Roman Polanski Film Studies

Roman Polanski, a Polish Jew with French nationality, has made his name in film making all over the world during the contemporary era. Polanski started his career in 1950s'.Since the end of the 1950s', he has been indulged in film directing for nearly half a century, during which he has made over 40 films. Many of those films reach a high level in artistic quality. This paper will pay main attention to all his important films, and classify them to three forms: films with Modernistic characteristics, genie films and adapted films. Each form will be independently analyzed in the paper.The paper will firstly study the Modernistic features in forms and contents of the films which were made in early period of Roman Polanski's professional career. The long Modernistic films made by Roman Polanski keep continuity with his filmlets in stories which appeared absurd and anti-logical. These films were also the same in using symbols. However, the long films differ with the short ones in symbol subjects which will be individually studied. Three long films show the same themes: the fortuitous existence of individuals and the uncertainty exists of human beings. According to those studies, the paper is able to conclude that Roman Polanski effectively worked in the Modernistic film making, and those films have some art power which no doubt promoted the development of the Polish film.The second chapter of the paper will focus on Polanski's achievements in genre film. Roman Polanski's genie films are not only the most in amounts, but also the most successful in his whole career. In accordance with the way to calculate films posed in Genre Films by Hao Jan, American movie studies by Cai Wei and You Fei, this paper believes that the genre films directed by Polanski cover four genres: the thriller, the film noir, the horror film and the war film. Then, in the paper, each genre will be an independent part to be analyzed except his horror film which only includes one movie and has been mentioned in many other papers. At last, in this chapter, another important problem will call your attention. It is how Roman Polanski worked on the norms of American genre film, and what he has done to break these norms, through which he managed to keep his style and also made a great contribution in genre film production. The last chapter will measure the value of the adapted films made by Roman Polanski. In light of different artistic tastes of popular literature and classic literature, the paper is to divide Polanski's adapted films into two kinds: films adapted from popular literature and those from classic works. The former form takes The Pianist as an example to make a delicate watch Polanski's skill to change the literature structure into filmable one. As to the later form, in popular idea on film adaptation, directors generally adopt two ways: one is completely loyal to the original works, the other is partly true to the original one. Roman Polanski practiced above-mentioned two ways in his film. In Polanski's Macbeth, the director makes a personal explanation to the spirits of the original drama, which provide a new approach to film adaptation, but at the same time the paper keep an eye on some weaknesses in the movie. In Tess and Oliver, Polanski makes another try which shows great respects to the original novel. All these efforts Polanski has made in filmization will give some clues to the filmdom.Through the studies to Roman Polanski's films, the paper highly values his contribution to the world film.