After the Nazis seized Poland in 1939, Polanski was interned with his Jewish parents in the Krakow ghetto; in 1941, when his parents were deported to the concentration camps, young Roman was cut loose and wandered from family to family for years, defending himself as a member of street gangs. Later tragedies and mishaps that befell him - the brutal, senseless murder of his then-pregnant wife, actor Sharon Tate, by members of Charles Manson's sect in 1969, and his flight from America in 1979 during criminal proceedings on a charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a teenage girl - only strengthened his cynical, disenchanted faith.

In this context, Polanski's work as a filmmaker seemed to blur reality and fantasy in many ways and directions at once. On the one hand, he was able to escape his impoverished past by entering the glamorous, jet-setting, sensation-driven world of international cinema; and on the other hand, his grisliest visions seemed to call forth worse terrors in reality, as a kind of malign reprisal. His films court fantastic extremes of sexuality and violence, sometimes celebrating such giddy excess, at other times standing back as a social moralist and judging it. Perversity, of all kinds, is a double-edged sword in his career. Polanski fed off mass media fantasy and, increasingly, it fed off him; in a twist familiar from many of his movies, it is hard to decide who is the vampire and who is the vampire killer.

One need only inventory the roles that Polanski chooses as an actor, either in his own work or that of others, to see the Absurdist influence: either he is a pathetic victim (as the human cockroach in Steven Berkoff's production of Kafka's Metamorphosis, or in The Tenant, 1976) or he is a sadistic bully (as the cop in Tornatore's A Pure Formality [1994], or the knife-wielding thug in Chinatown). This form of theatre also helped to shape Polanski's reigning 'anti-realist' bias: an ingenious master of artifice and stylisation, Polanski always begins by turning the human body and the actor's performing style into a kind of exaggerated cartoon, in all aspects of costume, posture, gesture and vocal tone.

Few filmmakers cherish the grotesque quite like Polanski.

"What makes you think I am obsessed by the bizarre?"
Roman Polanski, 1969

Material from: Landscapes of the Mind: The Cinema of Roman Polanski by Adrian Martin , Roger Ebert, Internet Movie Database

Knife in the Water
(1962, Poland, 1 hour 34mins, Polish)

Director: Roman Polanski Producer: Stanislaw Zylewicz Script: Jakub Goldberg Roman Polanski Jerzy Skolimowski Score: Christopher Komeda
Cast: Zygmunt Malanowicz, Leon Niemczyk, Jolanta Umecka

The first Polish film to be nominated for a Foreign Language Oscar. Polanski had intended to take on the role of the young hitchhiker himself, but the head of the Polish film unit KAMERA turned him down because he didn't consider the director attractive enough. The character's voice, however, is Polanski's, who later dubbed the part over.

Two men and a woman isolated on a boat. Bickering, sexual tension, power games. Weapons are ominously glimpsed, provisions run low, and the weather threatens to overthrow the last shred of the fragile status quo on deck. It sounds like Phillip Noyce's Dead Calm (1989), which is a good clue to the international impact and influence wielded by Polanski's debut feature.

Chinatown
(1974, US, Colour, 2 hours 10mins, English)

Director: Roman Polanski Producer: Robert Evans Script: Robert Towne Score: Jerry Cast: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, Perry Lopez, Roman Polanski

The last movie Roman Polanski filmed in the US. It is a tour de force; it's a period movie, with all the right cars and clothes and props, but we forget that after the first ten minutes. We've become involved in the movie's web of mystery, as we always were with the best private-eye stories. Part of a cycle of pessimistic 1970s mystery thrillers, including The Long Goodbye and The Parallax View, and anticipating the epic crime fictions of James Ellroy, Chinatown keys into the disillusioned mood of the Watergate era as it lays bare the history of a city built on 'water and power'.

The scene where Polanski slits Jack Nicholson's nose was extremely complex to film, and the two men involved got so tired of explaining how it was done that they began to claim Nicholson's nose was actually cut. The prop knife used to cut Jack Nicholson's nose had a special hinged blade that would only bend in one direction. If it were inserted the wrong way, it would have really cut Nicholson who was understandably nervous during the filming of that scene.

Because this film was the first of a planned trilogy, Jack Nicholson turned down all detective roles he was offered so that the only detective he played would be Jake Gittes. Part 2 was directed by Nicholson and released in 1990 under the title 'The Two Jakes'. Part 3 has yet to be made.