Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and Palace Cinemas are teaming up to present a touring film season dedicated to the oeuvre of controversial Franco-Polish director Roman Polanski.
ROMAN: 10 X Polanski will show ten key films drawn from the director’s Polish New Wave debut — Knife in the Water — to his 2010 political thriller, The Ghost Writer. Along the way , the retrospective dips into the director’s British films of the ‘60s including Repulsion and Cul de Sac; his New Hollywood classics Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown; and his Paris-set thrillers The Tenant, Frantic and Bitter Moon.
Marina Zenovich’s feature-length documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, will screen alongside the program’s ten selected features directed by Polanski. This exhaustively researched 2008 documentary – the first of two Zenovich has made on the subject – examines the 1977 statutory rape case that ultimately led to Polanski’s flight from the United States in February 1978. Zenovich doesn’t exonerate Polanski – the facts of the case are dispassionately and irrefutably chronicled – but she provides a sobering insight into the judicial irregularities and relentless media baiting that were brought to bear.
Lauded as ‘one of the great modern masters of the cinema’ Polanski refined formal film language. His record of innovation and re-invention is up there with the likes of Hitchcock or Truffaut. In 1962, Knife in the Water just about single-handedly sparked to Polish New Wave. His English language debut with Repulsion – an unnerving psychological horror film starring Catherine Deneuve – brought him to attention in the West. He soon found his way to Hollywood and produced some of his finest work there. Chief among these of course is his Oscar winning revivalist noir, Chinatown, which catapulted Jack Nicholson into super-stardom. The fallout of the 1977 legal case however saw him flee to Europe, where he has continued to work.
Starting in Melbourne on 5 November (at the ACMI), Roman: 10 x Polanski will travel to Palace Electric Canberra, Chauvel Cinema Sydney, and Palace Centro Brisbane, screening through to 7 December.
ACMI Cinemas
ACMI Cinemas, Melbourne – 5 – 20 November 2016
Tickets and Information: acmi.net.au/polanski
Palace Cinemas
Palace Electric, Canberra – 24 – 30 November 2016
Chauvel Cinema, Sydney – 1 – 7 December 2016
Palace Centro, Brisbane – 1 – 7 December 2016
Tickets and Information: http://www.palacecinemas.com.au/events/roman-polanski/
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television