Agnieszka Holland's Starburst Career: From Persona non Grata to International Celebrity on Multiple Fronts

Abstract

The chapter examines how Agnieszka Holland’s public persona has evolved from politically engaged director working within socialist cinema, through celebrity director embedded within the system of neoliberal democracy, to activist celebrity director advocating for human rights. While discussing this development, I indicate how this transformation of her public persona exemplifies the evolution of film authorship from the Romantic notion of the artist, through the idea of authorial agency conceived as a brand name, to a cultural worker who uses her symbolic capital to call for changes in global and local politics. Throughout her career, Holland has employed various methods and strategies to shape and control her public persona, which I propose to see as Foucauldian ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 1988, 18). Through self-fashioning, the filmmaker is establishing herself as an auteur, which is either acknowledged and reinforced, or diminished and erased by other participants in the authorial discourse. From these mediations the auteur/celebrity nexus emerges, with Holland making every possible effort to regulate it.