Polanski and Perception

Davide Caputo

Description

A new approach to a director whose contribution to cinema is often overshadowed his personal life, Polanski and Perception focuses on Roman Polanski's interest in the nature of perception and how this is manifested in his films. The incorporation of cognitive research into film theory is becoming increasingly widespread, with novel cinematic technologies and recent developments in digital projection making a strong grasp of perceptual psychology critical to fostering cognitive engagement.



Informed by the work of neuropsychologist R. L. Gregory, this volume focuses primarily on two sets of films: the Apartment trilogy of Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant; and the Investigation trilogy of Chinatown, Frantic and The Ninth Gate. Also included are case studies of Knife in the Water, Death and the Maiden and The Ghost. Polanski and Perception presents a highly original and engaging new look at the work of this influential filmmaker.

Chapter 1: 'Locating' Polanski 

Chapter 2: Establishing a Conceptual Framework 

Chapter 3: Schizophrenia and the City 

Chapter 4: Repulsion 

Chapter 5: Rosemary’s Baby 

Chapter 6: The Tenant 

Chapter 7: Approaching the Investigations 

Chapter 8: Chinatown 

Chapter 9: A Tale of Two Doctors: Frantic and Death and the Maiden 

Chapter 10: The Ninth Gate 

Chapter 11: The Ghost: A Bridge Between Trilogies 

Chapter 12: Concluding Remarks

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Film director
• General officer
• Art
• General
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 24 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841506968
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2012 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2012 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Cover image: Repulsion , 1965, Director: Roman Polanski [COMPTON-TEKLI/ROYAL/THE KOBAL COLLECTION]
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Jelena Stanovnik
Typesetting: Planman Technologies
ISBN 978-1-84150-552-7
eISBN 978-1-84150-696-8
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
For Lorna
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 ‘Locating’ Polanski
Chapter 2 Establishing a Conceptual Framework
Chapter 3 Schizophrenia and the City
Chapter 4 Repulsion
Chapter 5 Rosemary’s Baby
Chapter 6 The Tenant
Chapter 7 Approaching the Investigations
Chapter 8 Chinatown
Chapter 9 A Tale of Two Doctors: Frantic and Death and the Maiden
Chapter 10 The Ninth Gate
Chapter 11 The Ghost : A Bridge Between Trilogies
Chapter 12 Concluding Remarks
Roman Polanski Filmography
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
I must begin by paying respect to Professor Richard L. Gregory, as it was the question of his influence on Polanski’s cinema that formed the impetus for this book. Professor Gregory was kind enough to speak with me on a number of occasions as this work took shape; I am very grateful that I had the honour of talking with him directly and listening to his many amusing anecdotes. Sadly, Professor Gregory passed away in May 2010. (For information on Professor Richard L. Gregory’s research on perception, see www.richardgregory.org .)
I owe a special debt of gratitude to all those who have reviewed this text, either in whole or in part, and whose suggestions have found their way into the final draft. Thanks to all my friends at the University of Exeter, where this work took its initial shape, in particular to Will Higbee, Song Hwee Lim, Helen Hanson, Don Boyd and, above all, my good friend Susan Hayward, who has seen this project through from its inception and has provided me with much guidance over the years. I would also like to extend my thanks to Mark Shiel at King’s College London for his highly useful feedback, as well as the anonymous reviewer for his or her valuable commentary. Thanks also to everyone at Intellect and University of Chicago Press for their assistance, especially Melanie Marshall, Jelena Stanovnik, Alice Gillam, Holly Rose, James Campbell, and the copy editors. I must also acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) archives in London, and the Bibliothèque du cinema (BiFi) archives in Paris.
I would also like to thank my parents and all my friends and family for their encouragement over the years. Most of all, I want to thank my truly amazing wife, Lorna, without whose loving encouragement this book never would have been written. I love you so much.
Introduction
The young man in Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962) lays on the deck of his host’s boat and stares at his own index finger. He extends his arm and observes his finger in relation to the boat’s mast, which towers over his prone body. In a point of view shot (POV) from the young man’s perspective, light floods the frame; both the young man’s finger and the mast are in focus. Counter shot. He shuts his eyes, one at a time, alternating rapidly between right and left. Back to the POV. His finger leaps across the screen and back again as he closes each eye. After several seconds of this, the scene ends and is followed by the young man and Andrzej (his host) discussing the relative merits of compasses. The finger-leaping sequence has apparently no bearing on narrative progression, so why bother including it at all?
Perhaps this scene is intended to help us understand something about the superiority of the young man’s natural navigational abilities over those of Andrzej, or perhaps it is simply what Bazin calls a ‘micro-action’ (Bazin, 2004: 90), included to heighten realism; there are undoubtedly many ways of interpreting it, but what I would most like to highlight is that in this scene we have the first explicit allusion to the mechanisms involved in visual perception in a Polanski film. The scene replicates the effects of eliminating stereoscopic vision by (slightly) changing the position from which the boy’s hand and mast are filmed, and then cutting between these two shots to suggest that each corresponds to an ‘eye’ being covered. At least two key issues are called to mind from this rudimentary effect:
1. Attention is drawn to relative size and distance perception; that is, our ability to guess the distance of an object based on size comparison to another object whose size and distance is known. In this case, knowledge of the hand signals how far away the mast is, based on its relative size. Even though both are in plain focus, knowledge of how big the mast should be informs our perception of where it is in relation to the hand, moderated by our (logical) rejection of the possibility that the mast, which we recognise from previous scenes, has shrunk.
2. The (faux) depth effect of the cinematographic image is simultaneously exposed and heightened. Just as the young man does on-screen, we too can reduce the world to 2-D any time we wish by simply covering up an eye and thus eliminating the 3-D effect caused by stereoscopic vision (which, in any case, causes a ‘depth effect’ that is limited to only about 100 m). Paradoxically, the film’s cinematic replication of this effect actually encourages us to overestimate the parallel between the way we see the cinematographic image (which is flat) and how we see the rest of the world.
Above all, however, with this simple gesture of montage, Polanski invites us to consider the agency of cognition (of the brain ) in perception, and introduces the concept of perceptions as hypotheses into his work.
Whilst extended, inter-film analyses of Polanski’s work have tended to focus on biographical elements as a means of engaging with his cinema, 1 shorter academic pieces (far too many to catalogue here) are as diverse in their approach to Polanski’s films as the opus itself. Notwithstanding the diversity of the critical work on Polanski, an often-neglected aspect of his cinema is his concern with the functioning of perception and how this is manifested in his film-making; it is this particular authorial hallmark that is the focus of the present analysis of Polanski’s cinema. Polanski himself cites the work of the constructivist neuropsychologist Richard L. Gregory (1923–2010) as having had a great influence on his approach to film-making, claiming that Professor Gregory ‘lent scientific confirmation’ to many of his intuitive beliefs regarding perception, in particular those related to optical illusions (Polanski, 1984: 254–255).
Several critics have mentioned Gregory’s influence on Polanski’s cinema and their collaboration in the 1970s, but this fact tends to be mentioned only in passing. Other than the interview with Gregory included on a 2003 DVD release of Repulsion (cited herein as ‘Gregory, 2003’), the effect of Gregory’s research on Polanski’s work has, for the most part, been overlooked in academic discourse. One important exception, however, is an article by John Orr (1943–2010), promisingly titled ‘The Art of Perceiving’ (2006), which begins by acknowledging the fact that critics of Polanski’s cinema have long neglected the importance of perception in his work. My own research confirms Orr’s claim, and I propose that this is likely due to the overemphasis of biographical issues in much of the Polanski-based literature.
Whilst Orr initiates a fruitful discussion on Polanski’s fascination with the nature of perception and how he realises its implications at a philosophical level, he too mentions R. L. Gregory only in passing, referring to him as ‘Polanski’s favourite philosopher ’ (2006: 12, emphasis my own) rather than as a neuropsychologist; this is a mislabelling that is neither disparaging nor entirely inaccurate, but is certainly incomplete. Most importantly, whilst Orr does allude to part of the theoretical basis of Gregory’s model of perception (‘the nature of perception is at times inseparable from the question of emotion’ [12]), there is also much value to be added to this discourse by highlighting how the model of perception to which Gregory is aligned differs from other, and still tenacious, models. It is my intention to carry on Orr’s approach to Polanski’s cinema by investigating Gregory’s model more closely, highlighting how it differs from other theories of perception, and examining the manner in which Polanski’s own perceptual discourse engages with these theories. 2
Approaching a director’s cinema via a study of a model of perception does not necessarily mean the total abandonment of what Bordwell refers to as ‘Grand Theory’ (1996: 3); reading a film via an examination of perceptual psychology, for example, neither excludes nor entails a parallel psychoanalytic reading. And neither does such an approach necessarily reduce itself to the level of purely empirical (‘low level’) fact finding. What is most interesting about Polanski’s active mobilisation of perceptual psychology is indeed the manner in which it enables the reader to simultaneously address two dimensions of the perceptual discourse, each side informing the other. By this I intend:
a) the thematic discourse embedded in these films, both at narrative and aesthetic level, and
b) the actual cognitive experie