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Enticements to Voyeurism

From Cinema Papers no. 50, Feb / March, 1985.

The exuberance with which Polish-born film maker Walerian Borowczyk pursues his muse has, at times, earned him the unhappy and inexact epithet of pornographer. And indeed the key words of many of his feature titles - Contes immoraux (Immoral Tales, 1974), Dzieje grzechu (Story of Sin, 1975), Les heroines du mal (Heroines of Evil, 1979) - could almost form a lexicon of transgression. In his case, however, this is more of a flair than an obsession.

Borowczyk studied art in Cracow and began his film career designing posters for the major films showing there at the time. In 1953, he made his first experimental short. In 1957 he began to work in animation and the next year moved to Paris, where he has lived ever since. Even as a maker of experimental animated films he showed signs of being an incipient establishment feather-ruffler when one of his 'cartoons', Le dictionnaire du Joachim (Joachim's Dictionary, 1965), was rejected by the directors of the Tours Festival in 1966 on the grounds that it was "detrimental to the prestige of art."

Borowczyk is unique among European film makers. His films abound with the sort of content that would seem best suited to those brigades of gentlemen perennially dressed for inclement weather. Yet, the painterly care with which he fills each frame at once removes him from such associations. Functioning on each film as director, director of photography, editor, scriptwriter and set designer he would seem to embody a sort of post-Lumiere version of the Renaissance ideal (the Renaissance being a period of which he is fond and has treated on more than one occasion in his films).

The following interview was conducted in Borowczyk's Paris office by Susan Adler.

I didn't go to film school: I studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. I started making films because I wanted to, playing around with a still camera. Then, when I was 14 years-old, I saw a 16 mm movie camera in a shop window. It was open, revealing all the internal mechanisms. I was spellbound. As you can imagine, such goods were rare in Poland at that time. I bought one and started to experiment with it. But, as soon as I saw the first images that I had made, all notions of 'technique' flew out the window

Technique is something you can learn very quickly; school isn't necessary for that. School can serve as a forum, a meeting place for young people - or people in general - who have the same passion. More often than not, the stairways and corridors of schools are the true classrooms and lecture halls, and it is often there that the future of the art-form is determined. I rejected the idea of film school but I don't deny that it has certain things to offer: technique, experience with certain structures . . . with the camera.

Artists had liberty, but it was liberty under surveillance. For painters, there was almost total liberty within the framework of socialism. In spite of everything, we were free. For the generation of painters after the war, the style was post-expressionist, abstract and sometimes surrealist.

At that time I wasn't involved in cinema. I had bought my camera because I was fascinated by its mechanism, not to use it for professional purposes. To this day, I am fascinated by moving pictures: sculptures which are mechanical. They evoke a certain emotion in me, like when I saw the open camera in the shop window.

The first things I made with it were shorts, rather like paintings in a way. The fundamental thing for me is that miracle which allows 24 frames a second to give the illusion of movement. This is the truth of cinema.

Wajda was at the Academy of Fine Arts with me for two years. But he chose to follow a different path. He left the Academy and enrolled at the Lodz Film School. Wajda was a good painter but he preferred the cinema.

I still paint but I don't make a living from it. I study art and paint for personal satisfaction but I don't see making films as an extension of painting. And I don't subscribe to the idea that it is natural for a painter to go on to making films simply because they are both visual arts. Cinema is quite independent from the other visual arts.

My first films were shapes or forms in motion. Sometimes I used actors and sometimes I would relate a little story or make a documentary or simply show abstract forms moving in a universe of music. I did everything myself and I experimented a great deal; I taught myself how to edit. You don't have to go to school to learn to edit. All you have to know is that there are 24 frames a second and how to work the camera. Then you start to make images that please you, to develop on your own. That is how I did it anyway. For me, it is not a question of the film (stock) and the camera, it is the miracle of how you can recreate and improve or change and deform nature.

It is important to develop by yourself, because when you goof you regret more bitterly what you have lost. The disadvantage of film school, perhaps, is that you don't acquire the ability to resist, the perseverance to obtain something that belongs to you. There is the tendency to analyze: you spend a lot of time watching other people's films and develop a theoretical approach that tends to be literary.

A true artist, or true filmmaker, gives very little thought to technique. For me, it is a basic truth that there isn't that much discipline involved in art or in expression in general. It is only through quite arbitrary circumstances that one chooses a particular technique or form of expression as opposed to another. In this, for me, the cinema is like other art-forms.

Not necessarily. There are instances when one can draw directly onto the film.

Yes. Maybe it is not for everybody. For me, shooting isn't the most important part: it is the projection, the final effect, which is the most important, and projection doesn't necessarily require the prior use of a camera. You can draw in the movement by scratching onto the film or drawing by hand.

Even if one wants to make films in the more conventional sense of feature films, and one wants to be a true filmmaker as well, it is still necessary to almost draw the movements, either by drawing onto the film stock or by the use of decor and actors. Whatever the method, the important thing is to envisage how the movements will come out during the projection of the film because that is the point at which the relationship with the spectator is established. Natural photography - that is, photographing things as they are - is too easy; the creative process is reduced. Of course, there are photographs and photographs, but even then you deform nature.

If one has decided not to draw directly onto the stock but to photograph from nature, then a new reality has to be created, although composed of naturalistic elements. Here, the biggest difficulty is to avoid literary narration, to avoid illustration or the mechanical reproduction of nature. There has to be something else, and not just temperament, not just characters and writing: as well as and in spite of all this, there has to be a conception of what film making is.

I will tell you quite frankly that I am not free to exercise mine. True art is freedom and sincerity: an artist expressing himself by doing what he loves to do most, in total freedom, with absolutely no interference. But, unfortunately, nobody can do this; no filmmaker has this freedom.

To be a filmmaker whose work is seen means that you are obliged to work within the framework of degenerate film distribution circuits. I am not talking just about France. The practice of multiplying prints and circulating them in theatres, where money is the primary consideration, where the film can no longer be seen as a work of art but as merchandise produced by an industry is very inhibiting and, of course, cannot permit the filmmaker to have true, unbridled liberty. Even the greatest filmmakers have to smuggle their ideas into their films if they want to hold on to any kind of artistic freedom.

I ask myself: What is cinema? What is my conception of it? Once you have acquired the basic techniques, you don't think about them any more, you just do it. It is probably the miracle of reliving or, rather, being able to live that which doesn't exist in real life.

It is difficult to say. There are many filmmakers and films which are familiar to me and of which I am fond. Often, there are films I have liked very much, but I can't even remember who made them. Sometimes the films I have liked the most are very short, only a few minutes long.

I detest all this naming and judging, even though I am inevitably a party to it. You have asked me a question that has limited my freedom. Do you realize how many filmmakers there may be who are true artists, and yet their films haven't been made or seen? In this sense, I don't have the right to answer that question; it wouldn't be sincere. I would be like those panels of judges which select films for film festivals. What a moronic act! What about the films they haven't seen - films that aren't yet mixed or are still in script stage or that weren't shown because of retrograde or political manoeuvrings?

Of the films showing in Paris at the moment, I am almost certain that I will like Milos Forman's Amadeus, just as I have liked his other films. I like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin very much. I don't share the enthusiasm that there seems to be for the American school, as they call it. I usually don't like anything associated with a school because it implies that there is a lack of originality. Let us say, I like films in general.

When I started to make films, I went to the movies a lot. But now I don't go as often because I find that I scatter myself. I am not a conformist like other people - I don't feel impelled to keep abreast for social reasons - but one is inevitably bombarded by the media in any case.

Talking of media bombardment, you have often been singled out as a target by film critics ...

Ah, critics! In general, film critics are very limited people: they don't seem greatly interested in ideas, or particularly equipped to deal with them. They look at films with an analytical slant that never seems to change. A film should be viewed without any preconceptions. Film criticism is like a circus: a cultural institution in which the same ideas inevitably appear. The garish is celebrated and everything is keyed to the intelligence of a five year-old.

Films are rarely spoken of as they should be by critics and usually only those films that are likely to draw large crowds are talked about. Artistic worth is rarely taken into consideration. A good number of different newspapers come out every day each one with its own film critic. It never ceases to amaze me how critics who see perhaps two films a day which makes 700 a year, can analyze and write about, say, 365 films all with the same emotion. It must mean they don't believe what they write.

That is all part of the apparatus that generates more money for more films. Surely, the pictures of naked women or the other suggestive images that are used to promote your films have not been chosen for purely aesthetic reasons . . .

Commercial exigencies and box office potential are quite another subject, and one that doesn't interest me in the slightest. The most important factor for me is to impart my vision. If it turns out that people say, "He has made a commercial film", so much the better.

The first priority should be to make good films and to try to be good filmmakers working with as much freedom as possible. Of course, I know things aren't like that at all. You spend a lot of time playing a complicated game whereby you are busy trying to deceive the people who have given you the money to make a film while, at the same time, convincing them that they are getting what they are paying for. For me, it is an endless struggle, sneaking my visions - and, maybe, obsessions - into my films. Obviously, with short films there is greater freedom. With features, it is very rare that one gets to express oneself freely, but it does happen.

Just the same, erotico-cultural films such as yours must enable you more freedom than other forms?

Erotico what? Who used that term? I have never made films of that type.

Why don't you go looking for eroticism and culture in Walt Disney's films, where both abound? Take any film of his you care to think of: for example, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Why don't you look for eroticism there? There is always a boy and a girl in his films; there are even dogs that kiss each other and make vulgar suggestions - repressed desire that you can feel a mile away. Disgusting: desire that doesn't dare! I have never made films of that type.

If anything, I have been a victim of this semblance that there is in my films. There was a court case in Italy about Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne). With a film, you can change the context of everything, except the titles, by dubbing or by re-cutting it - and that is what they did with my film in Italy. It is the same as someone who cuts up paintings and puts them back together in different configurations with different parts of bodies from other paintings.

The producers dubbed the film and in re-cutting it they left out certain scenes. The film was released but was taken off by the decision of a court in Rome. It created the precedent that every foreign director and actor now has the right to sue the producer or distribution company that has dubbed the film. In Italy they dub all films: it is an incredible violation of the author's rights. I have dubbed things myself but only as a last resort and I have more right to do so since I am the author of the film. In any case, I was a victim of this abuse. I don't think that my films are any more erotic than most other films. Except for documentaries, perhaps: they are very rarely erotic.

The term pornography has been used, erroneously perhaps, In connection with certain of your films...

What is pornography? For me it doesn't exist and yet it is everywhere. Pornography is a legal term, not a critical or artistic one. One can't talk about pornography as the curse of society because in every country it is expressed as being different in the penal code. As for the censorship boards, I have never heard of one of the judges' rushing from a screening to rape and kill because he saw it in a film, so why on earth should they suppose that someone else would behave like that?

What is the difference between a home-made porn flick and a film with erotic content by Borowczyk or Nagisa Oshima?

It all depends on the montage. For me it is exactly the same whether I show a still-life or a man eating an apple or a man and woman during the sexual act.

People have strange problems: they close their eyes if they see a naked person, yet to open up a typewriter is not considered pornographic. And there are certain people who get excited by things that wouldn't normally excite anybody. For example, there is a case of someone who derailed a train and masturbated in the woods nearby to the sound of the screams during the crash. Things like that have actually happened.

In practically every film in the history of cinema, there is a couple embracing. The opposition of the sexes is a constant in the cinema. But where is the limit? You can show a woman's leg and no one thinks anything of it; raise the frame and it is obscene. What is decent and what is indecent is relative; in France and in Japan, the things that are considered pornography are very different.

Are you aware of having been rather heavily condemned by feminists?

Feminists? I didn't think they exist any more: they have grown up and married and now they give luncheons.

Joking aside, women occupy key roles in my crews, a lot more, I imagine, than on many of the films that don't cause the sort of controversy mine seem to. But that is neither here nor there.

Your heroines - Erzsebet Bathory (Paloma Picasso) and Lucrezia Borgia (Florence Bellamy) in Immoral Tales, and Margherita Luti (Marina Pierro), Marceline (Gaelle Legrand) and Marie (Pascale Christophe) in The Heroines of Evil, to name a few - don't have to answer to the society whose rules they transgress You place them beyond good and evil in spite of the titles of these films . . .

Deep down, I am on the side of these women. I hope that those people who have seen these films recognise their heroism: that is, the heroic energy they devote to realising their desires, whatever they may be.

Similar to the heroes In action films?

Yes, but, of course, not at all.

Have you ever considered making an action film?

Genre films disgust me. Nauseating repetitions of the same old thing - that, for me, is pornography. Naturally, I have had offers but I am not interested. There is always good and evil in those films and I am against that. I have my own way of seeing things.

Besides, I have a great aversion to being labelled. Once, John Ford stood up at a press conference at a film festival and sad. "My name is John Ford; I make Westerns." They want me to stand up and say, "Hello, I make erotic films." He didn't distinguish between politically reactionary Westerns and noble Westerns because Westerns have been accepted by the censors and the hypocritical society at large. It would be the same as another director saying, "I've made a neo-Fascist film" - which of course he wouldn't, he would say "Western" or "detective story".

Do you spend a lot of time in pre-production?

No, usually the pre-production period is quite short. But I plan every detail and movement beforehand.

Andrei Tarkovski has said that he does the same thing, and that for him the shoot is almost an anti-climax . . .

I don't feel the same way but I can understand. An imaginary film is, in a way, just as important as one that has been made. It isn't necessary to film. There are a lot of exceptional artists who have only conceived an idea for a film and writers of genius who have only written one book, or not even finished it. After all, what is the making of a piece of sculpture? It is merely the last phase, the least important. The most important phase is when you have the film inside you.

Nonetheless, you do seem to always manage to externalize your conception as you write the screenplays for all your films. Do you adhere strictly to the script during" shooting?

I usually invent my films in moments of insomnia and then, after a certain maturation period, I very carefully plot a final shooting script. But, after that, there isn't a process.

One shouldn't analyze everything so much; it is useless. If you ask me why I made a certain film, I can't answer you. I don't know.

Most of your films are based, to some degree, on works of literature, and often by authors with notorious reputations, such as Frank Wedekind, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, and others who are less notorious, such as Stendhal and Robert Louis Stevenson . . .

If I do a film based on literature on an original story by someone else, what does it matter? Cinema isn't literature; cinema is appearances and, clearly, my way of telling a story isn't the same as the way a writer tells a story. For me movement is creation. It is a pity I can't make films that are completely abstract: after all, people like to watch fireworks displays and sporting events. It is a pity that films haven't taken off in that direction as well.

"Ars amandi" (The Art of Love) is certainly literature, but Ovid's poem doesn't have a narrative thread . . .

Artistically, I am pleased with the film because it is fascinating to recreate periods of history. That is the magnificent thing about filmmaking for me: to relive things that may or may not have existed. If you want, you can have blue apples or strangely coloured trees. What is also fascinating is reconstructing the material culture, objects from an era that is close but at the same time very distant. This is the magic.

To this extent, then, you are free: for example, in the reconstruction of Rome under Augustus In The Art of Love . . .

But, even though I have always done the things I have wanted to do, I have never been able to do them in total freedom. As I said before, one can't be free, because even if I were to do a film with total freedom it would not be released.

You have to flatter the taste of the public but it is not the public that is at fault. People have faith in things, and they want to see new things, but they aren't allowed to. By the time the censors have finished snipping away a bit here and a bit there, one's film is inevitably disfigured.

The version of The Art of Love that will be released in Italy will be disfigured. The Italian producer and distributors have added scenes that are pornographic because the producer decided to make an erotic film. There is a scene in which a swan makes love to a tree and the producer thought it was a pity there wasn't a woman involved. They faked letters that were supposed to be from me giving my permission to add certain scenes.

Nonetheless, I am happy with what I did because I feel that I have done things I hadn't been able to do in other films. Now I have other projects but I will never again work with a producer whom I don't know well.

What other projects are you doing?

I am doing a film in France and then a co-production in Germany for German television. I am preparing a film I have dreamt of doing for a long time: an authentic reconstruction of Nefertiti's story. There is a plan to make it in five episodes for television but the form doesn't interest me as much as the idea of reconstructing ancient Egypt.

The private life of another woman: although I don't share the opinion that you are a pornographer you certainly seem to be something of a voyeur...

No more than you or anyone else. Films and television are all enticements to voyeurism. I make the films, but other people watch them.

By Susan Adler