Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Polish Cinema beyond Polish Borders
- Part One The International Reception of Polish Films
- Part Two Polish International Coproductions and Presence in Foreign Films
- Part Three Émigré and Subversive Polish Directors
- 11 An Island Near the Left Bank: Walerian Borowczyk as a French Left Bank Filmmaker
- 12 Beyond Polish Moral Realism: The Subversive Cinema of Andrzej Żuławski
- 13 Polanski and Skolimowski in Swinging London
- 14 The Elusive Trap of Freedom?: Krzysztof Zanussi's International Coproductions
- 15 Agnieszka Holland's Transnational Nomadism
- Selected Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index
15 - Agnieszka Holland's Transnational Nomadism
from Part Three - Émigré and Subversive Polish Directors
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Polish Cinema beyond Polish Borders
- Part One The International Reception of Polish Films
- Part Two Polish International Coproductions and Presence in Foreign Films
- Part Three Émigré and Subversive Polish Directors
- 11 An Island Near the Left Bank: Walerian Borowczyk as a French Left Bank Filmmaker
- 12 Beyond Polish Moral Realism: The Subversive Cinema of Andrzej Żuławski
- 13 Polanski and Skolimowski in Swinging London
- 14 The Elusive Trap of Freedom?: Krzysztof Zanussi's International Coproductions
- 15 Agnieszka Holland's Transnational Nomadism
- Selected Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index
Summary
In a sense I'm homeless, and that is the most natural condition in the world today.
—Agnieszka HollandI am glad that I am a nomad.
—Roman PolanskiIn the above epigraphs, Agnieszka Holland and Roman Polanski refer to their life and work outside of their native Poland. However, whereas Polanski calls himself a nomad, somebody who abandons the notion of a fixed home, Holland identifies herself as a homeless person, somebody deprived of a home. Their rhetoric is different, yet it is interesting that Polanski, the nomad, directed The Tenant (Le Locataire, 1976), one of the most insightful portraits of exilic exclusion, whereas Holland, the homeless person, has not developed a significant interest in exilic narratives. Neither has she developed a consistent body of thematic concerns. Moreover, her creative strategy seems to be aimed at “being at home” within any cinematic convention or style, whether art cinema as in Olivier, Olivier (1992) or popular TV drama as in the three episodes of The Wire she made for HBO between 2004 and 2008. Her films can be located within multiple discourses of contemporary cinema: art, national, European, Hollywood, popular, feminist, and queer. Each of these discourses demands the use of different codes, and in each case Holland rearticulates her message in new ways, successfully mobilizing them to communicate with a range of audiences. However, as opposed to Polanski's case, her capability of using so many “languages” does not result in her being rooted in any of them. None of them are her filmic mother tongue.
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- Information
- Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context , pp. 289 - 310Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014