Le gros et le maigre

Story fat and the lean(1961-14 minutes)

A small and thin barefoot slave (played by Polanski) plays a flute and beats a drum to entertain his large master who rocks in a rocking chair in front of his decreped mansion. The slave jumps and leaps like a madman, wipes his master's brow, feeds him, washes his feet, shades him from the sun with an umbrella and holds a urinal for him.

Facts The film was made in France, financed by a small French film company.

Though it was not a profitable venture for the production company, it was a favorite at cinema clubs.

His experience in Polish theatre gave him a lasting love of Absurdism, with its sardonic, existential view of life's futility, and its vicious parodies of the chaotic power games that underpin (and often undermine) social structures.

Polanski was not only interested in this kind of personages,he likes the relationship between' the master and the servant' The domineering and the repressed ,as we can see in his short film' The Fat and the Lean' (1961, B&W, 15mins) or in features like Knife in the Water (1962); Cul-de-sac (1966);Dance of the Vampires(1967) etc.

(The credits of this film are evasive and mystifying for legal reasons: Polanski, not possessing French citizenship at the time, had to give his editor, Jean-Pierre Rousseau, co-directing credit.)