Polish Reception of Roman Polanski’s Films. Outline of the Main Tendencies in Film Criticism and Film Studies

Abstract The article is devoted to the reception of Roman Polanski’s cinema in Poland. The author examines both critical-film articles (opinions formulated in reviews after the first viewing of a movie) and academic articles and monographs. Instead of criticizing the existing readings of the director’s works, the author considers which frames they were inscribed into by the reviewers and how this placement influenced the interpretations and evaluations of the films. As he argues, Polanski’s artistic propositions did not quite fit the vision of great cinema shared by Polish journalists at a given moment. The author shows that the reception of the artist’s work is a testimony to the changes in Polish critics’ attitude towards genre cinema and to the gradual mending of the division between high and low art. When commenting on the director’s works, Polish critics and scholars have had to struggle with a socialist realist view of art, an aversion to popular culture, and finally, postmodern prejudices against the “classic” form of cinema. The Polish researchers have not always overcome the limitations of dominant discourses, but it seems that Polanski’s cinema shaped and changed these discourses to some extent.