Apparently, bringing potato chips and your sleeping bag into the bomb shelter of a youth hostel in Jerusalem to watch The Pianist with thirty fellow students does not, in fact, qualify one as “a real Polanski fan.” This significant experience seven years ago, part of a long trajectory of fascination with history on film, was more about investing myself in the trials of the character and what his trauma did to his artistic and cultural identity than it was about getting inside the mind of the director himself. I don’t even remember if we really knew who Roman Polanski was, in the sense of understanding why he would direct this film within a career marked by cinema leaning more towards the straight-up thriller genre. I probably just knew him as another Jewish director with a stand-out vision, no different from Woody Allen or Steven Spielberg. (Yikes! She calls herself a film buff?) This, my friends, was why I needed to go hear Adam Nayman wax cinematic at ‘Media Mondays’.
There were some true Polanski fans at the Miles Nadal JCC this Monday, raising their hands knowingly each time Nayman asked us if we’d seen a particular Roman P. epic. He prefaced his vibrant, jam-packed discussion with some reasons for why Polanski was chosen as one subject of four in a lecture series also covering Paul Verhoeven, David Cronenberg and Catherine Breillat. The whole group represents unique styles of movie-making that sit quite a part from what we’re normally saturated with when it comes to icons of Jewish cinema- Woody and Steven, hello again. With Polanski’s work, Nayman suggests that you can at least attempt to see the art as a stand-alone expression without being influenced greatly by what he as an individual experienced. It is difficult, though possible, to put his life aside and just look at the work. By contrast, everything that Allen does is inescapably “Woody,” so much so that our group needs no explanation of the term. This is testament to how much we know about the Annie Hall wunderkind as fed to us by Hollywood. On the other hand, Roman, while respected, is tainted by his spat as a pariah and therefore inhabits a different but arguably more interesting space.
One thing Polanski has in common with directors worldwide is that as a teenager and subsequent film student, “the only thing he cared about was cinema.” Nayman elaborates, however, with the claim that how Roman might have arrived at this passion was via a wholly different route to his contemporaries. Where his artsy peers used the medium of the screen to respond to issues in post-war Poland in the 1950s and 60s, the director of the short Murder wanted to portray the internal moral conflicts, or lack thereof, imprisoning the common man. Elements of the horror/thriller genre were just not illustrated on screen the way they are today, despite the film institute in Lodz encouraging a high calibre of production relative to other schools in Europe at the time. A new generation of strong filmmakers was developing, but Nayman implies that Roman was still continually ahead of the game. Polanski as a director engaged in an exploration of homosexual themes, or simply a “subversion of masculinity”, which had not been done before with such purpose.
The classic Knife in the Water was therefore an incredibly timely production in Eastern Europe. Personally, I was nothing short of claustrophobic while watching Nayman’s selected scene. Interestingly, the woman calls the shots even though the men are the more obvious aggressors. It is she who says, let’s inflate our mattresses, let’s play a game, etc. This deftly illustrates the influence she has over men, despite being a woman of that particular era. Her role exacerbates the tension between the two men – they both want to impress her and be chosen by her affections – on top of which, they hate each other because they mistrust the other’s entire generation. Nayman comments that this angered Polish audiences; the country needed a national, fraternal spirit and Polanski’s film was a slap in the face to this aspiration. There is no brotherly feeling between the two men, suggesting that life in Poland was no longer what it used to be. At this time, Poles were confronted by massive social change, with a new generation suddenly turning on their heritage. Knife in the Water made audiences evaluate their new circumstances, attributing great significance to the filmmaking of the time.
But as North Americans, why don’t we revere Polanski’s directing the way we should? I like that according to Nayman, Polanski is “up there” with Kubrick and Hitchcock. He is also, I learned a moment later, that much more of a celebrity because he is so adored in Europe (something towards which American actors secretly work, perhaps?) Roman’s moral transgressions, I suppose, are simply seen there as a character trait which need no fixing. His career has been able to flourish in France because nobody there takes themselves as seriously as they do in Hollywood. They love art for art. That’s a beautiful notion, one which makes me question why Polanski was so resolute in his quest to pursue the post-war American dream. Perhaps, as Nayman puts forward, asking us to respond, it’s because Roman was obsessed with freedom. He was as a boy, a child survivor who imagined himself above the law, and remained so as a man, making films with claustrophobic scenes which elicit our sympathy for those who simply can’t get out. His pre-occupation with the concept of being either trapped or unleashed is not just connected to a physical state, but often commandeered by one’s mind as evidenced in his group of films dubbed “the apartment trilogy.”
I was fascinated by Nayman’s insight into something which may be taken for granted in other movies. How many romcoms based in New York take place in a postage-stamp size apartment, and do we ever think twice about it? I don’t. That’s just where these random aspirational 20-somethings live. It’s not a directorial choice. But there’s an overwhelming amount of material across Polanski’s apartment series that can be linked, and Nayman gives us plenty of clues towards this position through clips that are all the more potent when judged as a whole.
Hands shot up when Nayman introduced a solid forty-five minute discussion on Rosemary’s Baby, Repulsion and The Tenant; everyone was eager to know his position on films they had seen perhaps thirty or even forty years ago. I smiled meekly, keen to be enlightened. If I’d come across these films while flicking plastic at my local video store, I didn’t remember. And if I had, I’d have put them down to “ugh, horror” and moved on. Now that I’m somewhat more in the know, however, I understand the popularity that Rosemary’s Baby enjoyed at the box office, and how Repulsion cemented Polanski’s reputation as a top director. I was particularly moved by the study of Roman’s characters as outsiders, picking up on a theme that seems to pervade almost all of his work. Catherine Deneuve’s Carole, for example, is shown as completely foreign within her physical world. The human ability to hide and retreat, here in an environment in which one would ordinarily feel safe, comes through vividly while remaining true to the novel on which it is based. Polanski skillfully adds his own dimension, however, linking again to the Holocaust experience in which people became oblivious to how they looked or how they were perceived by others, the only priority being to survive your circumstance. It is a bleak and somewhat pathetic take on the human condition, and yet owns up to a reality that many directors who focus singularly on the creation of a hero tend to ignore.
Nayman’s intention was for us to look at the work as distinct from the life, but when we came to addressing the importance of Roman’s transition into Shakespeare we had to agree: sometimes a director’s context actually wants to stare you in the face while you watch. Roman’s guilt in being unable to protect his wife and unborn son, in a tragedy made even more horrific by the insinuation that he was to blame, led audiences to look at Macbeth and genuinely proclaim that “only Roman would have made this.” The violence so cleanly realized on screen was a shock to Polanski loyalists who had expected his mourning period to be longer, with filmmaking no longer a central priority. But as he attested, films were the reason life still held meaning for him, and he continued to work up until and of course after he cropped up on my radar.
I was finally able to chime in with recognition as we arrived at our focus on The Pianist (and an amused consensus that Adrien Brody would never have a role this good again.) Its a striking comment Polanski again makes on how a self-made refuge can, in the harshest of circumstances, turn us into captives. This idea, running through the core of the film, potentially recruits The Pianist into the “apartment” grouping, but this is of course up to the viewer. Nayman leaps from the seriousness addressed here to the more contemporary, corporate-style thriller presented by The Ghost Writer – which I have now rented, because, you know, it stars Ewan Macgregor. Additionally, though, it is a symbol of Polanski’s relevance as a filmmaker up until today, proof that he continues to ask the big ethical questions despite his individual, more private status as one who may lack morals. Because if our filmmakers were perfect, nothing on screen would ever be compelling. I now have my ear to the ground for anything Roman, and thank Adam Nayman for folding his story into my mental library of film appreciation.
You can catch the last installment of Adam Nayman’s lecture series at the Miles Nadal JCC from 7-9 p.m. on Monday, April 11 (Catherine Breillat). For more info, click here.
Janis Seftel is a Toronto-based writer and blogger.
