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The Short Films of Roman Polanski
Including Murder, the director’s first film
Roman Polanski (Photo: Jean-Paul Pelissier)
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Yesterday, the Brooklyn Academy of Music got Frantic; tonight, they’re getting short. In the second part of their mini-Polanski Fest, BAM will screen the short films the Polish-French director made between 1958-1962, with live musical accompaniment by Sza/Za (Paweł Szamburski and Patryk Zakrocki). Below are the films being screened:
Murder (1957)
Polanski’s first film is an atmospheric short scene about a man stabbed to death while asleep in his bed.
Teeth Smile (1957)
A handsome voyeur peers in at his déshabillé neighbor—before being interrupted by her husband’s sudden appearance.
Break Up the Dance (1957)
A band of thugs crash a dance party and disrupt the fun by beating people up and throwing them in the water. The act of thoughtless vandalism and animal brutality, emblematic of Polanski’s cinema, recalls the famous “nosy fellow” scene from Chinatown.
Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958)
Two men emerge from the sea carrying a large wardrobe into a town where everyone they encounter is hostile in this sublimely surreal and poetic parable about the burden borne by those on the periphery of society.
When Angels Fall (1959)
Polanski’s graduation film is an ambitious period piece in which the director crosscuts between the present-day, dull existence of an elderly lavatory attendant and her more colorful past as young girl, despite the horrors of two wars and a constant yearning for her lover. Until The Pianist over four decades later, this was the only Polanski film that directly evoked his wartime childhood.
The Lamp (1959)
A fire breaks out in an old doll maker’s shop, engulfing the doll parts and their empty faces. The unsettling feeling that the doll maker’s tedious, lifelong work has been in vain becomes a larger metaphor in this gloomy, surrealistic vision.
Mammals (1962)
Two men take turns pulling each other on one sled through the snow in this cinematic dance of power. The Beckettesque story recalls the themes of political duplicity explored in Polanski’s French 1961 short The Fat and the Lean.
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