ICE-Vision: The Tenant (Roman Polanski, 1976)
Thursday, October 20 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150
Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.
“Roman Polanski’s 1976 English-language, Paris-set creepfest was adapted from a novel by the French graphic artist Topor, but it may be the director’s quintessential movie. It’s an exercise in urban paranoia and mental disintegration that echoes or anticipates everything from Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby to Bitter Moon and The Pianist. Indeed, the movie is a true psychodrama: Polanski himself plays the eponymous protagonist, a furtive Polish-born Frenchman named Trelkovsky who rents the apartment of a recent suicide and is gradually driven mad by his mysteriously hostile neighbors.” -J. Hoberman (Village Voice)
“Movies about madness tend to lose me after a certain point. The tension vanishes when one realizes that any absurdity, any trick, is available to the film maker. The director and his audience must share a set of rules for what passes for ordinary behavior if suspense is to be maintained. These rules do not exist in ‘The Tenant.'” -New York Times