Though Polanski has often remarked upon the crucial importance of surrealism to his conception of the cinema, the extent of his commitment to surrealist philosophy in his feature films has never been satisfactorily examined. Indeed reviewers have tended to doubt Polanski's word and have regarded the observable surrealist elements in his major films as icing on the cake rather than as central to their conception (p. 44) An examination of Cul-de-Sac, however, reveals a total commitment to the philosoph...

The affinities of this 'black comedy' [Cul-de-Sac] with the Theatre of the Absurd hardly need underlining; and there's a spirit not unlike Ionesco's in his playing with the conventions of the genre, something of Beckett in his final image of sobbing nihilism. To make these comparisons is far from suggesting that his work is derivative. On the contrary…. [Polanski's] films bring a new impetus to a now inbred, cult-ridden, mood. For he remains in contact with certain ...

["Cul-de-Sac"] is the quintessence of fashionable, phony movie-making, and I am all the more impatient with it because of my admiration for Mr. Polanski's "Knife in the Water."… [In "Knife in the Water"] the test, conducted mainly in terms of a weekend sail on a remote Polish lake, gave the director an opportunity to deal with some of the oldest and most imperious emotions we know—fear, lust, rage, and jealousy—which he depicted with inso...

'Ah! Pinter' one cries, sniffing like a Bisto Kid at the heady aroma of Cul-de-Sac…. Then one remembers the odd, elliptical conversations of Knife in the Water, and wonders if Polanski was even then the Pinter of Poland. An unanswerable question, really, even if one knows Polish, as Pinter's English is so distinctive that it sounds like something else as soon as it is translated. Whatever the answer, the fact remains that Polanski's command of the English language has matu...