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ReFocus: The International Directors Series

ReFocus: The Films of Agnieszka Holland

By Elzbieta Ostrowska

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£90.00

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About this book

Examines Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s films and television works from the perspective of transnational screen cultures

  • First anglophone monograph about Agnieszka Holland’s versatile work
  • Analyses transnational women’s cinema
  • Reassess women’s cinema in a state-socialist context
  • Combines textual analysis, production cultures, and reception studies
  • Explores multitude of authorship discourses

The Films of Agnieszka Holland is the first monograph devoted to the internationally most famous Polish filmmaker, a three times Oscar nominee and the recipient of numerous film festival prizes.
It examines her rich, original oeuvre, which ranges from Holocaust dramas such as Europa, Europa (1990) to episodes of the HBO series, The Wire.
In examining the multifaceted nature of Holland’s authorship, the study situates her work in the context of art, popular, national, European, Hollywood, transnational, women’s, and queer cinema, as well as global television projects. Her colourful public persona oscillates among auteur, celebrity director, and political activist in an extraordinary professional trajectory, which started in the Eastern Bloc, continued in Western Europe and North America, then backtracked to a unified Europe. That zigzagged route conveys the unique nature of Holland’s career while epitomising the transformations of post-Cold War cultural production.

Reviews

"With more than 40 feature films to her name – and counting –　film director Agnieszka Holland may be the most prolific female filmmaker in history today. Elżbieta Ostrowska weaves together the multiple strands of this illustrious career in an absorbing narrative that reveals a persistency of vision in the name of an unobstructed creativity. From the studio system of communist Poland to Hollywood's production machine to a variety of European discursive agendas, Holland's creative and public persona emerges all over again -- unscathed, and with renewed vigor and ingenuity against the odds of adverse industrial, critical and nationalist discourses. A fascinating case study of a nomadic pioneer of transnational filmmaking."

"Combining meticulous research, critical acumen, and　 theoretical sophistication, Ostrowska　 judiciously tracks the ways in which the concerns of ethics, politics, identity, gender and spirituality have criss-crossed　 Holland’s provocative oeuvre. Particularly impressive is her tenacious grasp of its Protean　 shifts between auteurism, national and transnational cinema, Hollywood, and ‘women’s cinema’"

Through close textual and contextual analyses (paying attention to production contexts and modes of circulation) of Holland’s films along the three intersecting axes of authorship, women’s cinema and transnational cinema, this study yields original insights that go far beyond a conventional auteur cinema approach. Based on meticulous research, Refocus: The Films of Agnieszka Holland traces the fragmented, hard-to-narrativize history of Eastern European fictional filmmaking.

Ostrowska’s book is a veritable scholarly monograph in the sense that it not only reports
on Holland’s life and oeuvre but also carefully filters the material through various film
studies frameworks. In doing so, the author not only sheds interpretative light on specific
issues within Holland’s oeuvre but also meaningfully reinterprets the frameworks and theoretical
approaches themselves.

Table of contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: authorship, women’s cinema, and transnational screen cultures

Chapter One: Early years: pains and joys

Chapter Two: Art, politics, and gender: Holland’s participation in socialist Poland’s screen cultures

Chapter Three: European exilic cinema

Chapter Four: Transatlantic journey/adventure, or the re-phase

Chapter Five: From cinematic metteur en scène to television auteur?

Chapter Six: ‘Back home’ or ‘There’s no such place as home’: postcommunist political cinema revisited

Chapter Seven: Performing authorship: from celebrity director to celebrity activist

Conclusion

Filmography

Bibliography

About the author

Elzbieta Ostrowska

Elżbieta Ostrowska, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Department of Film and Audiovisual Media at the University of Łódź, Poland. Her most recent book is ReFocus: The Films of Agnieszka Holland (2024). Her articles have appeared in Slavic Review, Studies in European Cinema, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

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