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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > Individual film directors, film-makers

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Polanski (Hardcover) Loot Price: R324
Discovery Miles 3 240
You Save: R81 (20%)
Polanski (Hardcover): Christopher Sandford

Polanski (Hardcover)

Christopher Sandford

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List price R405 Loot Price R324 Discovery Miles 3 240 You Save R81 (20%)

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The tumultuous story of a director whose signature movies - dark, bleakly funny, shot through with perversity and paranoia - reflect the sensibility of an artist shaped by circumstances more harrowing, unpredictable and absurd than any Hollywood melodrama.Roman Polanski's troubles began in 1939, when the Nazis invaded his native Poland. The family was confined to Krakow's Jewish ghetto, and in 1943 his parents were sent to concentration camps, leaving their ten-year-old son to fend for himself. (After the war, reunited with his father, he learned that his pregnant mother had been gassed at Auschwitz.) Cunning and possessed of a ferocious drive, Polanski eventually attended film school in Lodz, where he quickly became the star pupil and developed a reputation for lavish spending, partying and prodigious sexual conquests. In slyly playful prose, Sandford (McCartney, 2007, etc.) limns the young artist as a mercurial changeling, alternately arrogant, tender, hilarious, boorish and charming, always striving for (and coming thrillingly close to) technical perfection in his cinematic technique. After he emigrated to America, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown helped define a new era in movies and cemented their director's status as one of the greats. Polanski's personal life remained gothic: In 1969 his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was horrifically murdered by the Manson Family; eight years later, the director pled guilty to the charge of "unlawful intercourse" with a 13-year-old girl, fled the country before sentencing and has lived in Europe since. Sandford admirably extracts all of the salient information from the maelstrom of controversy and urban myth surrounding Polanski's often lurid personal history, neither damning nor exonerating him. When he won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2002 for his Holocaust drama The Pianist (obviously, he could not attend), the driven, 69-year-old director was in Paris, preparing his next film.Engrossing, lucid presentation of a uniquely complicated and productive life. (Kirkus Reviews)
Exactly fifty years ago, a young director named Roman Polanski made his first completed film - a two-minute student exercise which he called Murder. In the half-century since, Polanski has become an iconic figure, widely admired for his mordant, sexually charged films and yet derided as - in his own words - 'an evil, profligate dwarf'. In January 1978, facing a possible fifty-year sentence for 'unlawful sexual intercourse' with a 13-year-old girl, Polanski fled the United States and flew to France, where he was a naturalized citizen. Thirty years later, he remains in exile: the much revered eminence grise of filmmakers and a criminal fugitive who complains of harrassement by the US authorities. Others have told pieces of this story, but Christopher Sandford brings it all together in one lucid, gripping account, beginning with Polanski's horrific experience in the Holocaust and ending with his current life in Paris, where he provides a 'living symbol of Franco-American misunderstanding.' The book draws on dozens of interviews with actors, writers and other Polanski collaborators, previously sealed transcripts of his criminal hearings, testimony before the California grand jury and the graphic evidence of former lovers and friends. There is a wealth of unpublished material, too, on what Polanski has called the 'central tragedy' of his life - the brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate and others by members of the so-called Manson Family - an event which, for sheer savagery, rivals anything in modern criminal history. Amidst the personal tragedy, the focus is also on the professional triumph. Polanski's films are seen here anew, with behind-the-scenes stories on everything from 1962's Knife in the Water to 2005's Oliver Twist. We follow the director through the backstage feuds of Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, his unflinching version of Macbeth, described by one critic as a 'film exorcism' in the wake of the Manson murders, and his Holocaust masterpiece The Pianist, which won Polanski his first and only Oscar. The generally downbeat themes - betrayal, corruption, satanic worship - are vintage Polanski, but there is also a lighter, knockabout side: this is the man who gave us The Fearless Vampire Killers or Pardon Me but Your Teeth Are in My Neck. Fascinating, flawed, wildly creative, the 'world's most notorious artist' is seen here in full.

General

Imprint: Century
Country of origin: United Kingdom
Release date: September 2007
Authors: Christopher Sandford
Dimensions: 242 x 159 x 43mm (L x W x T)
Format: Hardcover - Paper over boards
Pages: 496
ISBN-13: 978-1-84413-879-1
Categories: Books > Language & Literature > Biography & autobiography > Film, television, music, theatre
Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > Individual film directors, film-makers
Books > Biography > Film, television, music, theatre
LSN: 1-84413-879-8
Barcode: 9781844138791

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