Walerian Borowczyk

WALERIAN BOROWCZYK 

CINEMA OF EROTIC DREAMS

BY JEREMY MARK ROBINSON

Walerian Borowczyk (1923-2006) is one of cinema's great talents. Quite simply, there is no filmmaker quite like 'Boro'. Borowczyk's films have an astonishing, magical quality. They reach a place very rare in contemporary cinema, and are quite unlike the films of any other auteur. Borowczyk's films create their own space, with imagery, sounds and music of a really exceptional power. 

The book discusses each Walerian Borowczyk film in detail, sometimes going through scenes shot by shot. 

This fourth edition includes new chapters on 

Borowczyk's short films and animations 

The Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal 

The Streewalker (a.k.a. La Marge) 

Lulu 

The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Miss Osbourne (a.k.a. Docteur Jekyll et les femmes) 

and the Softly From Paris TV series (a.k.a. Srie Rose). 

Blanche, Immoral Tales, Behind Convent Walls, The Beast and Goto: Island of Love, can be celebrated for their painterly sense, the use of props and costumes, and the incredible attention to detail. Very stylized, mysterious, poetic. Not forgetting the acute awareness of the history of religion and literature. Walerian Borowczyk produced some of the most memorable images in European cinema, the equal of Ingmar Bergman, Sergei Paradjanov or Andrei Tarkovsky. 

The great Walerian Borowczyk masterpiece i's Goto: Island of Love. That can rank alongside the great films in the history of cinema. Immoral Tales could be placed in the masterpiece class too. The other Borowczyk films are often as fascinating, often more grotesque - certainly more sexually explicit - but probably not as wholly satisfying as Goto: Island of Love, from a conventional critical standpoint. But The Beast, Blanche, Behind Convent Walls, and Love Rites would count as extraordinary films by most standards. They may not be quite up there with Persona (Ingmar Bergman) or 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini), but taken together they form a group of works that mark Borowczyk out as a maverick original. Similarly, Borowczyk isn't a filmmaker celebrated by critics or filmmakers, like Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Jean Renoir or Sergei Eisenstein, and his films don't make critics' top ten lists. For detractors, Borowczyk's films were better when they concerned ideas rather than the senses - philosophy not sex.