Walerian Borowczyk Biography
Walerian Borowczyk was a Polish director born on 21 October 1923 in Kwilcz. He graduated in painting and graphics from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and initially worked as a poster designer, winning the Polish National Prize for Graphic Arts in 1953. Borowczyk then moved on to making stop-motion animated short films including Atelier de Fernand Léger and Photographies vivantes in 1954. In 1957, he collaborated with Jan Lenica on the animated film Byt sobie raz (Once upon a time) followed by other animated films such as Strip Tease (1957), Dom (1958, The House) and Szkola (1958, School). He moved to France where he made a series of short films with dark humor and surrealist influences such as Le magicien (1959), L'encyclopédie de grand-maman (1963), Rosalie (1966), based on a story by G. de Maupassant and Théâtre de M. et M.me Kabal (1967), his first feature film. In 1968 he directed Goto, l'île d'amour, which gave him international fame while maintaining surrealist elements typical of certain Polish literature (e.g. W. Gombrowicz), underlining the dreamlike and Elizabethan character of the tragedy where everything becomes ambiguous and hypothetical between nightmares and reality. With Dzieje grzechu (1975; History of Sin) Borowczyk returns to work in Poland and follows the trail of a novel by S.Żeromski, undertaking a journey that dissects the female body, capable of directing the sense of panic in a delirious and dizzying direction of a dissipated love. In the subsequent La bête (1975; The Beast), sexuality is expressed in intense and exhausting visions with continuous masturbations and erotic deliriums accompanied by an obsessive manipulation of the camera used as an alibi to hide the disturbing bestiality of monstrous joints and the surreal results of an almost gothic story. All his films have pursued the exploration of an exhausted and hallucinated eroticism which has often led to a solitary battle against censorship, also fought in Italy, where they have been repeatedly cut, reduced, re-edited, humiliated and distributed as B-movies . Borowczyk's cinema visually renders interrupted pulsations, sensations and excitements, an expressive choice of an obsession with the sensuality of bodies as objects, a cinematic rendering of the mechanisms of desire and pleasure, power and transgression.
