Catherine R. Hofmann

I recently watched my first Roman Polanski film, his debut, Knife in the Water. Polanski co-wrote and directed the 1962 film which takes places mainly on a boat featuring only 3 actors. A married couple pick up a young hitchhiker and invite him to spend the night aboard their boat. The film is tense and beautifully framed. The film received a 1963 Foreign Language Oscar nomination, the first Polish film in this category.

My favorite scene of the movie is when the camera is panning from the mast of the ship to show what each character is doing after getting settled. The wife is wo-manning the rudder, the husband is mapping the course, and the hitchhiker is napping. I immediately wanted to boat around the lakes of Poland. In a previous shot, the cameraman, while tied to the mast, forgot to attach the safety line to the camera and dropped it in the lake.

I stitched the stills together to get a sense of their relation to one another. The still of the hitchhiker is rotated 180ª for continuity.

The waterways surrounding Gizycko.