As I stated in the introduction, one of Mazierska’s main contributions to the study of Polanski is to directly tackle the question of autobiography, which she refers to with an implicitly Foucauldian phrase, “The Autobiographical Effect” (p. 7). In this first chapter, Mazierska presents the various reasons why Polanski’s biography and cinematic work have been so entangled, including both his cinematic performances and the spectacular life situations he has passed through. These two factors are combined with the sense that Polanski’s films are in some way about his own life. However, Mazierska quickly problematises both the notion of autobiography itself – which, when used in a broad sense, could encompass all works in which a particular sensibility is inscribed – and the concepts of life and identity on which autobiography is based. Drawing on the work of Stuart Hall and Szymon Wróbel, she makes the point that rather than autobiography being a one-way representation of a pre-existing life, there is a “symmetry” between the two so that “just as the author’s autobiography is shaped by his actual life, so his life, or what is regarded as his life, is shaped by his autobiography” (pp. 12-13). This is clearly apparent in the case of Polanski, since critics not only use his autobiography to interpret his films, but derive their knowledge of his life from his films. Mazierska makes reference to Grażyna Stachówna’s term “biographical legend” (p. 13), a fiction of authorship that mediates both Polanski’s autobiography and his films, but to avoid the mythical connotations of this term she prefers to speak about the autobiographical effect in Polanski’s work.