ROMAN POLANSKI / IVAN BUTLER — The Cinema of Roman Polanski, A. Zwemmer / A.S. Barnes, 1970

A remarkably compact object from the moment Roman Polanski was still being written into cinema history rather than retrospectively explained by it.

Published in 1970 as part of the International Film Guide Series, Ivan Butler’s monograph arrives immediately after Rosemary’s Baby and takes stock of a career that, at this point, consisted of the Polish shorts, Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Cul-de-sac, The Fearless Vampire Killers and Rosemary’s Baby. No Chinatown. No The Tenant. No Tess. No The Pianist. And, crucially, seven years before the 1977 criminal case that would permanently alter the cultural reading of its subject.

What survives is therefore more interesting than a standard director monograph. It is a portrait of a reputation before history finished with it.

The timing makes the publication especially charged. Butler was writing across the extraordinary rupture of 1969: the death of Polanski’s collaborator Krzysztof Komeda, followed months later by the murder of Sharon Tate. Those events enter the contemporary framing of Polanski almost immediately as biography, tragedy and auteur mythology. Read now, that machinery is unusually visible: an artist’s life being converted into narrative while the career itself is still unfolding.

The physical book is just as good. Powder-blue photographic wrappers, deep burgundy condensed typography, full-page production stills, cast lists, filmographies and densely printed criticism turn this modest 13.5 cm volume into a miniature analogue archive. Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion. Mia Farrow on the set of Rosemary’s Baby. Polanski moving between director, actor and increasingly mythologised public figure.

And buried inside is a strangely perfect passage on Knife in the Water, where Butler concentrates on the knife, yacht, haversack, compass, pipe and other possessions through which status and power move between the characters. The objects are not incidental. Their meaning changes according to who holds them.

The same has happened to the book.

In 1970, this was current criticism: an inexpensive guide introducing a young European filmmaker to an expanding international audience. More than half a century later, the printed pages remain exactly where they were. Everything surrounding them has changed.

The biography stops in 1970. The object does not.

A small document of canon formation, celebrity, criticism and the instability of historical reputation — retained long enough to acquire a second reading its publisher could never have anticipated.

13.5 × 16 cm · 192 pages · Illustrated softcover · Offset-printed text and black-and-white film stills throughout · A. Zwemmer, London / A.S. Barnes, New York, 1970

Condition: Good. Visible rubbing, creasing and edge wear to wrappers, with light age toning and handling consistent with a fifty-six-year-old film book. Internally well preserved.