Joanna Rydzewska

Swansea University, Department of Media and Communication, Faculty Member

Swansea University, Languages, Translation and Communication, Faculty Member

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Joanna was an undergraduate and postgraduate student at Lodz University, Poland, where she completed a BA in English Literature and an MA in American Studies. She also had close links with the Lodz Film School.Prior to Swansea University, Joanna was a Fulbright Fellow at the Department of Rhetoric and Film, University of California, Berkeley, where she was supervised by Prof. Linda Williams and worked on Hollywood cinema and feminist film theory.On joining Swansea, Joanna completed her PhD looking at Polish directors and characters in British cinema. She gained the PGCert HE (Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education) and became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). Joanna holds a Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Lodz.Joanna’s research focuses on European, Eastern European and British cinema with particular emphasis on exile, migration and transnational film studies. She has written on émigré Polish directors – amongst others Roman Polanski, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Pawel Pawlikowski – as well as the representation of Polish migration in both Polish and British film and television. All Joanna’s research is implicitly or explicitly informed by gender studies and feminist film theory, and employs robust contextual analysis that informs aesthetic and thematic analyses of film and television texts. She has co-edited Gender in Cultures (with E.H. Oleksy) and is currently completing two books: a monograph on an Oscar-winning, Polish-British director, Pawel Pawlikowski, The Films of Pawel Pawlikowski and preparing a manuscript From Valiant Warriors to Bloody Immigrants: Poles in Cinema.

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Josiah Heyman

University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)

Alisa Perren

The University of Texas at Austin

Greg Simons

Daffodil International University(DIU)

Santiago Juan-Navarro

Florida International University

Murat Akser

University of Ulster

Martin Lefebvre

Concordia University (Canada)

Evan Smith

Flinders University of South Australia

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Lydia Papadimitriou

Liverpool John Moores University

Jenny Chamarette

The Open University

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Journal Articles and Book Chapters by Joanna Rydzewska

Auteur Theory and European Art Cinema in 2021 -The example of Paweł Pawlikowski

The Routledge Companion to European Cinema, Routledge. Gabor Gergely and Susan Hayward (eds), 2021

As the credits start to roll at the end of Cold War (2018), the first shot bears the simple dedic... more As the credits start to roll at the end of Cold War (2018), the first shot bears the simple dedication 'for my parents' and the next one reads 'story, direction, image Paweł Pawlikowski.' Both are authorial inscriptions through which Pawlikowski announces himself to be the creative source from which, in line with auteur theory, the meanings and significance of the film ultimately derive. The credit 'story, direction, image' is unusual in that Pawlikowski clearly emphasizes the degree of creative control over all aspects of the film: not just the direction and the story (he co-wrote the script) but also the image, which we customarily attribute to the cinematographer. We also know, from the film's publicity and marketing which emphasized this fact, that Cold War is loosely inspired by the director's own parents' tumultuous relationship (McDonald and Sanders, 2017). In The Woman in the Fifth/La Femme du Vème (2011), based on the novel by Douglas Kennedy, Pawlikowski had appropriated authorship by writing the script himself ('screenplay by Pawel Pawlikowski') and by portraying an infirm writer-the artist-a figure through whom, Lucy Fischer (2013) argues, filmmakers frequently raise questions about the paradoxes of authorship. 1 It is through these dual channels-the creative figure who stands outside the text and the one who stands within it as corporeal presence-that Pawlikowski inscribes authorship in his oeuvre. He thereby asserts that his films' distinctive qualities and their importance, as auteur theory would have it, 'may be attributed to a single creative source who is responsible for bringing together its disparate elements into a coherent thematic and stylistic vision' (Watson, 2012: 143). Authorial inscriptions are not coincidental in Paweł Pawlikowski's oeuvre, and interview statements such as-'the thing that can salvage documentary (…) is Form. More important still is the personal vision of the director' (Macdonald, 1996: 391)-show that Pawlikowski is deeply indebted to the conceptual framework of authorship that permeates European cinema. In particular, the model of authorship that Pawlikowski follows, which foregrounds the author and where film is an artform with a higher purpose, is influenced both by the French New Wave, in its insistence on form, and by the Eastern European tradition, where the author is engaged in questions of historical and national identity. One goal of this Chapter is to introduce Paweł Pawlikowski's oeuvre and its thematic and stylistic characteristics, including selfreflexive authorial inscriptions, that link him to the tradition of European art cinema. Much has been written about Pawlikowski's individual fiction films, such as Last Resort (2001) or Ida (2013),

Joanna Rydzewska

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