Pride and Prejudice: Critical Dislocations of “To Kill a Priest” by Agnieszka Holland
Elżbieta Ostrowska
ostrowskaelzb@gmail.comUniversity of Łódź (Poland)
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4800-011X
Abstract
The author examines how Agnieszka Holland’s film To Kill a Priest (1988) functions in various systems of film production, distribution, and critical discourses. The main aim of the presented analysis is to demonstrate how certain distribution and critical strategies contribute to consideration of the film that was made as a transnational coproduction as belonging to auteur and national cinema. In her close analysis of the film, the author explains how the critical discourse developed within the system of national cinema consolidates the cinematic text whose coherence is frequently compromised by the narrative-affective tensions and oppositions. Finally, the article argues that Agnieszka Holland’s status of a film auteur is predominantly established by means of extratextual factors, especially the strategies of distribution and various critical practices.
Keywords:
Agnieszka Holland, national cinema, transnational cinema, film criticism, distribution, coproductionsReferences
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Authors
Elżbieta Ostrowskaostrowskaelzb@gmail.com
University of Łódź Poland
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4800-011X
In 2005-2021 Associate Lecturer in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Currently, she realizes the research project “Transnational Cinema of Agnieszka Holland” at the Department of Media and Audiovisual Culture, University of Łódź. Her publications include The Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia, co-edited with Ewa Mazierska and Matilda Mroz (2016), Women in Polish Cinema, co-authored with Ewa Mazierska (2006), The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World, co-edited with John Orr (2006), The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda: The Art of Irony and Defiance, co-edited with John Orr (2003), Gender in Film and the Media: East-West Dialogues, co-edited with Elzbieta Oleksy and Michael Stevenson (2000). Her articles have appeared in Slavic Review, Studies in European Cinema, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
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