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Chinatown Ethnography. The site that I have chosen for this ethnographic
research is the streets of Chinatown. The reason why I chose ...
Chinatown. Throughout the movie Chinatown, a film noir like atmosphere is portrayed. ...
In conclusion, Chinatown was an extraordinary film noir picture. ...
chinatown. A Chinatown is a section of an urban area associated with a large number
of Chinese residents or commercial activities within a city outside China. ...
Chicago Chinatown. ... It is located at the south and south west of Chinatown,
where a large number of Chinese are living there now. ...
chinatown. Context Some of ... American Nicholson. Nonetheless, Chinatown does
draw heavily on Polanski's life and experiences. Though ...
Submitted by bernard 1 on May 11, 2006
Category: Music and Movies
Words: 1190 | Pages: 5
Views: 300
Popularity Rank: 35,211
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Context
Some of film history's most memorable directors created films that were obviously autobiographical—for example, Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), François Truffaut's The Four Hundred Blows (1959), and Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963). The heroes in these films often seem to be simply better-looking versions of the director (with the exception of Woody Allen, who plays himself). Chinatown, released in 1974 but set in 1937 Los Angeles and starring Jack Nicholson as a hapless private investigator battling real estate crooks, doesn't seem at first glance to fit into this category. Director Roman Polanski didn't come to L.A. until 1968, never worked as an investigator, and hardly resembles the brash, all-American Nicholson. Nonetheless, Chinatown does draw heavily on Polanski's life and experiences. Though the main character, Nicholson's Jake Gittes, is not a stand-in for Polanksi, the director's biography is fragmented and refracted onto many separate elements and characters in the film, which both recalls his life's tragedies and foreshadows the scandals that would subsequently befall him.
Polanski was born in Paris on August 18, 1933, to a Polish father and Russian mother, both Jewish. Some of his first memories, however, would be of Krakow, where the family moved three years after his birth to escape rising anti-Semitism in France. Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, and when Polanski was seven, he witnessed the construction of a wall marking his neighborhood as a Jewish ghetto. His parents were soon sent to concentration camps. Polanski escaped the camps by hiding with a local Catholic family his father had bribed, but he had to manage largely on his own, cowering in barns and, on at least one occasion, dodging the bullets of German soldiers. After the war, Polanski reunited with his father, but his mother had perished in a Nazi gas chamber.
Polanski entered art school in Krakow when he was around seventeen years old, spending his...
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