“No one does it to you like Roman Polanski” – a tagline that would take on some rather unfortunate new contexts only a few years after its unveiling, or the rare bit of marketing to properly sell an artist? Answer: both. But we’ll only focus on the second point, our impetus being a new, Cristina Álvarez López– and Adrian Martin-helmed video essay on some of the director’s close-quarter thrillers as a “cinema of invasion.”
Even this well-learned Polanski admirer, one who could fire off more than a few examples of how the assorted films — Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Cul-de-sac, Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, Frantic, Bitter Moon, and The Ghost Writer — overlap, was impressed and, more importantly, surprised by the connections drawn here. Taking full advantage of both the material at hand and ways of bringing them closer together (disassociated sound, split-screen), Álvarez López and Martin’s work does justice to an oeuvre that can “smoothly, slyly navigate between inner, private worlds and outer, public history.”
Watch it below (via ACMI):