Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nmvwc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-06T18:09:21.422Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Polish Performance in French Space: Jerzy Radziwiłowicz as a Transnational Actor

from Part Two - Polish International Coproductions and Presence in Foreign Films

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2014

Alison Smith
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
Ewa Mazierska
Affiliation:
Professor of film studies at the University of Central Lancashire
Michael Goddard
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer at the University of Salford
Get access

Summary

Jerzy Radziwiłowicz first came to French cinema in 1981, to star as an expatriate Polish film director in Jean-Luc Godard's Passion (1982). He was thirty-one and thought of himself mainly as a stage actor, having been a regular member of the company at the Stary Theatre in Kraków, where he first encountered Andrzej Wajda. It was, of course, Wajda's film Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru), made in 1977, that brought Radziwiłowicz international fame, as well as changing his self-image as an actor, revealing, as he told Cahiers du cinéma, “a part of myself that I didn't want to know: a timid and sensitive person.”

The debate that Man of Marble elicited in the still-politicized France of the late 1970s was fervent and prolonged. It filled a large portion of three issues of Cahiers, culminating in an extensive tribute by Godard in May 1979. In this quintessentially Godardian image-essay we can discern a fascination for the young actor, which makes it unsurprising that the director soon contacted him for discussion of a project. Radziwiłowicz received the invitation with some trepidation: “I've seen some of his films; his way of thinking is so different from other things I've done”2—trepidation that proved warranted by the notoriously difficult relations between director and actors in Passion (1982). The somewhat agonizing shoot nonetheless established Radziwiłowicz as a potential resource for the more demanding sectors of French cinema, and the mutual respect that grew between him and Michel Piccoli— the doyen of the actors on the set of Passion, as well as apparently the principal line of communication between Godard and the cast—would determine his casting in Piccoli's film The Black Beach (La plage noire, 2001) some twenty years later.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×