Word: polanski
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...that can be identified is his use of close-ups. Objects inherently grotesque, though subdued by their everyday contexts, often fill his Panavision screen: fishguts on a butcher's block, kidneys plopping into a cat's dish. The viewer perceives that what might have been a "shock image" in Polanski or Hitchcock has not been used as such, but has been subdued by its context, as such things are in our everyday consciousness...
...money, Milos Forman is the first really important product of the overrated Czech-Polish "renaissance." In Loves of a Blonde,he dissociates himself from the more adulated Slavs. There is none of their relentless virtuosity-none of Wajda's beautiful but monotonously static compositions, none of the bludgeoning Polanski's Wellesian low angels and shock cuts, none of the coy mysteriousness common to Shop on Main Street and Joseph Kilian. Forman is more Western in temperament, a humanist in the Renoir-Truffaut-Olmi line of descent...
CULDESAC, an inventive exercise in macabre slapstick by Polish Director Roman Polanski, looks like Part 2 of a projected trilogy of terror that began with Repulsion. This time around, Polanski plays his ghoulish games on a desolate North Sea island whose sole inhabitants are a half-mad old fool (Donald Pleasence), his hot-blooded young wife (Francoise Dorleac) and two unexpected nighttime visitors...
CuldeSac. Roman Polanski, 33, is the Paris-born Pole who three years ago captured an international audience with a precocious thriller called Knife in the Water. Knife in hand, this switchbloc Hitchcock then went West and persuaded British producers to finance a small masterpiece of menace called Repulsion. His third film, also made in England, is a jittery-tittery comedy of terrors in which Polanski hones his slapstick to a razor-edge...
...story has been told on film before (The Petrified Forest, He Ran All the Way, Desperate Hours), but Polanski tells it in a manner cannily calculated to propagate tension. Tension is set up between Romanesque stones that soothe the eye and electronic jazz that grates the ear. Tension is set up in the script, which systematically intersperses-interfuses episodes of horror and hilarity. Tension is set up by the camera, which in frame after frame lets the danger lurk just out of sight until the onlooker feels like a man cooped up with a cobra he cannot...