Le spectre à la fenêtre Laurent Van Eynde
Images re-vues,
12/2022, Letnik:
10
Journal Article
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This article proposes to study the relationship between the spectral figure and the frame from the recurrent visual motif of the spectrum appearing through a window. Two films are analyzed and ...compared on this motif: The Innocents (1961) by Jack Clayton and The Tenant (1976) by Roman Polanski.
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.
This article engages with arguments in recent discussions about Polanski's personal conduct, and the effect of these discussions on the reception of his films. It also uses these debates to shed ...light on the changing attitudes toward cinema and art at large, pointing to the growing importance of the artists' personal conduct, especially sexual conduct, in the assessment of their work, including making spotless behaviour a condition to reach the audience. It does so from a position which is critical of censorship. The article draws on Polanski's biography, especially the part describing his encounter with Samantha Gailer (now Samantha Geimer) and recent journalistic discourse about his conduct and films, following the rise of the #MeToo movement. It is informed by debates about authorship in film and art and the relationship between moral and aesthetic values.
Polanski realiza The tragedy of Macbeth poco después de la trágica muerte de su esposa Sharon Tate. Para muchos, eso marcó notablemente la cinta, que resultó ser una de las menos aclamadas de ...Polanski. En este trabajo, hemos realizado una comparación minuciosa del film de Polanski con la obra de Shakespeare, película que no se encuentra aislada en su filmografía, sino que posee lazos con muchos filmes del director. Polanski se ha preocupado por ofrecer una versión fiel a la obra de Shakespeare en el texto y respetuosa, en su puesta en escena, con el contexto de la Edad Media. El cineasta demuestra una vez más su desbordante imaginación, al llevar a la pantalla escenas sólo sugeridas por Shakespeare o que podrían haberse expresado verbalmente.
Roman Polanski's 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 not as a designed plot but as a logical outcome of the bureaucratic system of the state. I analyse An Officer and a Spy historically alongside Walter Benjamin's writing on the interior. Benjamin's interior is a complex space that can function as a protective space, a space of death or inertia, a space of history and action as well as a colonising space that brings together the far and the near through colonial objects and customs.
As the imaginary deadline or vanishing point of the turn of millennium was drawing ever closer, its associated anxieties and apocalyptic woes offered a fertile breeding ground for suspense, horror, ...and the fantastic to experience a resurgence in Western cinemas. Roman Polanski's fifteenth feature film The Ninth Gate, released in 1999, can be read among the various auteur-helmed evidences of such a trend, but also as a self-conscious exercise in the kind of trans-European filmmaking being promoted at the time within the continent, one in which Polanski himself had, willingly or not, already been cutting his teeth for almost two decades after his spiteful return from the US and Hollywood in the late 1970s. On the back of a border-crossing journey in search for three demonic books, this essay will argue, The Ninth Gate manages to discursively interlace both facets. The result, by way of an intermedial concern with the world of literature, a generic involvement with the supernatural, and a meticulous mobilization of cinematic space, location shooting and architecture, is a cynical, self-deprecating reflection on the precarious state of Europe at the time, caught between the memories of glorious but long-fading splendor and a crippling uncertainty about its future and place in an increasingly globalized world.
The article analyses Olivier Assayas' Personal Shopper (2016) and Roman Polanski's Based on a True Story (2017) as post-horrors. Post-horror, sometimes called slow, quiet, or ambient horror, focuses ...on creating atmospheres rather than chains of events. Its themes of family and loss are often focalised through a single, female character. Sound design becomes key in creating auras of suspension as the films tend to omit dramatic events and focus on their aftermaths, showing the characters struggling to re-establish their daily routines. Assayas' Personal Shopper begins after Maureen (Kristen Stewart) has lost her twin brother and Polanski's Based on a True Story - after the suicidal death of Delphine's (Emmanuelle Seigner) mother. In both films the loss is not followed by mourning but by what both characters verbalise as waiting. The films foreground the scenes of waiting: from the most mundane of waiting at the train station to the most sophisticated of waiting for the spectre. Spectres are waited on and appear, manifesting the fluidity between life and death rather than the linearity and the acceptance of loss typical for mourning. Waiting for the spectre is the main trope in Derrida's 'Specters of Marx', where he imagines it as an ethics of responsibility towards that which does not exist according to traditional western ontology. He argues for a relational ethics that takes seriously the agency of such absent others, suggesting that ethics should reach beyond the immediate and the present. The figure of the spectre, through its hauntings, is both present and absent and, according to Derrida, tele-technologies like cinema were invented to explore such disturbances in time and space. The two films emphasise sound as a way to communicate with spectres, playing with Gothic and Victorian motifs of female mediumism, as they present the women's waiting as transcending the personal (and interpersonal) and reaching towards a cosmic awe or terror that can be analysed through a combination of what Bauman called the 'cosmic fear' of negative globalisation and Lovecraft - cosmic indifference.
Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden (1994), the adaptation of a play written by Ariel Dorfman, can be interpreted on various levels. Although not stated explicitly, it is unambiguous that the ...background of the story is the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, though it could equally have been any East-Central European or Latin American country with a dictatorial past. This motion picture raises questions concerning human consciousness, guilt, pain and torture (both emotional and physical), revenge and moral uncertainty. Three episodes of Polanski's life may add a special significance to this adaptation. Being a Holocaust survivor, the Polish director experienced the repression of a dictatorship and the effects of human cruelty. Furthermore, his pregnant wife was brutally murdered by the Manson Family. Also, taking into consideration that he was found guilty of unlawful sex with a minor, he knows how society and individuals punish someone for his or her crimes. The aim of my article is to examine the possible interpretations of the movie, paying special attention to Polanski's approach towards tragedies, dictatorships (in both East-Central Europe and Latin America), and personal guilt, and also to highlight what message the film may transmit to future generations.
Roman Polanski's films are noted for their subversive psychological style that explores themes of sexuality, desire, alienation, and violence. His narratives often reflect a dark sense of humour ...through which the director perceives the absurdity of the human condition in relation to his own cultural dislocations and artistic eccentricity. This article investigates how different connotations of transgression play a major role in defining Roman Polanski as a filmmaker. It specifically explores how the polysemy of transgression structures Polanski as an artist whose real and cinematic negotiations are often intertwined. Through the constant subversion of moral, cultural, and social discourses, his visual style and narrative ideology maintain a notorious affinity that disturbs the notion of reality and manipulates it with new narrative texts. It is the idea of transgression that changes the way Polanski's auteur status is perceived, appreciated, and rejected for his actions and creations in the past and their repercussions in the present. Polanski's works use historical, social, and personal realities to renegotiate his transgressive image in real life by incorporating his contested victim status and persecuted selfhood in narratives that manipulate both the past and present.
El cine de Roman Polanski es uno de los más ejemplos más clarificadores del empleo de la escenografía como catalizador psicológico. En una de sus aportaciones al género cinematográfico del terror ...psicológico y del fantástico, Rosemary’s Baby (La semilla del diablo, 1968), se consolidan muchas de las constantes audiovisuales que podrían formar parte de dicho mecanismo, que bien podríamos denominar «dispositivo escenográfico-psicológico». Se trata de un sistema estético que parece conformar y unir gran parte del cine del director francés. El presente estudio indagará acerca de dichas operaciones textuales escenográficas, que se erigen como una de las principales bases de la identidad visual del largometraje, especialmente en sus secuencias oníricas, seleccionadas oportunamente para esta disección.
Roman Polanski’s cinema is one of the most important examples on the treatment of the scenography as psychological catalyst. In one of his most recognised films, Rosemary’s Baby (1968), we can appreciate some of the many visual constants that could conform this mechanism, which we can call «scene psychological device», being an esthetical system that seems a very link between most of the films by the French director. The present article will explore these scene-textual operations which become one of the main sources of the motion picture’ visual identity, especially in the oneiric sequences selected for the analysis.
