WALERIAN BOROWCZYK

WALERIAN BOROWCZYK CINEMA OF EROTIC DREAMSBY JEREMY MARK ROBINSONWalerian 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. Série 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. You probably won’t know many other people who’ve even heard of Walerian Borowczyk, let alone seen one of his films. His reputation as a producer of European arty porny films (art-as-porn films or porn-as-art films) is probably all that many people will have heard of him (movies with sex and nudity do seem to travel well, crossing borders). Fully illustrated, with over 340 stills from all of Walerian Borowczyk’s movies and short films (including a gallery from the history of erotica), a bibliography, complete filmography and notes. The text has been updated throughout for this new, 4th edition, which is over twice the length of previous editions. Hardcover with a colour laminated cover and a colour flyleaf. 636 pages. www.crmoon.com