The Cinema of Agnieszka Holland: Anger and Ethics

The Cinema of Agnieszka Holland: Anger and Ethics uniquely combines academic film analysis, biographical detail and personal interviews with the filmmaker, conducted over the course of a year, to trace the development of Agnieszka Holland’s female characters and how they have been reshaped across half a century.

Piotrowska considers Holland’s distinctive and evolving vision of society, history, gender and family relationships, with particular attention to how the filmmaker’s own background has influenced this vision. The study engages with Freud’s notion of afterwardness, Marianne Hirsch’s concept of posthistory, and the author’s theorisations of female authorship and the figure of the ＂nasty woman＂ in cinema. Through detailed readings of six feature films, it highlights Holland’s extraordinary contribution to global film and television culture, and her movement from despair to a creative rage through collaborations and adaptations.

This original and insightful work will be essential reading for students and scholars of European and world cinema, feminism, gender studies, European history, filmmaking, authorship and applied psychoanalysis and ethics.

Agnieszka Piotrowska, PhD, is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and psychoanalytic life coach. She has published widely on cinema and psychoanalysis, including Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary (Routledge, now in its second edition). She has held senior academic positions in the UK and internationally and is a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council.