The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

By Agata Pyzik

He was a Polish designer who trained as a sculptor at the Academy of Arts in postwar Krakow. He co-created a phenomenon, which was later called the Polish School of Poster (and included such masters as Henryk Tomaszewski and Roman Cieślewicz). He invented his own kind of animated film, and then created a unique erotic/symbolic cinema which, he believed, combined his art and obsessions; although his films were never simply a cheap thrill, he was labelled a pornographer. He was Walerian Borowczyk, whose work is now available in its all glory, with the Arrow Academy DVD release of ‘Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection’ – which includes his six greatest films.

Born in 1923, Borowczyk, who was commonly known as ‘Boro’, was a self-obsessed megalomaniac who never ceased to hold a grudge against his native Poland, which he left in 1958 after his sensational success at the Brussels Expo 58, where he won the international competition with Dom (House, 1958) – the stupendous, Surrealist animation he made in collaboration with his fellow graphic designer Jan Lenica (the soundtrack is by Wlodzimierz Kotoński, of the PRES electronic studio). The film’s combination of uncanny, sardonic humour, mastery of collage technology and its combination of realism, retro and the abstract made it look unlike anything before or since. After Dom, Borowczyk went to France, made acquaintance with members of what was later called the Left Bank Group, and met some key characters in his life: the owner and producer of Argos Films, Anatole Dauman, and the Surrealist writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues, whose novels Boro would later adapt (such as La Marge, 1967). Paris in the late ’50s was not unknown territory for Polish artists – the likes of artist and theatre director Tadeusz Kantor and the painter Jerzy Kujawski had pilgrimaged there since the end of the war. But it was Boro who became the most significant Polish artist working in postwar France. He embraced certain aspects of the French cinema – for instance, in 1972 he collaborated with the legendary actor Michel Simon on Blanche– while remaining within a tightly closed niche of his own obsessions.

Walerian Borowczyk, Dom (The House, 1958, excerpt)

Boro’s first truly foreign endeavour was Les Astronautes (The Astronauts,1959), an adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s 1951 novel of the same name. Chris Marker is listed as co-director, but the film was, in fact, a solo work; Marker lent his name to help Borowczyk establish himself in a new country. Its unmistakeable aesthetic ushered in Boro’s complex graphic technique – painterly touches meeting ultramodern collage (and the electronic sounds of Andrzej Markowski), with cut-and-paste graphics that echoed the 19th century, suggesting that at heart Borowczyk was a Victorian. The provenance is confirmed by early feature films, such as Goto, l’île d’amour (Goto, Island of Love, 1968), in which cartoon characters that look like cardboard cut-outs are thrown into an atmosphere of lust and power. The usurper king of the eponymous island is a tyrant over both his subjects and his beautiful wife (played by Ligia Branice, Borowczyk’s lifelong companion and collaborator), whose heart and body longs for her young and handsome low-born lover. The story can be read as Boro’s take on Stalinist rule in the Soviet Bloc. But here, things get complicated, as Borowczyk’s focus wasn’t just oppression, but desire as the force that rules the world – something that is withheld, wasted, misguided or fatal, yet unstoppable. The French understood this, as Borowczyk’s interests corresponded with those of the French Surrealists: desire, sexuality, a death-drive, religion, all were seeped in his Polish Catholicism and reacted against it. Like the Surrealists, Borowczyk was interested in female desire – powerful heroines are central to his films, as the only creatures capable of love and a commitment to desire, for which they’re ready to risk their lives and without which they don’t exist. Blanche, the heroine of his 1971 medieval adaptation of the same name, provokes pernicious desire in every man she encounters – the king, his page, her senile husband, his son – but is betrayed by all of them and remains pure, despite reciprocating the love of her stepson. Ultimately, she chooses death rather than a world without love. Blanche is a tribute to Boro’s ongoing interest in the Middle Ages, and the film’s meticulous tableaux vivants evoke Gothic painting. The incredible recreation of medieval music sung in Latin in Blanche made it a pioneer of historic cinema.

Walerian Borowczyk, Blanche, 1971, film still

According to Boro, we’re not masters of our souls. There’s a Sadeian element to his work; his heroines often experience turmoil, and the fulfilment of their desires inevitably leads to death. As with Sade, one of his major targets is hypocrisy. Boro held a grudge towards his native Poland for censoring his films and not recognising his genius, but he still returned there to make his masterpiece Dzieje grzechu (Story of Sin, 1975), an adaptation of a novel by the Polish realist writer Stefan Żeromski, which tells the story of a poor, beautiful girl living in fin de siècle Warsaw, who is let down by a man she loves and falls victim to all kinds of crooks, hustlers, pimps and perverts. Before he died of heart failure at the age of 82 in 2006, Borowczyk released his erratic autobiography, titled What I Think Looking at a Naked Polish Woman. It was an incoherent, yet fascinating farrago of Polish obscurantism about his work, interspersed with clips from the French press testifying to his genius. It contains also slightly distasteful attacks at the hipocrisy of Story of Sin’s lead actress who accused him of a ruthless drive to make pornography.

Beauty in Borowczyk is either convulsive or doesn’t exist. Although on the surface his best-known film, La Bête (The Beast, 1975) is an exploitation flick – its unembarrassed exposure of its naked heroine is brazenly titillating – its nature is more Sadeian and Victorian than 1970s. The scenes in which porn actress Sirpa Lane’s 18th century aristocrat feels ultimate pleasure ‘riding’ the enormous phallus of the titular bear-like beast, are as shocking as they are funny. Its message of following pleasure, no matter how bestial, to its end was echoed five years later in Possession (1981) by another Polish eccentric, Andrzej Zulawski. In the film, housewife Isabel Adjani gravitates to the Berlin Wall only to find pleasure in the arms of a bloodthirsty gigantic octopus. As with Zulawski, a horror of marriage made its way into Boro’s hilarious animated feature Théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal (Mr. and Mrs. Kabal’s Theatre, 1967), in which the title’s couple engage in eternal infernal marriage games.

Walerian Borowczyk, Théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal (Mr. and Mrs. Kabal’s Theatre, 1967), film still

But it was atmosphere and appearance that were crucial to Boro’s films. His features all reveal an obsession with colour, texture, rhythm and music. It was an approach that was developed originally in the Eastern Bloc, where animation was a way for artists to escape censorship and the boring restrictions of the Socialist Realist period. Yet even if Boro didn’t want to make art for the masses, he knew the power of scandal. Unlike exploitation and soft-porn cinema, which also often used costume drama as a pretext for picturesque sex scenes, films such as 1974’s Contes immoraux (Immoral Tales) (with Paloma Picasso as the ultimate vampirella, Elizabeth Bathory) reveal a perverse mixture of Enlightenment rationalism and the revelation that there is nothing rational in desire. It was Kant avec Sade, in the words of Roland Barthes.

Walerian Borowczyk, Contes immoraux (Immoral Tales, 1974), film still

The interviews in ‘Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection’ reveal a ferocious, passionate artist, speaking clearly about his art and obsessions in French, his second language. His underlying seriousness makes it clear that Borowczyk was not merely an exotic cousin to the exploitation cinema genre that exploded after the late ’60s and the sexual revolution, or another great, lost schlock director newly available on DVD, to file alongside Alenjandro Jodorowsky or Jean Rollin. Rather more impossibly, he could be filed as an erotic mirror to the sublime work of the likes of Paradjanov (or even Tarkovsky).The Borowczyk of the erotic shockers was still the artist who made avant-garde shorts in 1950s Poland. Impossibly talented, infinitely curious, perversely morbid, he was an author of exquisitely beautiful pornography who communicated with the sacred and understood the nature of the profane.

Walerian Borowczyk, Une collection particulière (The Particular Collection, 1973, excerpt)Image may be NSFW.
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