On August 18, Roman Polanski turned 93. Few filmmakers have lived through so many eras, produced so many landmark films and, at the same time, carried such a disturbing and controversial biography.
Born in Paris on August 18, 1933, into a Polish Jewish family, Polanski built a filmography that placed him among the great auteurs of modern cinema. Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, Repulsion, Knife in the Water, The Tenant, Tess, Frantic, Death and the Maiden, The Pianist and The Ghost Writer are just some of the works in a career spanning more than six decades. (Akademia Polskiego Filmu)
It is difficult to find another director whose work so persistently features fear, persecution, paranoia, confinement, violence and the impossibility of escaping the past.
And perhaps it is impossible to separate this worldview entirely from Polanski’s life.
He survived the Holocaust as a child. His mother was murdered at Auschwitz. Decades later, his wife, the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, was murdered by members of the group led by Charles Manson. In 1977, Polanski was prosecuted in the United States in a case involving Samantha Geimer, then 13, and pleaded guilty to the charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. Before final sentencing, he left the United States and has never returned to the country.
Other women subsequently made allegations of sexual violence against the filmmaker, who disputed accusations made against him. His continued place in European cultural life, despite the American criminal case and these accusations, turned Polanski into a central figure in a debate that gained renewed intensity with the #MeToo movement: is it possible—and under what conditions—to separate an artistic work from its creator?
The answer remains deeply divided.
But Polanski’s cinematic importance is difficult to dispute. At 93, his trajectory represents one of the most extreme cases in contemporary cultural history: an artist whose masterpieces seem permanently accompanied by a shadow.
A childhood amid horror
Before Polanski began filming fear, he experienced it. His family left Paris and returned to Poland while he was still a child. The German invasion of Poland in 1939 transformed his childhood. The family was subjected to Nazi antisemitic persecution, and Polanski spent part of the war in hiding, using a false identity.
His mother was deported to Auschwitz and murdered. The boy survived.
This experience is more than a biographical detail. Decades later, Polanski would transform part of that world into cinema in The Pianist, based on the memoirs of Polish Jewish musician Władysław Szpilman. This structure recurs throughout his films.
From Polish film school to world cinema
After the war, Polanski became involved with theater, radio and cinema and studied directing at the renowned Łódź Film School, one of the main centers of postwar Polish film culture. His student works had already begun to receive international recognition.
In 1962, he made his first feature film, Knife in the Water.
But what could have been merely a small psychological drama becomes an examination of desire, masculinity, power, jealousy and violence. Polanski was discovering something that would characterize virtually his entire career: a small space can contain an entire universe of human tension.
The master of claustrophobia
Polanski established himself in Western Europe and made Repulsion in 1965, starring Catherine Deneuve. The film made explicit one of the great obsessions of his work: psychological deterioration within enclosed spaces. A year later, Cul-de-sac consolidated his international reputation and won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
By then, it was clear that Polanski was not simply a skilled director. He possessed a universe of his own.
If Alfred Hitchcock was the great master of classical suspense construction, Polanski added another layer: often the viewer can no longer be sure whether the threat exists in the world or in the character’s mind.
Rosemary’s Baby and the conquest of Hollywood
In 1968, Polanski made the film in the United States that would definitively establish him as an international director: Rosemary’s Baby.
Based on Ira Levin’s novel and starring Mia Farrow, the film follows Rosemary Woodhouse, a young woman who moves with her husband into a New York apartment building. Little by little, what seemed like a normal life begins to take on sinister overtones. The neighbors seem excessively interested in the couple. Her husband changes. Rosemary’s pregnancy becomes unsettling. Something is profoundly wrong.
Polanski achieves something extraordinary: much of the horror takes place without needing to be shown directly. The viewer senses the danger before being able to define it. That is the essence of Polanski’s cinema.
Rosemary’s Baby became an indispensable reference point for psychological horror and paved the way for a profound transformation of the genre in the following decades.
Sharon Tate and a tragedy that echoed across the century
The year after the film’s release, Polanski’s life was devastated.
His wife, actress Sharon Tate, was pregnant when she was murdered in August 1969 in Los Angeles, along with four other people, by members of Charles Manson’s group. Polanski was in Europe. The brutality of the crime and the fame of its victims made the case a worldwide event. Tate was 26. For Polanski, who had already lost his mother in the Holocaust, another experience of extreme violence would mark his existence. It would be simplistic to interpret all his subsequent films solely through his personal tragedies. But it is equally difficult to ignore the recurring presence in his work of a world in which safety can suddenly disappear.
Chinatown: one of the masterpieces of American cinema
In 1974, Polanski made Chinatown. With a screenplay by Robert Towne and performances by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston, the film begins as a private investigation and gradually uncovers a much larger system of corruption, money, violence and power. Detective Jake Gittes believes he is investigating a relatively conventional case. He discovers he has entered a labyrinth. Once again, this is a fundamental structure in Polanski’s work.
The character believes he understands the world. Then he realizes he understands very little. In Chinatown, however, this logic is no longer merely psychological. It becomes political. Corruption is not a deviation within the system. It is deeply embedded in the workings of power itself. An individual can uncover the truth and still be unable to defeat it.
The film’s critical acclaim remains extraordinary: on Rotten Tomatoes, for example, Chinatown ranks as the director’s highest-rated work.
1977: the case that changed his life
Three years after Chinatown came the episode that would follow Polanski for the rest of his life.
In 1977, in the United States, he was formally charged with six offenses involving Samantha Geimer, then 13. The original charges included rape by use of drugs, supplying a controlled substance to a minor and unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, among other offenses.
Under a plea agreement also requested by the victim’s family, which sought to avoid the publicity of a widely followed trial, Polanski changed his plea and, on August 8, 1977, pleaded guilty to the charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. He spent 42 days in a California state prison during an evaluation ordered as part of the proceedings. Before final sentencing, he left the United States in 1978 for Europe and never returned to the U.S.
From that moment, Roman Polanski’s story acquired two narratives that are impossible to completely disentangle. One is the story of his work. The other is the story of his criminal case.
The artist in exile
Fleeing the United States did not end Polanski’s career. In Europe, he continued making films. In 1979, he directed Tess, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel starring Nastassja Kinski. This was followed by very different works, including Pirates, Frantic, Bitter Moon, Death and the Maiden and The Ninth Gate.
His ability to move between genres remained impressive. Polanski could make horror. Suspense. Historical drama. Black comedy. Literary adaptations. Political thrillers.
But certain elements kept returning obsessively: isolation, mistrust, identity, humiliation, violence and the vulnerability of individuals confronted with greater forces.
The Pianist: a return to the original trauma
In 2002, Polanski made what may be his most personal work. The Pianist tells the story of Władysław Szpilman, a Jewish pianist trying to survive the destruction of Warsaw during the Nazi occupation.
For Polanski, it was impossible to approach that world as a mere historical reconstruction. He himself had been a Jewish child persecuted by the Nazis in Poland. The result is a film of extraordinary restraint.
The Pianist earned Polanski the Academy Award for Best Director in 2003. He was not present in the United States to accept the award. The situation was almost surreal.
Hollywood officially recognized as best director a man who could not attend the ceremony because of his standing before the American justice system. The contradiction that would mark the rest of his career was symbolically complete.
Can the artist be separated from the work?
For decades, this question followed Polanski. But after the emergence of the #MeToo movement, it took on an entirely different intensity.
Other women made allegations of sexual violence against the director. Polanski disputed accusations made against him. At the same time, his 1977 case involved a legally established element that must not be confused with later allegations: his guilty plea to the charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.
The night French cinema erupted
In 2019, Polanski released An Officer and a Spy (J’accuse), about the Dreyfus affair, one of the great political and judicial scandals in French history.
The film received 12 César nominations, France’s leading film award. The reaction was explosive. Feminist organizations protested. The debate spread throughout French cinema. Polanski decided not to attend the ceremony.
When he was announced as the winner of the César for Best Director, actresses and other attendees walked out of the auditorium in protest. Actress Adèle Haenel was among those who left the ceremony.
The film also won awards for Best Adaptation and Costume Design. The episode became symbolic. On one side were those who maintained that a film academy should judge films, not biographies. On the other were those who considered it impossible to give Polanski a personal honor without that being interpreted as a message to victims of sexual violence.
The discussion extended far beyond the director. It was a debate about power, art, memory, accountability and impunity.
A cinema built on fear
There is an inevitable question when revisiting Polanski’s filmography after learning about his biography. Why are his films so unsettling?
Perhaps because Polanski understands the feeling of vulnerability as few filmmakers do.
In his films, the world is rarely trustworthy. The apartment in Repulsion becomes a place of madness. The building in Rosemary’s Baby conceals a threat. Los Angeles, in Chinatown, is ruled by powers that the protagonist cannot defeat. Warsaw, in The Pianist, turns into a killing machine.
Even when working with humor, Polanski frequently transforms enclosed spaces into psychological battlefields.
The filmmaker and the moral labyrinth
Celebrating Roman Polanski’s 93rd birthday therefore requires resisting two oversimplifications. The first would be to turn his cinematic importance into moral absolution.
The greatness of Chinatown does not erase the 1977 case. The Oscar for The Pianist does not negate his guilty plea. The influence of Rosemary’s Baby does not settle the questions raised by later allegations.
The second oversimplification would be to imagine that moral condemnation of the man makes his achievements as an artist historically irrelevant. The films continue to exist. They continue to be studied. They continue to influence filmmakers.
They continue to evoke beauty, fear, discomfort and reflection in viewers who were often born decades after the films were made.
It is precisely the impossibility of a simple answer that makes Polanski such a disturbing figure in contemporary culture.
One of the great paradoxes of film history
Roman Polanski reaches the age of 93 as a survivor of one of humanity’s greatest crimes, the widower of a victim of one of the twentieth century’s most notorious murders, the creator of some of modern cinema’s foundational works, and the central figure in a criminal case that made him a fugitive from American justice.
It is an almost impossible combination of tragedy, talent, violence, recognition and controversy.
Few artists compel audiences to confront so uncomfortably the distance that can exist between aesthetic greatness and human behavior. Perhaps that is exactly why his work continues to provoke such discomfort.
In Polanski’s best films, characters enter labyrinths from which they cannot escape. They discover that appearances are deceptive. That institutions can fail. That seemingly respectable people can conceal terrible behavior. That truth can exist without producing justice. And that the past never completely disappears.
It is impossible to know how much of this was born from his biography and how much belongs simply to the imagination of a great filmmaker.
But there is an unavoidable irony. Over more than six decades, Roman Polanski created a body of work about characters pursued by forces they cannot escape.
At 93, his own life remains haunted by the same questions his cinema has never stopped asking: what do we do in the face of evil, guilt, violence and the impossibility of erasing the past?
Source: brasil247.com
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