Walerian Borowczyk

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Walerian Borowczyk

Walerian Borowczyk (September 2, 1923 - February 3, 2006) was a Polish

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe. Poland is bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian Enclave and exclave, to the north....
film director

Film director

A film director, or filmmaker, is a person who directs the making of a film. A film director visualizes the Screenplay, controlling a film's artistic and dramatic aspects, while guiding the technical crew and actors in the fulfillment of his or her vision....
. He directed 40 films between 1946 and 1988.

in Kwilcz, near Poznan

Poznan

Poznan is a city in west-central Poland with over 567,882 inhabitants . Located on the Warta River, it is one of the oldest cities in Poland, making it an important historical centre and a vibrant centre of trade, industry, and education....
, he studied painting

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . In art, the term describes both the act and the result, which is called a painting....
at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków

Kraków

Krak?w , in English also spelled Krakow or Cracow , is one of the largest and oldest cities in Poland, with a population of 756,336 in 2007 ....
, then devoted himself to painting and lithography

Lithography

Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface. By contrast, in intaglio a plate is engraving, etching or mezzotint to make cavities to contain the printing ink, and in woodblock printing and letterpress ink is applied to the raised surfaces of letters or images....
, including the creation of posters for the cinema

Film

Film encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the film industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or special effects....
, which earned him a national prize in 1953.

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Encyclopedia

Walerian Borowczyk (September 2, 1923 - February 3, 2006) was a Polish

Poland

Film director

Biography

Born in Kwilcz, near Poznan

Poznan

Painting

Kraków

Lithography

Film

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early-1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
animations, some only a few seconds long, including several comic abecedaria

Abecedarium

An abecedarium is an inscription consisting of the letters of the alphabet, almost always listed in order. Typically, abecedaria are practice exercises....
. His most acclaimed early films were Byl sobie raz (Time Upon a Once) (1957) and Dom (House) (1958, with Jan Lenica

Jan Lenica

Jan Lenica was a Poland graphic designer and cartoonist.A graduate of the Architecture Department of Warsaw Polytechnic, Lenica became a poster illustrator and a collaborator on the early animation films of Walerian Borowczyk....
). In 1959, he worked with Chris Marker

Chris Marker

Chris Marker is a French writer, photographer, film director, multimedia artist and Documentary film maker.He is best known for directing La Jet?e , as well as Sans Soleil and AK , a documentary about Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa....
for Les Astronautes. Major works of this period include the stop motion

Stop motion

Stop motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small amounts between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames are played as a continuous sequence....
film Renaissance (1963), which uses reverse motion to depict various destroyed objects (a prayer book, a stuffed toy, etc.) re-assembling themselves, only to be destroyed again when the last object (a bomb) is complete, and the nightmarish Jeux des anges (1964), selected by Terry Gilliam

Terry Gilliam

Terrence Vance Gilliam is an American-born British writer, filmmaker, animator and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. Gilliam is also known for directing several well-regarded films including Brazil , Twelve Monkeys , and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ....
as one of the ten best animated films of all time. In 1967, he directed his first animated feature film

Feature film

In the film industry, a feature film is a film made for initial Film distributor in Movie theater and being the "main attraction" of the screening ....
, Théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal: un film dessiné pour les adultes (Mr. and Mrs. Kabal's Theatre

Mr. and Mrs. Kabal's Theatre

Mr. and Mrs. Kabal's Theatre is the first full-length and last animated movie by Walerian Borowczyk, produced in France and running 80 minutes....
).

Borowczyk moved into live-action feature film with Goto, l'île d'amour
Goto, Island of Love

Goto, Island of Love is a 1968 in film drama film directed by Walerian Borowczyk and starring Pierre Brasseur. ...
(Goto, Isle of Love) (1968) and Blanche (1971), both tales of illicit love thwarted by jealous husbands, and both starring his own wife, Ligia Branice. One of his most appreciated films of this period, Dzieje grzechu (A Story of Sin) (1975), which was nominated for Palme d'or

Palme d'Or

The Palme d'Or is the highest prize awarded to competing films at the Cannes Film Festival. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee....
, is an adaptation of a Polish literary classic by Stefan Zeromski

Stefan Zeromski

Stefan Zeromski was a Poland novelist and dramatist. He was called the "conscience of Polish literature". He also wrote under the pen names: Maurycy Zych, J?zef Katerla and Stefan Iksmorez....
. Like his 1966 short film Rosalie (a Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant was a popular 19th-century France writer and considered one of the fathers of the modern short story.A prot?g? of Gustave Flaubert, Maupassant's stories are characterized by their economy of style and their efficient, effortless d?nouement....
adaptation and a Silver Bear winner), Dzieje grzechu had successfully rendered the themes of seduction and infanticide

Infanticide

Infanticide is the practice of someone intentionally causing the death of an infant. Often it is the mother who commits the act, but criminology recognizes various forms of non-maternal child murder....
. Contes immoraux (Immoral Tales

Immoral Tales (film)

Immoral Tales is a 1974 film directed by Poland film director Walerian Borowczyk.The film is composed of four stories set in four different epochs....
) (1974) and his later work, including Interno di un convento (Behind Convent Walls) (1977) (inspired by Promenades dans Rome of Stendhal

Stendhal

Henri-Marie Beyle , better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century France writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism in his two novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme ....
) and Cérémonie d'amour (Rites of Love) (1988) have been controversial, lauded by some for their unique surrealist vision and derided by others as contentless pornography

Pornography

Pornography or porn is the explicit depiction of sexual subject matter with the sole intention of sexually exciting the viewer. It is to a certain extent similar to erotica, which is the use of sexually arousing imagery....
. Especially, La Bête (The Beast, 1975) (based on the story Lokis by Prosper Mérimée

Prosper Mérimée

Prosper M?rim?e was a France dramatist, history, Archaeology, and short story writer. He is perhaps best known for his novella Carmen , which became the basis of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen....
and originally conceived in 1972 as a film on its own, but then in 1974 as the fifth story in Contes immoraux) was seen by many as a decline in the director's career after Dzieje grzechu, except in France, where it was hailed by prominent critics such as Ado Kyrou.

In 1981, he made Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (Blood of Dr Jekyll), a version of the Jekyll and Hyde story starring Udo Kier

Udo Kier

Udo Kier is a German people–England actor....
and Patrick Magee

Patrick Magee (actor)

Patrick Magee was a Northern Irish Tony Award-winning actor best known for his collaborations with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as well as his appearances in horror films....
and depicting Jekyll's transformation as a violent rebellion against the Victorian morality

Victorian morality

Victorian morality is a distillation of the morality views of people living at the time of Victoria of the United Kingdom in particular, and to the moral climate of Great Britain throughout the 19th century in general that were in stark contrast to the morality of the previous Georgian period....
. In his 1988 book Nightmare Movies, Kim Newman

Kim Newman

Kim Newman is an English journalist, film critic, and fiction writer. Recurring interests visible in his work include film history and horror fiction?both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's Dracula at the age of eleven?and alternate history ....
described the film as "dark, misanthropic and interestingly offensive". He made a brief return to animation with his 1984 short film Scherzo infernal. In 1987, he directed Emmanuelle 5
Emmanuelle 5

Emmanuelle 5 is Poland surrealist Walerian Borowczyks penultimate theatrical feature, a film whose merits are hotly debated among cult and artfilm lovers....
, an installment of the Emmanuelle

Emmanuelle

Emmanuelle is the lead character in a series of France soft porn erotic movies based on a character created by Emmanuelle Arsan in the novel Emmanuelle ....
series, that was also released in a hardcore video-only version. He was unhappy with the project due to a dispute concerning the casting of lead actress Monique Gabrielle

Monique Gabrielle

Monique Gabrielle is an American model and actress.Gabrielle was the Penthouse List of Penthouse Pets for December 1982. Since then, she has had a career as a B-movie actress....
. In 1988 and 1990, he directed four episodes for the series Série rose: Les Chefs d’œuvre de la littérature érotique on M6

Métropole 6

M?tropole 6, known popularly as simply M6, is a France television service owned by a company called M?tropole T?l?vision. M6 broadcasts an over-the-air SECAM signal, and is also carried on the Atlantic Bird 3 broadcast satellite....
.

Many of Borowczyk's films use historical settings, including Ars Amandi: l'arte di amare (The Art of Love) (1983), set in the time of Ovid

Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso was a Roman Empire poet known as Ovid to the English language-speaking world, who wrote about love, seduction, and Roman mythology transformation....
(and featuring the poet as a character); Blanche, set during the Middle Ages

Middle Ages

File:Karl 1 mit papst gelasius gregor1 sacramentar v karl d kahlen.jpgThe Middle Ages of European history are a period in history which lasted for roughly a millennium, commonly dated from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the beginning of the Early Modern Period in the 16th century, marked by the division of Western Christi...
; and three of the four episodes in Contes immoraux, set respectively in the nineteenth century, the sixteenth century, and the Borgia papacy.

A number of his films (like the "tale" La Marée (The Tide) in Contes immoraux, the 1976 La Marge (The Streetwalker), the episode Marceline in Les Héroïnes du mal: Margherita, Marceline, Marie (Immoral Women) (1979), and Cérémonie d'amour were based on stories by André Pieyre de Mandiargues

André Pieyre de Mandiargues

Andr? Pieyre de Mandiargues was a French writer born in Paris. He became an associate of the Surrealists and married the Italian painter Bona Tibertelli de Pisis, niece of the Italian metaphysical painter Filippo de Pisis....
. A less usual product of this cooperation was Une collection particulière of 1973, a representation of Borowczyk's collection of pornographic items, with Mandiargues having written (and read) the narration. His 1980 film Lulu was an onscreen adaptation of the play by Frank Wedekind

Frank Wedekind

Benjamin Franklin Wedekind , usually known as Frank Wedekind, was a Germany playwright. His work, which often criticizes bourgeois attitudes , is considered to anticipate expressionism, and he was a major influence on the development of Epic theater....
.

Borowczyk was the author of two books; Anatomia diabla (Anatomy of Devil) (1992) and Moje polskie lata (My Polish Years) (2002).

He died of heart failure in Paris in 2006.

Filmography

External links

A review of the film Les Héroïnes du mal, in relation with Borowczyk cinema

Walerian Borowczyk

Biography

Filmography

Further reading

External links