Andrzej Zulawski: Abject Cinema (Eastern European Screen Cultures)

Andrzej Zulawski (1940–2016) was born in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) and educated in Paris. From 1971 to 2015 he directed thirteen feature films. Andrzej Zulawski: Abject Cinema interprets the director’s oeuvre through the methodological lens of Julia Kristeva’s notions of the abject and the semiotic chora, with the narratives in Zulawski’s filmography amounting to an experience of the abject -being not merely the state of affairs among the films’ subjects but also of their collective regression to a semiotic non-verbal state divorced from the symbolic verbal-visual language employed by cinema as a whole. It further contextualizes this interpretation with the sociopolitical circumstances from which Zulawski emerged, specifically his Polish homeland occupied by various foreign powers, his emigre status in France, and the influence of the Polish Romantic movement. Table of Contents Acknowledgements Part I Landscapes of Affect 1 Kristeva and Żuławski 2 Żuławski and Ideology 3 The Maternal 4 Landscapes of Affect Part II Abject Cinema 5 “Children Are an Ism” 6 Coenesthesia 7 Borders 8 Performance 9 Loss of Subjecthood 10 Returning to the Womb 11 The Image of Film Violence 12 The Sight of a Corpse Part III Unfathomable, Darkness—A Conclusion Conclusion Filmography Bibliography Index of Subjects Index of Names Index of Titles