Walerian Borowczyk: From Animation to Provocation

In 1959 the surrealists in Paris decided that the most exciting filmmaker alive was a Polish poster designer making animated shorts out of scrap. By 1976 the British censor was cutting his features, the arthouse press had disowned him, and his name was appearing above the title of soft-core pictures in cinemas off the Boulevard de Clichy. The same man made all of it, with the same eye, using the same handful of obsessions. The collapse of Walerian Borowczyk’s reputation is one of the strangest reversals in European film, and the strangest part is how little the work changed while everything around it did. The audience turned over, the label on the door was rewritten, and he went on filming hands and hinges and locked boxes exactly as before.

He was born in Kwilcz in 1923 and trained as a painter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. Before he made a single film he was already a significant figure in the Polish poster school — that extraordinary postwar generation who were handed foreign films to advertise, given no stills, and told to invent an image from nothing. That training explains him better than any biography. A poster has to be a single arresting object with no narrative support. Borowczyk never stopped making them; he simply learned to make them move.

The shorts nobody has surpassed

With Jan Lenica he made Once Upon a Time (1957) and Dom (House, 1958), which took the Grand Prix at Brussels in 1958 and remains one of the genuinely disturbing pieces of animation ever assembled — a woman in a room, a wig that eats a man’s face, a mouth chewing the air, all cut with the pitiless rhythm of a machine. He moved to France in 1959 and the run that followed is the one his defenders lead with.

Les Astronautes (1959) was made with Chris Marker. Renaissance (1963) is five minutes of a bombed room reassembling itself in reverse — a stuffed owl, a trumpet, a doll, a grenade — everything rising off the floor and knitting back into wholeness, until the grenade completes itself last and the room blows apart again. Les Jeux des anges (1963) is an abstraction of machinery and blood and receding corridors that has been read, correctly, as a film about the camps, made by a man who had lived through the occupation and would not narrate it. Le Théâtre de Monsieur et Madame Kabal (1967) was the first animated feature made in France.

Nothing in these films is warm. The objects are handled with a tenderness the human figures never receive, and the cutting has the clean, indifferent cruelty of a lathe. This is the Borowczyk everyone agrees about, and the shorts sit comfortably beside the tradition Švankmajer would later extend — the Central European animation of objects that resent being touched.

Live action, and the great middle period

Goto, l’île d’amour (1969) is his first live-action feature and a masterpiece nobody sees. A remote island run as an absurd dictatorship, shot in monochrome with sudden sequences flaring into colour; his wife Ligia Branice at the centre; a fly-swatting servant climbing a hierarchy through murder. Blanche (1971), with the great Michel Simon in his last major role, is a medieval chamber tragedy of enormous formal control — a castle, a wife, a king, jealousy, and an ending of absolute coldness.

Both films are shot by an animator. The frames are flat and frontal, the way a Flemish panel is flat. Objects are placed with maniacal precision. People move through the composition the way pieces move on a board. It is a grammar that no other live-action director was using, and if Borowczyk had stopped in 1971 he would be in every history of the European art film.

The turn, and the cost

Contes immoraux (1974) is where it goes. Four period episodes, each about desire and its machinery — a tide, a cucumber, a bath of blood, a Borgia orgy — and Paloma Picasso as Erzsébet Báthory. The full account of the anthology is that it is a serious film about the objects and rituals people build around appetite, executed with the same jeweller’s attention as Renaissance, and also that it was sold as a dirty picture and made a fortune as one.

La Bête (1975) began as a fifth episode of Immoral Tales and grew into a feature. A bourgeois marriage negotiation in a decaying château; a family secret; and a lengthy dream sequence in which an eighteenth-century ancestor is pursued through woodland by a creature that is part bear, part man and entirely ridiculous. It was banned outright in Britain for years and is still, half a century on, the film people mean when they say his name. It is genuinely funny, which almost nobody admits, and the creature is deliberately absurd — a rubber snout and a foot that will not stop — because the joke is on the pornography of the sublime.

Then the assignments came. La Marge (1976) with Sylvia Kristel, Interno di un convento (1978) working the nunsploitation seam, Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (1981) with Udo Kier and Marina Pierro, and finally Emmanuelle 5 (1987) — a franchise entry in a series whose original had already colonised the multiplex. Critics who had called him a poet in 1965 now filed him with the trade. Dzieje grzechu (The Story of Sin, 1975), his only Polish feature, played in competition at Cannes and was received as an aberration by people who had already decided what he was.

Why it works

Look at where his camera goes and the whole career resolves into one project.

Borowczyk films the object. A hand on a latch. A corset lace under tension. A clockwork bird. A glove being removed, in real time, in close-up, while nothing else is permitted into frame. He learned in animation that an object photographed with enough attention acquires a will, and he applied that discovery to human bodies without adjusting the method. When he shoots a woman he shoots her the way he shot the trumpet in Renaissance — as a surface with a mechanism inside it — and that refusal to distinguish is exactly why he unsettles people and exactly why the erotic films are colder than any of their marketing suggested.

The technique is period-perfect and obsessive. He researched costume and furniture to museum standard, used real antiques, and lit them with a painter’s contempt for atmosphere; his interiors are bright and shadowless so you can see the workmanship. He cuts on objects rather than on faces, so a scene’s emotional beats land on a door handle. And he almost never uses a reaction shot, which strands the viewer with the thing itself and no one to tell you how to feel about it. The nearest relative is Švankmajer, whose wordless studies of fetish and apparatus are the closest anyone has come to the same territory, and the Quay brothers, whose one live-action feature is a Borowczyk château by another name.

The muses, and the case against

Two women organise the filmography. Ligia Branice, his wife, is the still centre of Goto, Blanche and the tidal episode of Immoral Tales, and Borowczyk photographs her with an attention that shades into cataloguing — she is lit, posed and held like the antiques she stands among, which is either the most romantic thing in his cinema or the most alarming, depending on the day you watch it. Marina Pierro took over from Interno di un convento onward and stayed to the end, through Docteur Jekyll et les femmes and the final feature Cérémonie d’amour (1988). Pierro understood the assignment completely. She performs at the pitch of a wax figure that has decided to move, and in the Jekyll film — which compresses Stevenson into a single night in a single house and is far better than its reputation — she is the one element holding a delirium together.

The technique underneath is worth naming because it explains the whole style. Borowczyk animated with cut-outs, and his source material was nineteenth-century engraving: catalogue illustrations, anatomical plates, hand-tinted lithographs, all sliced apart and reanimated. Working that way for a decade teaches a specific set of instincts — the frontal plane, the hard silhouette, the frame composed as a page — and those instincts never left when he picked up a live-action camera. His châteaux are engravings you can walk into. The famous flatness that critics complained about in Blanche is a cut-out artist’s habit, sustained on purpose, because depth would have softened the edges he wanted.

The case against him is substantial and should be made without flinching. The later films regard women as apparatus, and a great deal of scholarly effort has gone into arguing that the coldness is a critique of possession rather than an instance of it — an argument that works well for Blanche and works less well the closer you get to 1987. He was contemptuous of collaborators, notoriously difficult, and treated actors as furniture that could talk. Emmanuelle 5 is a job and reads as one. Even his admirers concede that after La Bête he was repeating a method with diminishing conviction, and that a director who had once been able to build a five-minute short more frightening than most features spent his last active decade decorating assignments. The reappraisal is real and deserved; it does not require pretending the last decade was good.

Where to start

He died in Paris in February 2006, having made nothing for eighteen years, and the reappraisal arrived almost immediately afterwards: the Arrow restorations put the shorts and the features back into circulation in the condition he shot them, and a generation that had never had to choose between “Boro the poet” and “Boro the pornographer” simply watched them and saw one director.

Begin with the shorts, which take ninety minutes in total and will tell you within five whether the rest is for you. Then Blanche, which is the most beautiful and the most accessible. Goto if the flatness intrigues you. Immoral Tales and La Bête are the notorious ones and deserve to be watched with the shorts fresh in mind, because the continuity is unmistakable once you have seen the trumpet reassemble itself. He was making the same film for fifty years, and only the subject on the table kept changing. The scandal belonged entirely to the marketing.