"Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater"
About this Quote
Polanski’s line is an aesthetic dare disguised as a comfort blanket: the best cinema, he argues, should anesthetize your awareness of the room. Not just entertain you, but erase the seams of the experience. It’s a director’s credo built on control. If you remember the seat, the screen, the polite darkness, then the movie has failed to fully colonize your attention.
The intent is technical and psychological at once. It champions immersion, yes, but also the craft that makes immersion possible: pacing that doesn’t snag, framing that guides the eye without showing its hand, sound design that feels like air rather than apparatus. Polanski’s films are often studies in entrapment (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant), and that’s the subtext here: “forgetting” is less about relaxation than about submission. You don’t drift into his worlds; you’re sealed inside them.
Context matters because Polanski came up revering classical narrative discipline, then thrived in an era when New Hollywood tested how far you could push audiences without losing them. His best work weaponizes absorption: the camera becomes a moral accomplice, keeping you close enough to feel implicated but not always wise enough to see the trap being set.
There’s also a quietly contentious premise: cinema as an escape hatch. In a culture increasingly alert to how images persuade and manipulate, “forgetting” reads as both aspiration and warning. The theater disappears, and so can your critical distance. That’s the power Polanski is naming - and, knowingly or not, defending.
The intent is technical and psychological at once. It champions immersion, yes, but also the craft that makes immersion possible: pacing that doesn’t snag, framing that guides the eye without showing its hand, sound design that feels like air rather than apparatus. Polanski’s films are often studies in entrapment (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant), and that’s the subtext here: “forgetting” is less about relaxation than about submission. You don’t drift into his worlds; you’re sealed inside them.
Context matters because Polanski came up revering classical narrative discipline, then thrived in an era when New Hollywood tested how far you could push audiences without losing them. His best work weaponizes absorption: the camera becomes a moral accomplice, keeping you close enough to feel implicated but not always wise enough to see the trap being set.
There’s also a quietly contentious premise: cinema as an escape hatch. In a culture increasingly alert to how images persuade and manipulate, “forgetting” reads as both aspiration and warning. The theater disappears, and so can your critical distance. That’s the power Polanski is naming - and, knowingly or not, defending.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
|---|---|
| Source | 'Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater' — Roman Polanski; listed on the Roman Polanski page, Wikiquote. |
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