"Seven Days in May" - the movie - Is being shown on the Turner Classic Movies (TCM-TV) in one hour

[Jan Klimkowski]

I've long loathed Polanski.

There's a lengthy DPF thread here.

He's a nasty, self-obsessed, predatory paedophile.

Jan, I think that is kind of unfair to me.

I didn't say anything about him as a person. I was referring to his films.

Very few directors alive today can claim to have made the equivalent of the following list:

Knife in the Water

Repulsion

Rosemary's Baby

Chinatown

MacBeth

Tess

Ghost Writer

Jim, it wasn't a pop at you but, with respect, you wrote "But I've always liked Polanski."

You then continued, "The guy has made some very good films."

Now, if you were actually saying "I've always liked Polanski's films", then we have some common ground.

Chinatown is one of the greatest films ever made.

My attitude to Polanski is informed by what I wrote in the Art.. Storytelling.. Fascism thread.

Like Leni Riefenstahl, Tony Scott and his brother Ridley, Roman Polanski is a master of his craft. A technical genius who understands the impact of framing, size, order and pacing of shots, how to use the cinematic form to tell a story

Chinatown is almost flawlessly executed.

However, then we come to the question of the nature of the story being told, and how far we hold the director responsible for the emotional, political and moral worldview revealed by that story.

Leni Riefenstahl always claimed she was an artist, not a fascist.

Leni said her loyalty was to the artistic form. Not to a political cause.

In fact, the cinematic grammar she created, hacking away at Plato's archetypal marble, was the cinematic grammar of mass power.

Once revealed by Riefenstahl, it has been used by political leaders across the spectrum - Republicans and Democrats, Conservative and Labour, Fascists and Communists - ever since.

Of course, the particular Triumph of the Will that Riefenstahl's films conveyed was that of Nazi Germany.

Should she be allowed to get away with: I am an artist, not a fascist?

In that thread, I wrote:

The primary loyalty of Ridley Scott, like his now deceased brother Tony, is to cinematic story telling.

Not to historical truth.

This is a fundamental distinction.

Top Gun is a pile of fascist ordure.

Man On Fire is a searing insight into the soul of a killer for hire.

Bladerunner is tears in rain.

Black Hawk Down is racist tosh.

"Killing Kennedy" will be a cinematically breathtaking lie.

So, Man On Fire and Bladerunner, are films that speak to my soul. I like these films.

However, it is clear to me that the Scott brothers and I have very different moral consciences.

I've walked away from documentary projects that I knew were either lies or propaganda for a particular political worldview to which I am opposed.

I could never have made Black Hawk Down or Top Gun. I respect the cinematic craft that went into their making and delivery, but I hate the films and I loathe the filmmakers.

So, to Polanski.

Most filmmakers have obsessions which recur throughout their oeuvre.

Polanski has an obsession with knives, terror, pain, power, death.

His early films included Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth.

Watch Bitter Mooon with its themes of bondage, sadomasochism, voyeurism.

Then there's the murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson Family.

The post below is from the Naval Intelligence, MKUltra and the Hippie Movement thread:

I am reminded that Sharon Tate came from an Air Force family and lived in this area too when she was murdered. FWIW probably not much.

Paul Tate, Sharon Tate's father, was Army Intelligence.

After Sharon and her unborn child had been slaughtered, Paul Tate went on a journey into the dark, sleazy, criminal subculture that the Manson Family inhabited.

The world of garbage cans, Kenneth Anger, the Process Church of the Final Judgement, the OTO, Hollywood's wildest families, and "acid" that produced entirely different mindtrips from LSD.

A world where sex and violence, glamour and pain, manipulation and psychosis, were intricately linked.

It has been suggested that Paul Tate's journey into this otherworld was, in part, the inspiration for Paul Schrader's nightmarish movie Hardcore, starring George C Scott, and 8mm starring Nicolas Cage.

In the introduction to Vol 3 of Peter Levenda's brilliant Sinister Forces, Paul Krassner discusses the evidence of everyone from Dennis Hopper to private investigators that the LAPD found & sold hardcore films of Sharon Tate after her murder.

Hopper was one of the sources for persistent tales of the public flogging of a drug dealer (possibly filmed) at Cielo Drive just prior to the slaughter.

And, as I've written before, there have also been persistent - and briefly published - claims that Manson had a Naval Intelligence handler who provided him with highly experimental and potent drugs. Drugs from the dark side...

Rosemary's Baby was filmed and released prior to the murder of Sharon Tate.

For me, Polanski's most revealing film post that horror is The Ninth Gate.

I watch it searching for insights to Polanski's soul.