Oeuvre is an in-depth examination of the entire body of work of an important director.
Roman Polanski learned filmmaking at Lodz, Poland’s National Film School, an academy that trained Polanski’s future Knife in the Water collaborator Jerzy Skolimowski as well as directors like Piotr Szulkin, Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieślowski. His early work, a collection of short films, many made at the National Film School, depict a filmmaker growing in ambition as he learns his craft.
His earliest short, Bicycle (1955), was apparently a semi-autobiographical story about a famous criminal who had offered to sell Polanski a bike but instead beat and robbed him. Due to a mix-up at the lab, a reel of the film’s negatives ended up in Moscow so the director was unable to finish the film. Thus, Murder (1957) became Polanski’s first film. More simple than Bicycle sounds, the silent Murder lasts one minute and 20 seconds and contains a whole three cuts as a mysterious figure sneaks into a dark bedroom, stabs a sleeping man in the heart, and slowly exits. It’s fairly well made for a first film, with a striking mood and only mild pacing issues as many early work from students don’t know when to cut.
Teeth Smile (1957) is only 30 seconds longer, but a bit meatier as a man walks by a bathroom window and watches a naked woman whose face we never see. When he returns to the window, he finds a man brushing his teeth. While this still depicts a filmmaking talent in education, we see Polanski adding more than a break-in and subsequent stabbing into a similar timeframe.
Polanski’s third film in 1957 Break Up the Dance, shows a remarkable leap in his work. His first film of any remarkable length (nearly eight minutes) with both music and dialogue, Break Up the Dance amounts to an elaborate prank wherein the director organized a dance and invited some young hoods to come in and disrupt it, which ended with some students getting hurt in the process. Needless to say, he got in trouble. While this brings up questions of morality in filmmaking and how far a filmmaker can go, it’s also works as a metaphor for storytelling, equally apt as this is Polanski’s first film with any sort of conflict — you create a situation, and then you throw in complication.
Interestingly, once Polanski begins to use dialogue in film, we just as soon see him exercise the artistic lack of dialogue. Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958) was the director’s first publicly screened film and his first to receive international acclaim for its allegorical story of two men who emerge from the sea carrying a large dresser only to find that their burden is an inconvenience. They can’t get on a train, they fail to court a young woman, no establishment will let them in. Soon they view the ugliness of the world like theft, violence and murder. It’s a misadventure strangely reminiscent of the old Hal Roach Laurel & Hardy piano-moving short The Music Box, but much more depressingly Polish.
Though one can look at Murder as Polanski’s first foray into horror, a genre he will venture into many times in his career, The Lamp (1959) is closer to horror for its focus on creepy surrealist imagery as opposed to brutality. The “story” of the film is simple: a doll maker sets up an electric light that sets his workshop aflame. Polanski focuses not on completed dolls, but dolls in progress — dismembered little cute things strewn all about the workshop. Once the doll maker leaves for the night, the dolls begin to whisper unintelligibly as the music becomes ominous, cuckoo clocks begin chiming and flames overtake the horrific little baby dolls.
When Angels Fall (1959), Polanski’s senior thesis, stands out as the director’s most ambitious achievement with handmade miniatures as well as an elaborate, full-size public restroom set and a mixture of color and black and white film. Here Polanski’s subject is an elderly bathroom attendant who, while ignored by the men who just come in to piss, has full-color visions of her life gradually leading up to this drudgery — a life full of passion, war and heartbreak as she goes from rural bliss to cleaning houses for the wealthy in the city, followed by war and waiting for strangers to come by and drop coins in her dish without washing their hands. It’s somewhat absurd and beautifully depressing as only Polish cinema can be. The only thing that would make this short better is if it had a title more emblematic of its theme high/low dualities, like The Angel in the Toilet.
Polanski’s first work post-film school, The Fat and the Lean (1961) and Mammals (1962) both feature a comedic pairing not unlike Two Men and a Wardrobe, ever reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy shorts, especially since The Fat and the Lean has a fat guy paired with a skinny guy (played by Polanski himself). However, The Fat and the Lean’s absurdist, allegorical trappings of a thin man waiting hand and foot on a fat man eternally resting in a rocking chair suggest something beyond the comedy of Laurel and Hardy and into the desolate absurdity of Waiting for Godot, especially considering the characters’ ragged clothing. The aim of Mammals is less apparently allegorical and closer to making a ripping good silent misadventure about two men traveling through the snow by sled. At times the film even has the flicker of a comedy from the 1920s.
Mammals would be Polanski’s last short film prior to his breakthrough feature, Knife in the Water. While the first feature film may seem like a director’s real bit of exposure, as long-form work often comes out theatrically and short films tend to screen to smaller audiences at film festivals and the like, one must not discount these formative films that lead up to Polanski’s “official” debut.
by Danny Djeljosevic
