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15 - Agnieszka Holland's Transnational Nomadism

from Part Three - Émigré and Subversive Polish Directors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2014

Elżbieta Ostrowska
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
Ewa Mazierska
Affiliation:
Professor of film studies at the University of Central Lancashire
Michael Goddard
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer at the University of Salford
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Summary

In a sense I'm homeless, and that is the most natural condition in the world today.

—Agnieszka Holland

I am glad that I am a nomad.

—Roman Polanski

In 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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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2014

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