Dauman, producer of films as diverse but epochal as Hiroshima, mon amour, Masculin feminin, La Jetee, and Ai No Corrida, provided the backing for Borowczyk’s most ambitious and controversial projects, Immoral Tales and The Beast.
The villain of the piece, a reoccurring laughing red face, is the film’s producer, Anatole Dauman, a little-known but important figure in French film.
An attic inventor builds a spaceship out of newspaper, taking his pet owl on a nocturnal adventure through an outer space populated by enormous hats and sleeping drunks. The Astronauts (1959), included as an extra on the disc of Goto, Island of Love, is filmed in this collaged style and is rather lighter than his usual subjects, no doubt due to the influence of the perennially witty Chris Marker, who contributed a loose scenario to the project. But perhaps the most notable inheritor of one of Borowczyk’s methods is (self-admittedly) Terry Gilliam, who used a rudely photo-collaged Borowczykian technique for the segue sections of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Objects are alive because of the systems we impose on them, inscribing their existence with private ceremonies of utility and decay-a teacup, an orange, a wig.Īs an animator, Borowczyk can be seen to be the progenitor of an esthetic school that includes not only Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay, but also a legion of MTV-associated animators such as Alex Proyas and Fred Stuhr. Collage, stop-motion, traditional cel animation, and reverse-motion photography were employed toward the same esthetic end, the destabilization of quotidian environments, and a menacing focus on hermetic ritual.
Often made with the collaboration of Jan Lenica, another Polish graphic designer who was to become one of the greatest surrealist animators, Borowcyk’s short films ran the gamut of modernist technique. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, and as his reputation as a film-poster designer grew, he decided to translate his esthetic into animated short films, which quickly became celebrated fixtures of the international film festivals and cine clubs that flourished in Europe in the 50’s and 60’s. Borowczyk is interested in the corset rather than the breast, the shoe rather than the foot, the antique sex toy rather than the genitals.īorowczyk’s stylistic fetishism found its first expression in the graphic arts. For this misunderstood, or at least mislabeled artist, sex is an engine that propels the bizarre mechanism of human sociality, and he is fascinated with its trappings, its effects, its attendant rituals. Never one to shy away from the explicit, at the same time he refused to present sexuality as simple or purely carnal. Borowczyk, who died in 2003, used the quotation as the epigram to a pivotal film in his career, his first truly ‘erotic’ work, Immoral Tales (1974). Taken as a sort of manifesto on erotic art, La Rochefoucald’s quotation suitably encapsulates the artistic concerns of the late, controversial Polish/French director Walerian Borowczyk. 1968Īll titles distributed by Cult Epics, “However enjoyable love may be, it is enjoyable more for the ways through which it manifests itself, than for itself alone.”-La Rochefoucauld Produced by Louis Duchesne, Rene Thevenet written and directed by Walerian Borowczyk edited by Charles Bretoneiche cinematography by Guy Durban music by Georg Friedrich Handel starring Pierre Brasseur and Ligia Branice. Produced by Anatole Dauman written, directed, and edited by Walerian Borowczyk cinematography by Bernard Daillencourt, Marcel Grignon music by Domenico Scarlatti starring Sirpa Lane and Lisbeth Hummel. Produced by Philippe Guez directed by Walerian Borowcyzk written by Walerian Borowczyk and Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues edited by Florence Poulain, Guila Salama, Lili Sonnet, Marie-Helene Zirisch cinematography by Gerard Monceau, Jean-Paul Sergent, Michel Zolat music by Johann Sebastian Bach starring Marina Pierro and Mathieu Carriere.
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