Borowczyk. Is that the animator who wound up doing porn? Now there’s a tale with a moral. Scandalous insofar as we associate cartoons with children. But then Borowczyk’s films were never ‘for’ children. They were always ‘adult’, in the true sense of the word. That’s to say, death was never far around the corner.

Borowczyk’s story is a tragic one:  lets say he’s the ‘Orson Welles of animation’.  Just as Welles’ gargantuan baroque smacked of self-indulgence, Borowczyk’s thematic sexual preoccupations implied that he was a pervert.   It’s true:  he was a deviant, but only in terms of cinema: there was never anything normal, decorous or restrained about Borowczyk’s films.

Read an entry on Borowczyk in the history books and you’ll be forgiven for thinking that he died twenty, even thirty years ago.  But I’m going to tell his story without the moral.  For some, it’s bizarre, and nothing else.  But for others, it speaks volumes about cinema, particularly the fate of short and animated films.

Borowczyk studied painting and lithography at the Krakow Academy of Arts.  He quickly found work as a poster artist. Looking back at Borowczyk’s posters, and you’re immediately struck by the conditions under which they were produced.  But they’re not just testaments to social realism.  Let’s say Borowczyk was one of the truly great Polish poster artists, alongside Jan Lenica, Henryk Tomaszewski and Roman Cieslewicz.  However, unlike his colleagues, Borowczyk had no discernible style: he was a true radical, reinventing his artistic identity with each poster.  That’s also something true of his first films, made in collaboration with Lenica. Far from just being embryonic works, Once Upon a Time (1957), Requited Sentiments (1957) and Dom (1958) brought about a ‘Cartoon Renaissance’. 

Perhaps it was inevitable that Borowczyk and Lenica’s partnership would end.  Both, however, went to Paris and made their first solo films for producer Anatole Dauman. If Chris Marker didn’t quite co-direct Les Astronautes (1959), and that his credit was the result of the producer’s need for a French name on the film, then at least we can say that Borowczyk was closer in spirit to the
cine-essayist than he was to the nouvelle vague.

During the early sixties Borowczyk became one of the diverse talents supported by Jacques Forgeot’s Cineastes Associes.  He later formed his own production company with Dominique Duvergé, Pantaleon Films. 

Like his posters in Poland, Borowczyk’s short films in France were as diverse as they were original. The one question raised by each film was this:  what is animation?  For Borowczyk, all of cinema was animation. Rosalie (1966) wasn’t, as the catalogues say, ‘animation plus live-action’.  Rather, animation and live action were facets of the same thing: cinema.

I have a particular fondness for The Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal (1967).  There really is no film quite like it. It’s a feature length animation, but with no story to speak of.  As Homer of The Simpsons once said, it’s ‘just a bunch of stuff which happened’.  It’s as bleak and funny as Beckett and one of the first animated features for ‘grown-ups’.

Goto, Island of Love (1968) remains Borowczyk’s masterpiece.  It stands as some kind of artistic summation of his career up until that point.  Like Renaissance (1963) and Rosalie, objects are as much part of the ‘action’ as any actor. There is a story, but it can also be seen as a succession of transactions in spaces no less hermetic than the one depicted in Les Jeux des Anges (1964).  With these two films, Borowczyk established himself as not just the maker of idiosyncratic short animations, but also a major feature filmmaker of international standing.

Blanche (1971), Borowczyk’s second feature, was based on Mazepa, a play by the Polish Romantic poet, Juliusz Slowacki.  Originally Borowczyk had intended to film the drama in Poland four years earlier, but the authorities were reluctant to allow a filmmaker who had enjoyed the ‘freedom’ of the West back inside the communist system.  So Borowczyk shifted the action to France, not to mention back in time.  It’s about an Ophelia-like beauty (played by the director?s wife, Ligia Branice) that falls prey to the lust of men around her. Blanche has a similarly tragic end to Goto, Island of Love, and in many ways stands as a companion piece to its predecessor, but one that is considerably less weird.  But above all else, Blanche is proof on the influence of Polish Romanticism on Borowczyk’s work as a whole.  The sex and death one associates with Borowczyk (or, for that matter, Polanski or Zulawski) stems less from French surrealism than from Poland’s own literary heritage.

Looking back at Immoral Tales (1973) it’s tempting just to think that Borowczyk ‘sold out’.  However, the truth behind Borowczyk’s ‘erotic turn’ is more complex.  First, we need to ask ourselves, was the erotic impulse completely absent from his previous work?  Let’s not forget the voyeuristic astronaut, or Mr Kabal’s extending binoculars.  Goto, Island of Love and Blanche were about the violence resulting from desires to possess a single woman.  What’s more, Immoral Tales is not really about sex; it’s more about the rituals leading up towards the act.  The strengths and weaknesses of the film rest not in its sexual daring, but in its formal qualities.  It’s a portmanteau film, but one in which each of the four episodes plays off one another: like Diptych (1967), the parts form a Gestalt.  Watch Immoral Tales immediately after A Particular Collection (1972) - a surrealist documentary on belle époque erotica - and the film breaches Makavejev territory, mixing factual elements, comment and disparate factual strands.  Today, the film might seem politically incorrect, but in 1974 it was taboo busting.  Immoral Tales was second only to Emmanuelle as the most successful film in France during the seventies.

Thanks to Stanislaw Rozewicz, then literary director of the TOR film unit, which is perhaps most famous now for producing Kieslowskí’s films, Borowczyk was invited back to Poland in 1975 to direct Story of Sin, based on the book by Stefan Zeromski. Interestingly, the film’s anti-clericalism makes it more prescient today in Poland than it was thirty years ago.

When Borowczyk returned to France, he returned to a short film which he had intended to be part of Immoral Tales, The Beast (1975).  The seventeen-minute short, which featured a Marie Antoinette-like girl being ravaged by a hairy beast, had originally created a storm of controversy when it was presented as a ‘work in progress’ at the London Film Festival. In its feature-length form, the ‘immoral tale’ becomes an erotic dream which interrupts the plans of a venal French aristocrat to marry off his son to a wealthy American heiress.

The film world rarely forgives success, and Borowczyk found himself in a peculiar rut between art and exploitation, not too dissimilar to Paul Morrissey’s ‘Warhol’ films.  La Marge (1976) may feature the Emmanuelle girl, but it had little in the way of sexual titillation.  Rather, La Marge is as passionately hateful as a Celine novel, revealing the filmmaker’s unease in the ‘real’ world. In Borowczyk’s Paris, there are no shots of Eiffel Tower, only building sites, venal pimps and malicious call girls.  What’s more, the camera is all over the place, ‘rough and ready’ documentary-style.  Around this time, Borowczyk became particularly fond of a type of Russian cartridge loading 16-millimetre camera. He used it to great effect in Brief von Paris (1976), a forty-five minute wordless portrait of his adopted city, as well as L’amour Monstre de Tous les Temps (1979), a short documentary on the Serbian painter, Popovic Ljuba.  Borowczyk captures the artist realising a non-photographic image before our very eyes:  is it documentary or animation?  Both films dispel the notion that Borowczyk had dispensed with art and experiment during the seventies. Rather, the obscurity of these films is more a sad reflection of the increasing marginalisation of the short film form.

I defy anyone to watch The Blood of Doctor Jekyll (1981) and dismiss Borowczyk as a wasted talent. It’s a bloody, knockabout surrealist farce, featuring an utterly demented turn by Patrick McGee. The last ten minutes or so is a tour-de-force of editing and sound design that practically breaks every rule in the book. However, the film was a disaster at the box office, and today, because of legal issues, The Blood of Doctor Jekyll is in danger of becoming a ‘lost film’.

Thereafter, Borowczyk had considerable difficulty in raising finance for his projects.  At one point there was talk of Borowczyk directing an adaptation of Alexander Dumas’ La Reine Margot, but nothing materialised.  In interviews he talked of films about Chopin, de Sade and Gilles des Rais, but nobody was interested.  Then there was Nefertiti, Borowczyk’s dream project.  At one point, it looked like Borowczyk would be making a film in England, based on a script by a young graduate of the Royal College of Art, Cherry Potter.  Just imagine that: Borowczyk, who Variety was then dubbing the ‘defrocked Prince of art-house erotica’, directing a feminist period drama for the British Film Institute!

It’s still something of a mystery why, in 1985, Borowczyk sold his name to the producer of the Emmanuelle series. The decision was tantamount to career suicide.  Thereafter, there were few film critics prepared to take Borowczyk seriously.  What makes his decision all the more puzzling is a short animation he made for his old producer, Anatole Dauman, in the same year.  Scherzo Infernal (1985) suggests that Borowczyk was still capable of producing great animation during the eighties. Why did nobody see it? The advertising reel had displaced the short before the feature. Only with the advent of DVD has this film, along with many of Borowczyk?s other shorts, become available to the wider public.

Borowczyk managed to direct one more film, a literary adaptation of recent book by his friend, Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, perhaps most famous as the author of Girl on a Motorcycle. However, its austere, apocalyptic tone begs the question of whether this, like many other of Borowczyk’s feature films, could indeed be described as being erotic. Yes, Ceremonie d’amour (1988) has a sex scene, but like Pasolini’s Salo, that doesn’t make it erotic. After directing three light, formally interesting episodes for the Serie Rose television series, Borowczyk retired from filmmaking, devoting himself to writing, publishing a collection of short stories, titled L’Anatomie du Diable, in 1992.

When he died in February 2006, the same old story of the animator turned pornographer was printed in the obituary sections of newspapers. However, I’d argue Borowczyk’s films still have much to offer, particularly in terms of challenging popular critical distinctions between ‘animated’ and ‘live action’ films, as well as narrative strategies in both short and feature length forms.

© Daniel Bird 2006
This text originally appeared in the festival catalogue.