Overview

The Cinema of Agnieszka Holland: Anger and Ethics uniquely combines academic film analysis, biographical detail and personal interviews with the filmmaker, conducted over the course of a year, to trace the development of Agnieszka Holland’s female characters and how they have been reshaped across half a century. Piotrowska considers Holland’s distinctive and evolving vision of society, history, gender and family relationships, with particular attention to how the filmmaker’s own background has influenced this vision. The study engages with Freud’s notion of afterwardness, Marianne Hirsch’s concept of posthistory, and the author’s theorisations of female authorship and the figure of the “nasty woman” in cinema. Through detailed readings of six feature films, it highlights Holland’s extraordinary contribution to global film and television culture, and her movement from despair to a creative rage through collaborations and adaptations. This original and insightful work will be essential reading for students and scholars of European and world cinema, feminism, gender studies, European history, filmmaking, authorship and applied psychoanalysis and ethics.

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9781032593401

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Reviews

""This beautiful and inspirational work on Agnieszka Holland is a personal project for both author and filmmaker. Agnieszka Piotrowska draws on a stunning array of previously unseen photographs from Holland’s family album and personal archive, and sets these in a context that is culturally, historically and theoretically feminist. Drawing on interviews, recollections and analysis, this is a long overdue investigation - and celebration - of the work of this important filmmaker along her creative and political journey."" -- Professor Lucy Bolton, Queen Mary University of London, UK

""This beautiful and inspirational work on Agnieszka Holland is a personal project for both author and filmmaker. Agnieszka Piotrowska draws on a stunning array of previously unseen photographs from Holland’s family album and personal archive, and sets these in a context that is culturally, historically and theoretically feminist. Drawing on interviews, recollections and analysis, this is a long overdue investigation - and celebration - of the work of this important filmmaker along her creative and political journey."" -- Professor Lucy Bolton, Queen Mary University of London, UK ""Agnieszka Piotrowska’s ground-breaking and highly original study of Holland’s film-making is also a study of the position of women in Poland as it emerged from communism, as well as Holland’s own journey as a film maker in the male dominated world of film-making in Eastern Europe and world wide where she was ‘praised for her ""masculine"" filmmaking whilst encountering gender-based limitations. Piotrowska draws on psychoanalysis to understand the choices made by Holland in her films and those of her characters, notably in Bitter Harvest which Holland spoke of as ""a meditation on an impossible love, where trauma and intimacy become inextricably bound."" Drawing on her extensive interviews with Holland and her detailed analysis of Holland’s films, Piotrowska demonstrates the importance for Holland ‘of creating meaningful connections beyond national, cultural, or familial boundaries …. suggesting the possibility of human solidarity in the face of nationalist division. Most of all, Piotrowska makes a very forceful case for revisiting Holland’s early films, and for the importance of her most recent ones that ‘offer no easy comfort’ but which suggest ‘that meaning can be created through acts of care and recognition’."" -- Elizabeth Cowie, Professor Emeritus of Film Studies, University of Kent

Author Information

Agnieszka Piotrowska, PhD, is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and psychoanalytic life coach. She has published widely on cinema and psychoanalysis, including Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary (Routledge, now in its second edition). She has held senior academic positions in the UK and internationally and is a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council.

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