Roman Polanski is one of the most celebrated living directors. In recent years he also became one of the most reviled due to his sexual encounter with a minor, which took place in 1977, and fleeing from the United States a year after. As a result of these two sides of the Polanski phenomenon, authors discussing his films feel obliged to defend themselves. The negative publicity accompanying Polanski is also part of the reason why most of the scholarship concerns his earlier films. Less attention is dedicated to his films produced after The Pianist (2002). This film marks a turning point in Polanski’s life, career and scholarship. Polish biographer of Polanski, Jan Kochańczyk, even describes The Pianist as his most important film (Kochańczyk 2014: 119), a view supported by the film’s Oscar for Best Director and Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
The fame surrounding The Pianist also reignited discussion in the media about the director’s legal status as a fugitive from the American justice following his 1977 guilty plea to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, Samantha Geimer, and his flight before sentencing (Geimer 2003; Goldstein 2003). Especially since 2017, when Harvey Weinstein was exposed by the media as a sexual predator and charged with rape the following year, his case has prompted journalists to revisit the Polanski-Geimer affair. Some feminist commentators and organizations have brought the two men into the same critical frame, treating them as American and European embodiments of male sexual predation (Willsher 2017).
The changes in the film industry and wider political culture, discussed in the following chapters, have been unfavourable to Polanski, adversely affecting the distribution of his films. As a result, Polanski’s films post-The Pianist received limited distribution and are relatively little known. There have been few attempts to treat them as a distinct body of work, whether as bearing Polanski’s authorial stamp or, conversely, as lacking such a signature. This book addresses this gap by combining tools employed by other researchers, such as autobiographism and spatial analysis, with approaches not previously applied to Polanski’s films in any sustained way, including production studies, transmediality, postcolonialism and the representation of work.
Polanski is widely regarded as an auteur. In European cinema, he belongs to the generation born before the Second World War that helped shape postwar modernist cinema and the New Waves, a lineage that includes figures such as Jerzy Skolimowski, Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard. Even his lesser known and less acclaimed works demonstrate rare self-confidence and a sense of film as a medium. In this respect, Polanski’s cinema may be compared to that of Alfred Hitchcock (Leaming 1981: 11; Wright Wexman 1985: 50; Stachówna 2002: 53). It is more difficult, however, to assert Polanski’s authorship on the basis of consistency, which many critics have treated as a key criterion of auteurism. His cinema is marked instead by an unusual versatility of genre, period, setting and literary source. His films encompass horror, melodrama, comedy, film noir and the spy film; they are set variously in Poland, the United States, France, England, Scotland, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, as well as in unidentified or deliberately indeterminate countries. Their characters frequently move between locations, relishing or cursing their freedom of movement. Although most of them are contemporary, several are situated in a specific historical or mythical past. Finally, Polanski complicates the idea of auteurism because he is rarely the sole author of his scripts and has often described his role as that of a director who improves material written by others.
Despite the versatility of Polanski’s films, scholars point to their common features. One of these concerns his ability to convey the inner life of his characters, especially through visual means. This is especially the case in his horrors: Repulsion, The Tenant, Rosemary’s Baby. When watching them, we feel as if we are entering the mind of his character. Polanski’s cinema is a cinema of perception, as Davide Caputo asserts in the title of his book (Caputo 2012). Again, this connects Polanski with Hitchcock. Another common denominator is their focus on space (typically enclosed) as a form of oppression, as testified by the title of a collection devoted to Polanski (Orr and Ostrowska 2006). The category of space is also important in the later films of Polanski, which take place in multiple time zones, real and imaginary, as in Based on a True Story, or which disrupt the sense of chronology, as in Venus in Fur. Space thus brings unity to the stories, which otherwise would come across as disjointed. These films testify to the fact that cinematic narration is inherently spatial, as attested by such authors as Stephen Heath (1981). Almost all critics writing about Polanski before us also point to Polanski’s perfectionism and attention to detail in settings and costumes, in order to ensure historical and psychological realism in his films. For this purpose, for example, cows of a particular breed were transported to the setting of Tess.
The concept of auteurism, which has been through numerous changes since it was introduced by critics working for Cahiers du Cinéma in the mid-1950s (see Chapter 1), is linked to the notion of arthouse cinema. Arthouse films break with established conventions and strive to convey the personal vision of the filmmaker. They privilege development of the character, who lacks clear-cut objectives and is meant to be important in his own right, rather than as an element of the narrative, which in arthouse films tend to be reduced. The cause-effect linkage of events is often abandoned, endings are open, ambiguous or tragic, depriving the viewer of the pleasure of a happy ending or even closure. Arthouse filmmakers commonly use a mix of lesser-known and amateur actors, modest production sets, typically using real-world locations, with no large stunts or special effects (Bordwell 1979). Because of these characteristics, authors of arthouse films have problems attracting producers willing to risk a big financial investment in their films. Many of them maintain that they do not even have such an ambition, preferring to make their films independently from big studios, on modest budgets.
Polanski’s films share some similarities with arthouse films defined in this way. His productions, as has already been established, have a ‘personal signature’. They also tend to have ambiguous endings. His first foreign production after he left Poland was a segment in the collaborative film Les plus belles escroqueries du monde (1964), in which other segments were directed by New Wave directors, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard. That said, it can be argued that Polanski does not have the temperament of an arthouse director. He was consistently outspoken in his dislike of the French New Wave. He regarded his films as superior to Godard’s, dismissing the latter’s work as amateurish and sloppy (Polanski 2017). He also didn’t agree with the leftist political position of French New Wave directors. Barbara Leaming quotes him saying: ‘People like Truffaut, Lelouch and Godard are like little kids playing at being revolutionaries. I’ve passed through this stage. I lived in a country where these things happened seriously’ (quoted in Leaming 1981: 97). He also attributed the limited recognition his early work received in France to an excessive reverence for the New Wave tradition.
Another reason Polanski does not fit neatly into the category of the arthouse director is his long-standing commitment to relatively high-budget filmmaking and to reaching mainstream audiences through suspenseful, gripping stories. The desire to make such films can be linked, again, to his biography, given that he was an avid consumer of films as a child and as a student in the Lodz Film School. These were popular narrative films, rather than products of the avant-garde. They provided him with a perfect escape from the threatening world in which he lived at the time. Reading his autobiography and listening to his interviews, one notices that he believes in the close connection between budget and the quality of films, at least in his case. Big budgets allow him to fulfil his vision, which often requires building elaborate sets and employing stars. This was one reason that his ultimate destination was Hollywood, hence he was very disappointed when he had to escape the United States, following his conviction for sexual misconduct. That said, in due course, he started to appreciate the European way of filmmaking, because Hollywood has changed immensely since the late 1970s, when he left the United States, resulting in approved projects being more conservative and directors losing some of their independence. Polanski’s body of work includes many independently financed or European co-produced films, such as Repulsion or Cul-de-sac, made outside the major film studios on relatively modest budgets, although this was often less a matter of artistic choice than a consequence of difficulties in finding major backers.
Polanski’s films are also marked by their cosmopolitan character, evident both in their modes of production and in their narratives. Most of his films were international co-productions. Over the years, their production has involved an expanding network of countries, reflecting the increasing difficulty in securing funding. Polanski himself has remained closely involved in these production processes, often taking financial responsibility for his projects, which extends his authorship beyond direction and style to include material conditions of production. This industrial cosmopolitanism is mirrored at the narrative level by the characters who are often immigrants, exiles or travellers, rarely settled in the countries of their birth.
Polanski the film author is also linked to Polanski the celebrity. From the beginning of his cinematic career, which began properly during his years at the Film School in Lodz, he attracted attention. Wojciech Kilar, the well-known composer and later one of his collaborators, recalls than in Lodz’s artistic circles everybody knew him (Wilczek-Krupa 2021: 483). Zofia Komedowa-Trzcińska, the wife of Krzysztof Komeda, observes that Polanski attracted various acolytes, drawn by his energy and his determination to get what he wanted (Komedowa-Trzcińska 2015: 233). His first marriage, to the well-known actress Barbara Kwiatkowska, helped make him visible in Poland as one half of the ‘power couple’, bringing colour and glamour to the drab reality of Gomułka’s Poland. Such off-screen visibility accompanied Polanski throughout his life. In London during the Swinging Sixties, Polanski also attracted attention, despite his status as a foreign newcomer. His second wife, the American actress Sharon Tate, like Kwiatkowska in Poland before her, embodied glamour and celebrity allure, and the couple soon acquired celebrity status, becoming pursued by the paparazzi and featured in popular magazines. This status was initially cultivated by the director, who would photograph himself naked with his wife and who enjoyed the aura of a mystery, which is how Hollywood reporters described him. This changed, however, after Tate’s murder, when press speculation took a darker and more defamatory turn, including rumours about Polanski’s alleged involvement in her murder and stories that maligned Tate herself. This tragic event ended Polanski’s good relationship with the press, but not the press’s interest in him. The next chapter in Polanski’s fraught relationship with the press was the case involving an underage girl, which resulted in his imprisonment and, subsequently, his flight from the United States in 1978, to avoid what he believed would be a longer custodial sentence.
This book examines Polanski’s post-The Pianist films as a distinct body of work, asking how his authorship is reconfigured in this later phase of his career, while recognising that authorship itself is not a straightforward concept. Janet Staiger, in particular, identifies seven approaches to authorship, ranging from those that emphasize the agency of an individual creator (authorship as origin, authorship as personality, and authorship as technique of the self), through those that foreground the collaborative character of film work (authorship as a sociology of production) or textual consistency (authorship as signature), to those that centre on the reader’s role in constructing the author (authorship as reading strategy) and those that combine these approaches (authorship as site of discourses) (Staiger 2002). To some extent, this book engages with all these approaches. We are interested in Polanski’s ‘signature’ and in the collaborative character of his work, but also in the ways in which his celebrity and media construction, especially in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, have shaped the reception, circulation and cultural status of his films.
In Polanski’s case, the relationship between the personal and professional is close and complex, extending beyond the question of autobiographical motifs to encompass production and reception. In 2019, shortly before the premiere of An Officer and a Spy, Polanski faced another rape allegation, which Agnieszka Holland described as marking a new phase of ‘black PR’ against him. ‘Roman doesn’t make cheap films’, she remarked in 2020, arguing that the negative publicity accompanying the premieres of his recent films, especially An Officer and a Spy, would most likely make it impossible for him to secure funding for further projects (Holland 2020). Indeed, The Palace, released in 2023, was already a considerably less expensive production, yet Polanski still encountered difficulties in securing funding and distribution (Raczek 2023). The situation had been very different at the beginning of the period discussed in this book, when the Oscar and Palme d’Or awarded to The Pianist, cleared the way for Oliver Twist. For that film, nineteenth-century, Dickensian London was reconstructed at Prague’s Barrandov Studios, and an unprecedented number of extras was employed, making Polanski’s version the most expensive adaptation of the novel to date.
In this book, we are particularly interested in the new stylistic traits and motifs that emerge in Polanski’s later films, while recognising that auteurship is always shaped by specific circumstances within the film ecology, and by the wider political, social and economic context. At the same time, Polanski’s work allows us to examine broader changes in global cinema over the last two decades. Because authorship comprises multiple dimensions, we have avoided imposing a single methodological framework on the book. Instead, each chapter employs a different method, reflecting the range of issues outlined in this introduction: Polanski’s working methods, his use of sound, and recurring thematic motifs such as home and work. This also means that we return to the same films several times, placing them in different contexts.
We embarked on this project with the conviction that Polanski’s career changed after The Pianist. We wanted to examine whether this change affected the content, style and structure of his subsequent films, and for this reason we pay particular attention to both continuities and departures from his earlier work. Ironically, the making of The Pianist, despite its harrowing subject matter, was not itself connected to a new upheaval in Polanski’s life. Nevertheless, the film can be regarded as a milestone in his career, because of its critical and popular acclaim. Polanski’s Oscar for Best Director and the film’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival confirmed its exceptional status. Its success can be attributed in part to the perceived fit between the topic and the author: The Pianist confirmed Polanski’s position as both a Holocaust survivor and a director able to approach the subject with the authority of a witness to Nazi genocide.
This authority gave The Pianist a status that many films on the Holocaust lack. The subject itself continues to attract attention from filmmakers, scholars and the general public. It grants artists who engage with it a particular ethical and cultural prestige. Yet The Pianist is not only a film about the Holocaust; it is also made in a specific mode, close to Hollywood melodrama. It seeks to move the viewer emotionally while offering a subdued but nevertheless hopeful ending. In this sense, The Pianist occupies an unusual position in Polanski’s cinema: it is a melodrama with an optimistic rather than a tragic end – somewhere between Tess and Death and the Maiden. Its success most likely posed a dilemma for Polanski – whether to continue along this path, adhering to aesthetic realism, humanist sentiment and a moderated happy ending, or to return to what is more readily recognizable as ‘Polanski’s style’, marked by open endings, irony and pessimism. By choosing to make Oliver Twist, Polanski seemed initially to favour the first option. The film follows the path opened by The Pianist, since one can easily see the parallel between little Oliver, orphaned and mistreated by adults while seeking solace among fellow street urchins, and Polanski himself, who was effectively orphaned during the war.
After Oliver Twist, however, Polanski’s cinema became more eclectic. Several later films can be regarded as reworkings of earlier tropes. Based on a True Story revisits the theme of a character trapped in an apartment, previously developed in The Tenant. The Ghost Writer, with its naïve and inept detective, recalls Chinatown, while the Ghost’s growing preoccupation with the book he has been hired to complete also makes the film a companion piece to The Ninth Gate. The carnivalesque The Palace brings to mind What?, as well as Polanski’s short Let’s Break the Ball.
That said, more divides these later films from Polanski’s earlier work than connects them. First, they are more transnational in terms of financing and production, with a large number of countries involved. This might suggest a lack of consistency in their crews, but this is not actually the case. Most of Polanski’s productions from this period involve the same cinematographer, Paweł Edelman, the same composer, Alexandre Desplat, and the same editor, Hervé de Luze. Almost all of them also involve support from Polish film institutions and Polish crew members, even though none of their subjects can straightforwardly be described as Polish. It is difficult to contain these films within the categories of ‘accented cinema’ (Naficy 2001) or ‘migrant cinema’ (Berghahn and Sternberg 2010), since references to Polanski’s Polish identity are sparser than in his earlier films and they do not centre on alienated migrants, such as Carol in Repulsion. The later films are Polish primarily at the level of production rather than plot. In terms of shooting and set design, many of these films are based on substitution. One country or city stands in for another, reflecting both the economic pressures and Polanski’s anxiety about travelling to countries where he might risk arrest and extradition to the United States.
The structure of the narratives changes as well. Polanski’s earlier films were often centred on a single protagonist suffering in a hostile environment, a focus reflected in titles, such as The Tenant, Tess, Rosemary’s Baby or The Pianist. By contrast, many of the later films have a more symmetrical structure: two characters pitted against each other in Venus in Fur and Based on a True Story, or two couples locked in conflict in Carnage. The Palace disperses this structure across a large ensemble cast: no single character emerges as the dominant protagonist but the film is organised around a collective rivalry between the guests and the staff of the eponymous hotel. Such structures make identification with the protagonists more difficult. Against this background, An Officer and a Spy appears somewhat exceptional: despite its title, which suggests two equally important figures, it is centred largely on one character, Picquart with whom the film invites sustained sympathy.
Apart from Venus in Fur and Based on a True Story – both of which can be described as modern ghost stories – most of Polanski’s post-The Pianist films do not include overtly fantastic events. Their plots can usually be explained without invoking supernatural entities such as vampires, devils or ghosts. Unlike some of his earlier films, whose plots and iconography were strongly marked by surrealism, the later films do not bear such obvious surrealist traces. Nevertheless, their relationship with realism remains complex. They are far from the Bazinian notion of realism based on indexicality (Bazin 2005a, 2005b), since their ‘realist effect’ often depends on the manipulation of space: Sylt stands in for Martha’s Vineyard in The Ghost Writer, a film studio in London becomes a Brooklyn apartment in Carnage. These films also display a strong tendency towards exaggeration and caricature, present in the melodramatic stories told by Her in Based on a True Story or in the clichéd vulgarity of the hotel guests in The Palace. At certain moments, cinematic ruptures interrupt the apparent realism of the plot, as in the flying camera movement at the beginning of Venus in Fur, which evokes the spectral movement of an invisible presence through Paris and recalls the opening of The Ninth Gate.
Critics often judge these later films according to the criteria of popular or genre cinema rather than arthouse cinema. When they are regarded as failures, they are frequently criticized for underdeveloped characters or for puzzles that remain unresolved, as if they were expected to conform to Hollywood narrative closure. Their box office results have also tended to be modest in comparison with Polanski’s earlier films, although this can be attributed at least partly to problems with their distribution, especially in North America, rather than to their content or artistic value. We argue that these films are more preoccupied than Polanski’s earlier work with the mundane structures of human life, especially work and domesticity. At the same time, they convey an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia specific to the twenty-first century, an era in which conspiracy theories flourish and technologies such as deep fakes make reality increasingly difficult to distinguish from fabrication. The precision with which Polanski registers these developments makes the films unusually attuned to contemporary reality and, at times, almost prophetic.
Equally important is the transmedial character of Polanski’s post-The Pianist cinema. These films often recycle worlds that have already been created and circulated elsewhere by other media. They feature recognizable and recurring spatial settings, some of which allude to Polanski’s earlier films, including his shorts, while others draw on broader cultural topoi or spatial archetypes embedded in the Western pictorial tradition. They evoke the spirit of specific historical moments: the emergence of the modern surveillance state in An Officer and a Spy, or its full institutionalisation in the post-9/11 world of The Ghost Writer. Polanski’s later films also suggest how important cinema and other media have become to our understanding of history. They repeatedly engage with media, both historical and contemporary: photography in An Officer and a Spy, television and digital media in The Ghost Writer, and social media with screen-based communication in Based on a True Story. Books, too, occupy a central place. They act as triggers for action in Oliver Twist, as status symbols in Carnage, as clues to a political mystery in The Ghost Writer, and as portals to another reality in Based on a True Story.
If Polanski has often been linked to modernism, his later films move more clearly towards postmodernism. Yet, he is rarely overtly meta-cinematic in the manner of Jean-Luc Godard or Quentin Tarantino. His concern is less with the filmmaker’s self-conscious manipulation of form than with the viewer’s experience of worlds already mediated by books, screens, images, performances and rumours. In this respect, the post-The Pianist films constitute a distinct body of work: one in which Polanski’s authorship persists, but is reconfigured through transnational production, media saturation, spatial substitution, fractured realism and a renewed interest in the phantasmatic worlds through which contemporary subjects experience history, identity and reality.
The book consists of three parts. The first part, ‘Production and Reception of Polanski’s Films after The Pianist’, comprises three chapters. Chapter 1, ‘Polanski on Trial: The Changing Discourse around Polanski’s Private and Professional Life’, focuses on Polanski as a public and private figure rather than directly on his films. It engages with recent debates about his personal conduct and their effect on the reception, circulation and evaluation of his work. The chapter also uses these debates to shed light on the changing attitudes towards cinema and art more broadly, pointing to the growing importance of artists’ personal conduct, especially sexual conduct, in assessments of their work. It does so from a position critical of censorship. Drawing heavily on Polanski’s biography, especially accounts of the Samantha Geimer case, as well as on recent journalistic discourse about his conduct and films, the chapter is informed by debates on authorship in film and art and the relationship between moral and aesthetic values.
Chapter 2, ‘The Conductor: Polanski’s Production Methods’, examines how Polanski works on his films. It argues that, while he has remained a perfectionist closely involved in all aspects of filmmaking, the financing and production of his films have changed significantly, reflecting wider transformations in the film industry. The risk-taking producer of the studio era, exemplified by Robert Evans, with whom Polanski worked during his Hollywood years, now belongs to the past. Consequently, after The Pianist, Polanski increasingly appears as one of the producers of his own films, as his projects become more dependent on transnational funding structures.
Chapter 3, ‘The Craft Not the Method: Polanski’s Work with Actors’, argues that Polanski expects actors to be craftsmen who learn to perform a role rather than to ‘live’ it. His approach places particular emphasis on the physicality of the body, and on the materiality of space and props, which he treats as central to the actors’ ability to imagine the character. This attention to bodily precision, spatial awareness and material detail helps explain the distinctive cinematic quality of Polanski’s films: their visual fluidity and, at times, almost floating movement.
The second part of our book, ‘World-building’, examines how Polanski constructs distinct cinematic microcosms. Chapter 4, ‘From Genrification to Mediatization: Phantasms in Polanski’s Cinema’, argues that the films made after The Pianist increasingly place themselves in a transmedial context. Rather than concentrating primarily on linear storytelling, they foreground immersive spaces and draw on worlds already created and circulated by other media. They also feature recognizable, recurring spatial settings: some refer back to Polanski’s earlier work, especially his short films, while others draw on broader Western cultural topoi and spatial archetypes.
Chapter 5, ‘Peeling the (Sonic) Onion: Sonic Layers of Reality in Polanski’s Cinema’, is devoted to the neglected issue of sound in Polanski’s work. Polanski has often been described, including in this book, as a filmmaker of interiors; however, as we argue in the chapter, these interiors are created and animated through sounds. They are never empty, mute or passive, since dead matter is repeatedly made to appear alive through strange registers of murmuring, hissing or creaking. Polanski’s oeuvre is, in this sense, haunted by sound, which complicates the temporal structures of his films and unsettles the boundaries between presence and absence.
The third and final part of the book, ‘Exploring Material Reality’, investigates the prevalence of two motifs in Polanski’s late films: work, addressed in Chapter 6, ‘Work to Live: Work and Social Class in Polanski’s Films’, and home, addressed in Chapter 7, ‘At Home and in the World: Interior and Exterior in Polanski’s Films’. We focus on work, because, in contrast to most of his earlier productions, Polanski’s post-The Pianist films are strongly work-centred. The representation of work goes hand in hand with an interest in the mundane aspects of life. Even when dramatic events occur, they are presented within the context of everyday routines, which continue irrespective of disruption. Polanski avoids the two extreme modern attitudes to work: its Romantic elevation as a source of meaning and its Marxist condemnation as alienated labour under capitalism. The later Polanski films are also remarkable for the importance they attach to affective labour and for the wide range of jobs and professions they depict.
Chapter 7 argues that, in the films Polanski made after The Pianist, houses tend to be less cursed than in his earlier work, such as Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant. This change reflects the more broadly realist orientation of this later period, in which neither people nor houses possess supernatural powers. The relationship between the characters and their homes is subjected to closer scrutiny. Some characters long for home, such as Oliver Twist; others appear blasé about where they live, such as the Ghost or the guests of the Swiss Palace Hotel. Nevertheless, all these films draw attention to the importance and fragility of home. Polanski also foregrounds the relation between domestic space and the external world, especially the nation state, which functions as a guarantor of domestic stability. Modernization, he suggests, has weakened people’s attachment to their physical homes, but has not obliterated it. Polanski also points to the significance of certain spaces, such as the theatre or the concert hall, as surrogate homes for artists.
The seven chapters demonstrate that, although there are continuities between the films Polanski made up to The Pianist and those he made afterwards, the post-The Pianist films constitute a new chapter in his career. It should be added that embarking on this project elicited mixed reactions from other scholars. Some questioned the value of devoting time and attention to the life and work of an artist who has become, for many, a deeply compromised figure, and whose later films are often regarded as inferior to his earlier achievements. Others, however, regarded the project as a necessary engagement with a controversial but significant body of work.
This book is not intended to provoke, nor to solicit sympathy for Polanski. At its root lies a desire to explore his later work without favour or prejudice. The project was also encouraged by the strong response to Ewa Mazierska’s article ‘Roman Polanski (and Others) on Trial’, published in Studies of Eastern European Cinema in a special issue devoted to Polanski and incorporated into the first chapter of this book (Mazierska 2023). The article attracted considerable attention, including a polemical response, a request for republication in Polish, numerous emails and downloads, making it one of the journal’s most widely read pieces. This response encouraged us to continue the project, in the hope that the book too will contribute meaningfully to ongoing debates about Polanski’s cinema, authorship and reception.