Roman Polanski… Inspiration from the cinema of the century

Old ruined buildings belonging to the Soviet army in Poland, brought back the international director “Roman Polanski” the memory of asylum and flight during World War II, from France to Poland. “The Pianist” was Polanski’s film in which he recounted the memories of the death with which he began his life. His film won the Palme d’Or. But the story of a Jewish pianist who escaped from the Nazis and extermination camps was the story of “Waldick Spielmann”, a Polish pianist of Jewish ethnicity who played on the Polish radio station. Roman Polanski is another story.

From the atmosphere of asylum from France to Poland to America, Polanski lived the beginning of his life full of events, at times tragic, and at others strange. The death of his mother while fleeing the Nazis, and the murder of his wife in an incident resembling the complex of one of his films, to other incidents made him more than an ordinary film director. Polanski’s films cannot be put in one place, he made his first feature film in 1962, which was nominated for an Oscar as the best foreign film directly, it was titled “Knife in the Water”, which depicts the story of a young couple tired of their lives, and find the key to happiness with a man old. He then co-produced the film “The Beautiful Swindlers”, with Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol. Then, he made his first English-language film in 1965 with French star Catherine Deneuve, entitled “Repulsion”, about a maniac woman who has a frightful hallucinations in a nightmarish atmosphere.

Polanski is considered a director with a great ability to deal with various topics, he has moved between comedy, horror, romance and tragedy. He presented the worlds of vampires in a satirical way in 1967 in his movie “Dancing with Vampires”, then moved to horror films and demons in the movie “Rosemary’s Baby”, then He moved to tragedy and the worlds of Shakespeare in the movie “The Tragedy of Macbeth” 1971, then entered the worlds of romance with the movie “Tess”, for which he won the Best Director award in 1981, then moved to the world of mystery and secrets in his strange movie “The Ninth Gate” in 1999, which was starring Johnny Depp to his famous movie ‘The Pianist” that won Best film and Best Director in 2003. Polanski’s career, despite the issue of sexual harassment that has dogged him for the past thirty years, did not stop. It is like his fame that shines with every new work, raising more ambiguous questions about the innocent criminal who reformulated the global cinematic event, according to his own vision.

Rami Maki