Weird Scenes Week 87 (8/11/22): Paranoia, Decadence and Dissolution – The Films of Roman Polanski

Born in Paris in the early 1930s, Roman Polanski lived a life marked by many tragedies. 
 

From seeing both parents taken away to the camps during the Nazi occupation of Poland and forced to live with a series of clandestine foster families to a later youth under the equally horrific oppression of Communist Russia and the Poland of the Iron Curtain, he came to the attention of the film community with his debut film Knife in the Water, quickly moving on to a series of British and American successes.

But even then, tragedy struck, with his new wife and future child murdered viciously by the Manson Family, with all these experiences feeding into his grim, fatalistically existential narratives onscreen.  Later (rather compromised) court matters led to his being scapegoated and rendered fugitive, forced to continue his directorial endeavors in a handful of European countries not subject to extradition laws (a matter that returned to public attention in the early millenium.)

His is a cinema marked by both Decadence and doom, grimly determinist and Kafkaesque regardless of genre or subject, from Hitchcockian narrative to spy thriller to outright horror.  

Oft feted and nominated (and winning) laudatory awards both domestically and abroad (in England, France and Europe per se) and much discussed in critical circles, he nonetheless remains something of a controversial figure, most often due to circumstances entirely out of his control or driven by self-serving accusatory figures in the media, courts and even public opinion.  But do these accusations paint as clear cut a condemnation of the man as it may seem?

Join us as we discuss the life and films of Roman Polanski, and decide for 
yourselves...

Week 87: Paranoia, Decadence and Dissolution – The Films of Roman Polanski

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