ACMI Wrestles With The Infamous Genius Of Iconic Director Roman Polanski

In Marina Zenovich's 2008 documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted And Desired, the infamous director's 1977 court case, where he was tried for the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl, is chronicled in fastidious detail. Zenovich goes through evidence and testimony and interviews all the key players, including police, legal representatives and the victim, Samantha Geimer. She doesn't speak to the subject himself, but that becomes the film's angle: Polanski's effective (and ongoing) trial in absentia and the simultaneous trial-by-media, with the muckrakers of the gossip mill hooked on a case thick with celebrity obsession.

In the documentary, Richard Brenneman, an LA-based reporter who covered the hearing, says of the press coverage at the time: "How can this same man be two different things to two different sets of press? The European reporters looked on Polanski as this tragic, brilliant, historic figure... who had survived the Holocaust, who had survived the gassing of his mother, and then had come [to America] and maintained his integrity against the power of the Hollywood machine. And the American press tended to look at him as this malignant, twisted dwarf." 

Four decades on and the divisive opinions about the director persist. At a time in which social media has conflated art with the artist and has empowered Twitter mobs in piques of (self-) righteous protest, the -let's use the word- 'problematic' nature of Polanski's filmography has never been more apparent. 

So, it's notable that the cinematic retrospective Roman: 10 x Polanski doesn't just feature his films, but Wanted And Desired, too. Even when celebrating his own works, it seems imperative to screen a documentary about Polanski. Whilst his run of classic '60s and '70s films long ago meant that the filmmaker ascended into the ranks of auteurs known mononymically by their surnames, evoking his name is never so simple. When cult '00s comedy Nathan Barley -Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker's prescient digital-era satire- makes a joke about doing something that's "technically a Polanski", they're not talking about his off-kilter spatial composition. 

If we're to go just by his films, Polanski is one of cinema's definitive directors: a filmmaker who remains influential to this day. Born in Paris in 1933, he survived the Holocaust in Poland and was inspired to make films after seeing Snow White. Where other mid-20th-century filmmakers took a while to find their feet, Polanski's genius was apparent early. His 1958 short, Two Men And A Wardrobe, is a work of invention and delight, and his debut feature, the unsettling 1962 thriller Knife In The Water, was nominated for an Academy Award (and, years later, ripped-off wholesale in Phillip Noyce's Dead Calm). 

Knife In The Water screens as part of 10 x Polanski, and its tale -a young husband and wife invite a charismatic drifter onto their boat, sexual power games and paranoia blossom- sets the tenor for the program. An accompanying visual essay by Adrian Martin calls Polanski's work the 'Cinema Of Invasion'. In so many of his films, a bourgeois life falls apart as outside forces enter enclosed spaces -boats (as with 1992's Bitter Moon, too), houses, theatres, or, most famously, tenements- that grow to feel increasingly like prisons. 

This includes -and is defined by- Polanski's run of legendary paranoia thrillers, especially his 'apartment trilogy': 1965's Repulsion, 1968's iconic Rosemary's Baby, and 1976's The Tenant. Each of them finds a figure (Catherine Deneuve, Mia Farrow, and Polanski himself, respectively) becoming increasingly unhinged, spooked, and delirious; and these films are unsettling when contrasted with the real-life death of his second wife, Sharon Tate, who was infamously murdered, whilst pregnant, by the Manson Family in the Hollywood Hills in 1969. Polanski's 1974 film, Chinatown, in turn, depicted Los Angeles as a cesspool of toxic corruption; the film a classic noir-movie in which a PI sinks slowly into the mire and justice remains unserved. 

10 x Polanski touches on other elements of Polanski's oeuvre, from his early knockabout UK comedies (1966's Cul-de-sac, 1967's The Fearless Vampire Killers) to his later Hitchcockian thrillers (1988's Frantic, 2010's The Ghost Writer). With only one film from the past quarter-century, the program is built around 'classic' Polanski, but the filmmaker is still active, currently working on two forthcoming projects: an adaptation of Delphine de Vignan's Based On A True Story, and D, a film about the notorious Dreyfus Affair in late-19th-century France. 

At 83, it's unlikely the director has many more movies left in him, but, as Polanski x 10 shows, his status as a cinematic legend was long ago consecrated. Of course, so, too, was his place in infamy. The debate between these two sides of Polanski will be stirred up by this program, come into the mass consciousness with his eventual death, and continue on long into the future. 

What: Roman: 10 x Polanski

When & Where: ​

VIC

5-20 Nov, Australian Centre For The Moving Image

ACT

24-30 Nov, Palace Electric

NSW

1-7 Dec, Chauvel Cinema

QLD

1-7 Dec, Palace Centro