TSPDT

Key Production Countries: France, Poland
Key Genres: Drama, Romance, Horror, Melodrama, Comedy, Fantasy, Action-Adventure, Music
Key Collaborators: Marie-Sophie Dubus (Editor), Andrzej Korzynski (Composer), Sophie Marceau (Leading Actress), Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz (Cinematographer), Francis Huster (Leading Actor), Leszek Teleszynski (Leading Actor), Malgorzata Braunek (Leading Actress), Jacques Dutronc (Leading Actor), Alain Sarde (Producer), Marie-Laure Reyre (Producer), Krzysztof Osiecki (Editor), Michal Grudzinski (Leading Character Actor)

"The common negative view of Żuławski’s cinema was that his plots were wilfully baffling, that his camerawork was too florid, that he encouraged his actors to emote and gesticulate as if in some continual state of paroxysm. But this was an entirely superficial impression. Underlying the heightened nature of the films was a deep, questioning soulfulness related to literary antecedents coupled with a vision of cinema open to shifting levels of perception and fantasy." - David Thompson (Sight & Sound, 2016)

"No other filmmaker fuses hysteria and contemplation like Andrzej Zulawski. The director is most often represented by his 1981 film Possession, an emotionally fraught breakup movie in which a tentacled monster is part of a love triangle. That film has recently enjoyed a critical upswing after years as a cult favorite. He made only twelve features between 1971 and 2000, but those movies are remarkably consistent explorations of a core set of ideas about love, honesty and responsibility, the interrelated nature of personal and political lives, and the many transcendent and often terrifying ways in which emotions burst through any barrier as lives collide." - Russ Fischer (IndieWire, 2016)

"A multilingual polymath, as well as an heir to a legendary family of Polish artists and intellectuals, this Paris-educated writer/director was a sensibility so singular as to be virtually unmatched. The beginnings of his career are closely linked to that of another giant of Polish cinema, Andrzej Wajda, who hired the young Żuławski as an assistant director for several of his 1960s projects (most notably the mammoth Napoleonic epic The Ashes in 1965)… His films are not the easiest or most pleasant of fare to watch. But few other filmographies offer a viewing as adventurous, or as memorable, of a great mind expressing itself in the most overpowering of mediums." - Michał Oleszczyk (Roger Ebert.com, 2016)

"It’s common for viewers first coming to the work of the late Polish director Andrzej Żuławski to find it both wildly undisciplined and inspired. His films seem lost in their own making, with scenes or sometimes even individual shots directed without apparent consideration for how they’re supposed to fit in the whole; a Żuławski movie’s contradictory, usually enigmatic interpretations of a central theme are held together by force of will, and appear to dangle on the edge of an abyss." - Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (A.V. Club, 2018)

"Żulawski’s genius was to see the personal as political, and the visceral and sexual as coming from social and political oppression. Incredibly stylish, pitched between excess and austerity, his is a world torn between Marx and Coca-cola. The choices of many of his generation bore serious traces of reacting to a trauma, but still he remains chiefly a Romantic: revealing that love is the darkness, against the common, desexualized, sanitized convictions of capitalism." - Agata Pyzik (The Quietus, 2016)

"Critics love to write about how insane Zulawski’s movies are. And it’s true that his movies flout narrative conventions and that his actors to give over-the-top performances… But his movies aren’t about an insane world as much as insane people trapped within the small confines of their minds. His best movies are about toxic intimacy, about a person’s world shrunken to the dimensions of their loss. The insanity part comes when that shrunken world fills up again, when the traumatized person can’t see anything new, only mutated, rotted versions of what they had, like grandparents exhumed for a family portrait." - Frank Thurston Green (BOMB Magazine, 2012)

"Cinema is a thief. It's a bizarre coincidence because of its chemistry: It's theater with physical interventions through the camera etc. in order to be cinema. It is absolutely awkward and unexpected. But what is normally expected is to show, as with Plato's allegory of the cave. Why we want to show things, I don't know. Why kids want to play, I can't say. This is just basically, very profoundly in our nature. So cinema, when coming into existence, stole—or borrowed, if you want—everything around: painting, literature and music, theater, vaudeville, grotesque, pantomime. Whatever you want! So cinema is a bastard. And that's why I love it so much." - Andrzej Żuławski (MUBI Notebook)