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Transnational Subjectivity: Trauma and Displacement in Roman Polański's Repulsion

2011; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3366/jbctv.2011.0043

1755-1714

Joanna Rydzewska,

European history and politics

While arguably all Roman Polanski’s films contain aspects of exilic/transnational sensibility, this article argues that his first foreign film, Repulsion, made in England in 1965, contains particularly strong elements of exilic narrative in spite of the fact that it does not overtly deal with exilic experiences.1 The story of Carol Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve), a Belgian girl in London who experiences a bizarre attraction to and repulsion from sex in the Gothic space of her apartment, articulates what Hamid Naficy has termed the ‘(melo)drama of transnational subjectivity’ (2003: 203) as the predicament of both the film’s character and its director. In conveying the melodrama of transnational subjectivity, Repulsion’s indebtedness to Surrealism is central. Hal Foster challenges the predominant view of Surrealism as concerned with love and liberation and argues instead that as a concept it is quintessentially concerned with psychic conflict and social contradiction, both of which relate to underlying traumas (1993: xvi). Thus Foster argues that if there is a concept capable of comprehending Surrealism, it is the concept of the uncanny, ‘that is to say, a concern with events in which repressed material returns in ways that disrupt unitary identity, aesthetic norms, and social order’ (ibid.: xvii). As he contends: ‘If the