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Walerian Borowczyk

9th June 1998 at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television.

Walerian Borowczyk trained as a painter and lithographer at the Cracow Academy of Fine Art between 1949 and 1954. A visit to Ferdinand Leger's studio inspired a short 16mm film, one of many which he shot, edited and added music for personal viewing. After winning the national prize for lithography in 1953, Borowczyk produced several socialist realist film posters. These posters had to be vetted by a syndicate of (non governmental) graphic artists to maintain a high standard and to nurture the growth of Polish graphic art during the 1950's. A poster artist would attend a film screening and then in the following week they would present a maquette in competition with the other artists. The syndicate comprised of established lithographers such as Borowczyk, who would select a design and arrange a poster contract with the artist. Borowczyk crossed paths with another internationally renowned poster artist, Jan Lenica (Born in 1928), through this selection process.

Jan Lenica studied music and architecture before illustrating the Polish anti fascist satirical magazine "Szpilki". His early style was markedly different from Borowczyk, favouring harsh black outlines and washes of opulent colour, whilst Borowczyk seemed under the influence of the Polish constructivism, a movement which developed out of a split in the "Blok" group led by Mieczyslaw Szczuka.

Borowczyk and Lenica collected the $10,000 Grand Prix at 1958 Brussels Experimental Film Festival for their third collaboration, Dom, which made a deep impression upon the "micro-branch of the seventh art" animation. The film established Borowczyk and Lenica as two diverse graphic artists of international standing. Borowczyk and Lenica went on to dominate international animation festivals for the next twenty years, consequentially influencing a whole generation of animators as diverse as Jan Svankmajer (who has been described as Lenica's successor) and Terry Gilliam.

The two previous short films made by Borowczyk and Lenica were by no means insignificant. Once Upon A Time (1957) could be described as McLaren's Le Merle (1958) remade by Vukotic (the pioneer of reductionist animation) with an added dash of macabre wit. Requited Sentiments (1957) is a montage of the work of a naif painter, dissolving both his memory and fantasy. Both films were a complete break with an animated puppet tradition pioneered by Ladislaw Starewicz and Jiri Trnka. Not only did these films rejuvenate Polish animation, but they also anticipated the tangled trends in Borowczyk and Lenica's later (separate) work.

Whilst Lenica has been able to escape genre pigeonholing, producing several animated films based upon the work of Pieyre De Mandiargues (La Femme Fleur), Ionesco (A, Rhinoceros, Monsieur Tete) and Jarry; Borowczyk's animation has been swept into the same collective pile of genre anomalies under the vague banner of "surrealism". The irony of Borowczyk's fascination with cataloguing and listing (e.g. Une Collection Particuliere (1972) is that he himself is perhaps one of only a handful of filmmakers who truly deserve a category all upon his own. The form of Dom established a blueprint from which Borowczyk would refer time and time again in his career, being a set of rigorous, simple principles: repetition, antithesis and alteration. Parker Tyler distinguishes Dom from several other entrants at the Brussels festival. Unlike Stan Brakhage's Loving (1958) and Agnes Varda's L'Opera Mouffe (1958), Dom is described by Tyler as being of the "pure" tradition of the Dada-Surrealist school comprising of Bunuel and Dali, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. This distinction is inadequate because the premise that "movement in film is to be varied and arbitrary as movement in music while the image itself can be transformed and distorted in any way suiting the purposes of the film artist" is not exclusive to what Tyler terms as the "pure experimental" film. Maya Deren's Ritual In Transfigured Time (1946) is a film which fulfils Tyler's premise perhaps better than Dom, yet conversely is of the "avant garde" tradition of Stan Brakhage, Jerome Hill and Bruce Connor. On the other hand, despite Andre Breton being "dazzled" by his animation, Borowczyk may live under the shadow of his surrealist predecessors, but he has never been a prisoner to it. Borowczyk acknowledges a variety of artists, from the Serbian artist Ljuba, to the Californian animator Hy Hirsh (who died in a car accident in Paris 1961 and receives a dedication at the beginning of Renaissance (1963). Like another animator turned "surrealist" filmmaker, David Lynch, the films which seem to have influenced Borowczyk most have not been solely surrealist in nature. In fact they are the films which tend to be marginalised to the peripheries of surrealist film studies, and those which parallel Szcuzuka's abstract film experiments in the twenties and thirties : Hans Richterıs Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928), and Dreams That Money Can Buy (1944-46), the latter featuring contributions from Leger, Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Alexander Calder. Ferdinand Leger's brilliant Ballet Mecanique (1923) is, like Dom, a combination of live action near abstractions, animated dadaist collages and three dimensional objects. But when Ligia Branice caresses a plaster head, rather than it come alive it disintegrates in the girls hands, a literal come down from the most memorable image in Cocteau's opium fantasy, Blood Of A Poet.

"Surrealism - like Cubism, Futurism, or Expressionism - has had such a pervasive influence on our contemporary sensibility and has joined so readily with the vestiges of those other "-isms" that it would be futile to try and isolate its many offspring".

Borowczyk has dedicated several collages to Max Ernst. Ernst is most strongly felt in Borowczyk's animated film L'Encyclopedie de Grandmere, which operates like an Ernst collage novel (e.g. Une Semaine de bonte or La femme 100 tetes) set in motion. Not only does Borowczyk anticipate Larry Jordan's films (Our Lady Of The Sphere (1969) The Orb (1973), Once Upon A Time (1974), he also unveils the eroticism which was to blossom in his later erotic feature films. Ernst both championed and collaborated with the Polish French artist Hans Bellmer, the illustrator of Georges Bataille's Story Of The Eye, Madame Edwarda and Pieyre De Mandiagues L'Anglais decrit dans le Chateau Ferme. Unlike Ernst, It's hard to see any common stylistic ground between Bellmer and Borowczyk, but their specific association of death and eroticism under the shadow of Bataille is equally hard to ignore. Visually Bellmer's series of concentration camp engravings feature numerous girls opening their stomachs like curtains made from bricks as well as labyrinthine prison cell interiors, imagery and content which resonates strongly in the animation which confirmed Borowczyk's destiny as a live action filmmaker: Les Jeux des Anges (1964). Borowczyk and Bellmer also share a fascination for Belle Epoch paraphernalia, reserving special attention for Victorian wigs and corsets, not to mention private collections of clandestine erotica. It would be interesting to see if the paths of the two artists crossed, most probably through there friendship with the writer Pieyre de Mandiargues, whose fiction was regularly filmed by Borowczyk. However, that is one of the many questions which the legendary Walerian Borowczyk has yet to answer.

There is another surrealist hero who sheds the most fascinating light upon Borowczyk's cinema. Louis Aragon points to Charlie Chaplin's genius in his ability to make the inanimate world participate as a protagonist in his films, not unlike the master orchestrating the inanimate characters in Dom, Renaissance and Le Phonographe. Borowczyk's control is not limited to the animated film, as he has taken control of both the editing and decor in his subsequent live action feature films, and to paraphrase Aragon's remarks about Chaplin, the stage set is the very vision of the world for Borowczyk, with the discovery of the mechanism of its laws, which haunts his protagonists to such a degree that by an inversion of values all inanimate objects become a living being for him, every human person a mannequin with a lever.

Eschewing any notion of influences, Lenica describes himself as a film "barbarian" approaching each film with an empty head armed only with a camera. Both Lenica and Borowczyk detest the term experimental film, a term which implies a fumbling with both camera and concept. Borowczyk is content with Robert Benayoun's description as an alchemist:

"Every artist is an artisan" and every artist is an alchemist. But alchemist in the sense that we mix different things together, and something totally unforeseen happens. The alchemist uses non-scientific methods. Whereas a chemist knows what he'll get. He knows he'll affect a reaction by mixing one element with another#46;..we make a story board. We know where we are heading, more or less. That's to say, the end result is always unforeseen. Working day and night without respite, the most interesting phenomenon is our unsatisfied curiosity as to the result. I think alchemists were equally fascinated, anxious and curious to see the end product #46;..Will the Golem come to life or not? ...So Benayoun was right to call us alchemists. But he forgot to say that real animation, real creativity is alchemy."

"Will it go bang or not?" - If Borowczyk is an alchemist, he's certainly a mischievous one. Every film Borowczyk has made ends in a bang, albeit an understated one. Renaissance documents a charred room gradually reconstructing itself, only for the very grenade which destroyed the room to explode once more. Who would have expected the beautiful Blanche (1971) to end with all but one of the main characters suffering a violent death?, Who would have expected the wedding engagement of Jekyll and Fanny Osbourne (Dr Jekyll et les femmes 1981) to end in arson, murder and the couple tearing each other apart in a frenzied blood lust? Borowczyk is no anarchist but, as Chris Newby points out, chaos, not order has to be restored.

Borowczyk has developed an editing style as rigorous as Bresson, with jarring juxtapositions paralleling early soviet montage cinema. Borowczyk's rapid inter-cutting of long and close ups of contrasting imagery, whether it be in the explosive climax of Renaissance (grenade / clock / doll), the opening sequence of Blanche (castle / dove / girl stepping out of bath) or La Bête (1975) ( girl / trees / snail on ornate slipper) all of which actively disrupts the unity of time in each film. Bold fragmentation of form such as the split screen action in Dyptique (1967) and the reflexivity of Borowczyk's cinema, draws him closer to Dziege Vertov than Eisenstein. Borowczyk doesn't draw a (false) distinction between animation and live action film:

"film in general - the cinema - is animation. Live action cinema is animated photographs. Because ultimately, a strip of film is just a row of images. So if you replace photographed images with drawn ones, it comes to the same thing... In the early days cinema was even called "animated photography"

Borowczyk is undoubtedly one of the most audacious, exciting and imaginative filmmakers to have emerged in the second half of the century. It is therefore increasingly sad and frustrating, not that Borowczyk's later work is "mere soft-core porn", but rather that this is cited as a reason to discredit and ignore the entire body of his work, especially in England. Borowczyk's later sexually explicit work is as imaginative and original as his early animated work, especially La Bête, Dzieje Grezchu (1974) Docteur Jekyll et les femmes and sections of Contes Immoraux (1973) and Heroines du Mal (1979). However, much of his work has also been mutilated by both the censor and producer (hard core inserts), and what's left has been ruined by laughable dubbing. It is now long overdue for all of Borowczyk's work to be restored and made available to a country which has, on the whole, been unable to look through these factors when passing judgement.

Daniel Bird.

With thanks to Paul Buck, Harvey Fenton, Jane Giles, Keith Griffiths, Peter Hames, David Thompson and Pete Tombs.