Andrzej Zulawski (1940–2016) was born in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) and educated in Paris. From 1971 to 2015 he directed thirteen feature films. Andrzej Zulawski: Abject Cinema interprets the director’s oeuvre through the methodological lens of Julia Kristeva’s notions of the abject and the semiotic chora, with the narratives in Zulawski’s filmography amounting to an experience of the abject -being not merely the state of affairs among the films’ subjects but also of their collective regression to a semiotic non-verbal state divorced from the symbolic verbal-visual language employed by cinema as a whole. It further contextualizes this interpretation with the sociopolitical circumstances from which Zulawski emerged, specifically his Polish homeland occupied by various foreign powers, his emigre status in France, and the influence of the Polish Romantic movement.

Henri de Corinth is a film writer based in Washington DC. An art historian and linguist by training, his writing has appeared in Lo Specchio Scuro, MUBI Notebook, Kinoscope, Senses of Cinema, and We Are The Mutants.

Part I: Landscapes of Affect
Chapter 1: Kristeva and Zulawski
Chapter 2: Zulawski and Ideology
Chapter 3: The Maternal
Chapter 4: Landscapes of Affect
Part II: Abject Cinema
Chapter 5: “Children Are An Ism”
Chapter 6: Coenesthesia
Chapter 7: Borders
Chapter 8: Performance
Chapter 9: Loss of Subjecthood
Chapter 10: Returning to the Womb
Chapter 11: The Image of Film Violence
Chapter 12: The Sight of a Corpse
Part III: Unfathomable, Darkness - A Conclusion
Index