Rosemary's Baby
Od–jazd Film Club meeting
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Rosemary's Baby
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directed by Roman Polański, USA, 1968, 136'
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Delicate Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and her husband Guy (John Cassavetes with a strange glint in his eye) rent a flat in an old tenement block in Manhattan. Their neighbours are Minnie and Roman, a charming, yet eccentric elderly couple who take a great interest in the life of the young couple. One day, Minnie treats Rosemary to a homemade dessert with a particular flavour. After eating it, Rosemary has an odd dream. It soon turns out that she is pregnant, and strange coincidences and mysteries begin to occur around her, raising increasingly disturbing suspicions. Accused of slipping into madness, Rosemary starts losing ground…
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Many consider Rosemary's Baby to be the perfect horror film. The dark, disturbing, but also hypnotic atmosphere and superb direction by Roman Polanski, combined with what is now legendary music by Krzysztof Komeda and the acting of Mia Farrow and Ruth Gordon (who won an Oscar for this role) make the elaborately built tension rise until it grabs you by the throat. The diabolical aura also extends beyond the film's diegesis: a year after the film was finished, Polanski's pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was the victim of a ritual murder by Charles Manson's sect. The connections between this event and the film remain unexplained.
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What is the secret of a perfect horror film?
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What are we most afraid of in cinema?
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- Should the controversy surrounding the figure of Roman Polanski influence our perception of his work?
- We will try to answer these and many other questions together with our club's expert, Dr Mateusz Werner, PhD. We invite you to the screening and discussion, during which you will be able to ask questions or share your ideas on how to interpret the film. What do you think Rosemary's Baby is about? We want to hear your opinion!
- Dr Mateusz Werner (PhD)
- Philosopher of culture, essayist, film critic, doctor of humanities. He graduated from the Faculty of Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw and the Graduate School for Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Junior Fellow of the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences. He was a guest lecturer in film studies at the Warsaw SWPS University, the National Film School in Łódź, the Faculty of Polish Studies and the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw. He co-created programmes about film on public television: Seans filmowy [Film Séance] (Channel 2 of TVP) and Pół serio [Half Serious] (Channel 1 of TVP). For several years he managed the Film Art Gallery at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. In 2001-2010 he curated the film programme at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. Editor of the quarterly journal Kronos. Currently he is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Humanities at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, and from 2021 he’s been the editor-in-chief of the monthly journal Twórczość. He is interested in cinema as a cognitive instrument, a stimulus for thinking and factual evidence in the trial of the visible and the invisible.
