Visual artist, script writer, stage designer, director of animated and feature films, writer. Born in 1923 in Kwilcz near Poznań. Lived in France from 1959. Died on 3 February 2006.

He studied painting and graphic arts at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1951. As a student, he made amateur short animated and feature films. He designed theatre and film posters. From 1950, he published satirical drawings in "Szpilki", and later in "Nowa Kultura" and "Życie Literackie" magazines. At the National Art Exhibition in Warsaw in 1951, he won the third prize for graphic art. In 1953, with Jan Tarasin, he published the picture album "Rysunki satyryczne", maintained in typical socialist realist style. In the same year, he received the Polish National Prize for his cycle of lithographs "Nowa Huta". In 1956, he started a collaboration with Jan Lenica. In 1957 they made an animated cartoon, "Once Upon a Time", which brought them international fame. In 1959, after making a few more films, including one on his own ("School"), Borowczyk left Poland for good and settled in Paris, where he went on to make short and feature-length animated films and short feature films. From 1969, Walerian Borowczyk focused almost completely on full-length feature films.

Walerian Borowczyk was involved in many art genres; beside animated films, short feature films that the critics hailed as masterpieces, and interesting full-length productions, he was one of the main authors of the Polish poster school, and first and foremost, of artistic erotic cinema. The author of satirical drawings, sculptures, film sets, he exhibited his works in Poland and abroad. He received many prizes for his artistic output. He also wrote a volume of short stories, "L'anatomie du diable" / "Anatomia diabła", published in France in 1992 and in Poland a year later, and a book of memoirs, "Mes années polonaises" / "Moje polskie lata" written in French (2002).

Walerian Borowczyk was awarded the Max Ernst Prize for his life's work in animated films in 1967, and the President of the Italian Republic's Gold Medal in 1971, and was a recipient of many awards at festivals of short films, including those in Oberhausen, Mannheim, Tours, Berlin, Venice and Krakow.

No record of the greatest achievements of animated film worldwide would be complete without mention of two Polish artists, Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica. Their joint film from 1957, "Once Upon a Time", followed by films they made together, such as "House" in 1958, and also their individual productions, triggered a true revolution in this peripheral film genre. They turned animated film into an art capable of communicating the most complex, difficult and serious messages. Marcin Giżycki was not wrong when he wrote many years later ("Kino" 12/2001), that "in animated films ... there were two eras: before and after Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk". As "milestone works" he mentions their joint projects "Once Upon a Time" and "House" as well as Lenica's "Monsieur Tète", "Labyrinth" and "New Janko the Musician", and Borowczyk's "The Astronauts" and "School".

Before the films of Lenica and Borowczyk, animated films in Poland were a less valued form, thought to be films addressed to children, without any great artistic or visual - not to mention philosophical - aspirations.

"Lenica and Borowczyk's brilliance did not reveal itself in technical innovation or inventiveness", wrote Marcin Giżycki, "on the contrary, it was demonstrated in their nonchalant approach to existing techniques and conventions. ... Their films made no secret of the simplicity of means they utilized, camouflaged nothing, their movement and montage as simplified as possible. Just a few pieces of coloured paper, old photographs, junk objects, fragments of found drawings".

The "cut-out" technique they used in their first films worked well as a means of conveying a humorous, amusing message as wellas surreal grotesque expression, right up to Ionesco- and Kafka-like absurdity and horror. From the start, Walerian Borowczyk treated animated film as a form of "highbrow" art. One example of his serious treatment of this film genre is "Renaissance" (1963), which was shown at the film festival in Krakow in 1964 next to Lenica's "Rhinoceros", and which enchanted the well-known film critic, Aleksander Jackiewicz. He even judged it more highly than Lenica's film. It is worth quoting his words, as they reflect the value of Borowczyk's art ("Życie Literackie" 24/1964):

"This is an animated story about the world being ruined as a result of some disaster. The world - a real table, the real objects lying on it, the basket under the table - has physically fallen apart. And then it comes together anew, matter organizing itself into objects again. The trumpet lying on the table starts playing triumphantly. Then a second disaster strikes. The history of matter, the persistence of matter in the face of the forces of destruction - shown on one square metre and a few odd pieces of junk!"

One needs to stress the presence of humour, both in Borowczyk's animated films and his feature films. This was often black humour, in many cases absurd, grotesque, not without reason evoking associations with surrealism. This was the case with "The Magician" (1959), for instance, and "School" (1958). Sometimes, though, a film, even an animated one, had an air of peril. "The Game of the Angels" (1964) is one example, about which Marian Prominski wrote ("Życie Literackie" 25/1965):

"game indeed - a slaughterhouse with streaming dark blue blood, as that seems to be the kind that angels have",

stressing the film's "infernal" mood. It is primarily the case with Borowczyk's full-length animated grotesque, "Mr. and Mrs. Kabal's Theatre" - a film in which the animated protagonists become as realistic as real people, which augments the horror of the story. Aleksander Jackiewicz wrote ("Film" 25/1969) that

"the most fascinating thing about this film is that the Kabals are ostentatiously fictional characters throughout. Dashes, dots that portray people. But they portray them realistically and act like living people".

It is also worth noting the way Borowczyk used photographs in his films. Even as a young man, wrote Urszula Czartoryska ("Fotografia" 11/1961), Borowczyk took a lot of photographs, he also liked putting together pairs of photos in such a way as to give the impression of movement when you looked at them. He used photography extensively in the film "House" (1958). Here, he and Lenica even used photographs made by the pioneer of cinema, Jules Marey, stripping Marey's shots down to their constituent parts and introducing jerky movement akin to the first ever films. In "School" (1958) Borowczyk used almost exclusively his own photos (taken with Lenica), made specially for this film. After filming on a trick-table, 400 photos turned into a 9-minute film, a grotesque protest against military drill which strips people of personality.

" 'School' is ... the height of succinct and simple means, it is a masterpiece of montage, ... it is an attempt at exploiting photographic material not only placed next to normal sequences shot with a film camera, but replacing them", wrote Czartoryska.

Marcin Giżycki noted ("Kwartalnik Filmowy" 19-20/1997-1998) that both artists headed towards Melies in their animations. Lenica was closer to Feuillade's films about Fantomas and Chaplin's burlesques. Borowczyk, though he made the colourful, Melies-style "The Astronauts" (1959), moved towards trick film. It is a fact that photographs often played a more important role in his animated films than drawings. With time, actors appeared as well, treated - as the critics emphasized - just like animated characters.

Borowczyk's full-length feature debut "Goto, Island of Love" from 1968 was enthusiastically received by the critics. The director received the first-ever award named after the French film critic Georges Sadoul for this film. His first all-actor short "Rosalie" (1966) met with a similarly enthusiastic reception, with Bolesław Michałek ("Kino" 8/1967) finding it to contain "pure, crystalline form" and "an amazing frugality of means", while the critic who signed his name "wa" called the 15-minute film a masterpiece ("Magazyn Filmowy" 2/1971). His next feature films also brought Borowczyk recognition: "Blanche" (1971), "Immoral Tales" (1974) and a film made in Poland, extremely interesting visually and psychologically, and at the same time faithful to the original novel, "Story of a Sin" (1975), a melodrama that the director himself called an "illustration" of Żeromski's novel. It does need saying, though, that Borowczyk's moving away from animation had a mixed reception. Edward Chudziakowski ("Student" 6-7/1968) wrote about the 1967 film "Gavotte" that "it turned out to be a pretentious macabre film in which one searches in vain ... for philosophical subtext". He added that Borowczyk's departure from animation "is starting to bring less and less interesting effects". Meanwhile, Aleksander Jackiewicz ("Film" 19/1969) - seeing the story of a tyrant, death and love as being rather uninteresting and derivative - criticized "Goto, Island of Love": "There's a story too many in this film."

Oskar Sobanski ("Film" 44/1992) wrote that the films made in 1974-76 formed the central part of Borowczyk's output, naming "Immoral Tales", "Story of a Sin", "The Margin" and "The Beast":

"They won the greatest renown and practically exhausted the director's aesthetic and intellectual potential".

Films like "Immoral Tales" and "The Beast" consolidated Borowczyk's position as a maker of artistic erotic films. Subsequent productions, "Behind Convent Walls", "Heroines of Evil", "Lulu", "Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes", "Ars Amandi" and the fifth part of the "Emmanuelle" cycle - to repeat after Oskar Sobanski - "are a collection of erotic themes of no great importance". In these films, from an issue that triggered existential questions about the nature of man (culture versus nature), sex turned into a magnet to draw in audiences.

These films were also obviously inspired by de Sade, or more generally by 18th-century French libertinism, where sex was coupled with pain, and also by Italian and Spanish mannerism. Libertinism is also the source of the treatment of woman as an object that is adulated and humiliated at the same time. However, as one can notice after reading Borowczyk's short stories, this inspiration is not only outdated but also lacks artistic value. That includes a lack of film value, as the more unkind critics noted, to mention Jan Gondowicz ("Film" 44/1992) in a column devoted to "The Beast". Even Borowczyk himself seemed to assess this part of his work differently. At a retrospective of his films in Krakow in 1999, he did not want to show these particular productions, as Boguslaw Zmudzinski ("Opcje" 2/1999) reported. Zmudzinski wrote that "they call Walerian Borowczyk 'Boro' in Paris". He added that Borowczyk "is an outstanding director of animated and short films", while 'Boro' was associated chiefly with a director of feature films who "gained the ambiguous fame of the creator of French erotic cinema", or even the fame of a "soft porn classic". No wonder many of his films were banned in various countries for years, edited by censors, cut, changed; there were even problems with some of his short films, to mention "Collection Particuliere".

Borowczyk himself did distinguish between pornography and erotic films, though. Talking to Andrzej Markowski ("Kino" 4/1975), he said:

"Eroticism, sex, is one of the most moral parts of life. Eroticism does not kill, exterminate, encourage evil, lead to crime. On the contrary, it makes people gentler, brings joy, gives fulfilment, leads to selfless pleasure".

Despite the controversies surrounding Borowczyk's successive feature films, they always display great visual imagination, great creative inventiveness, absurd humour, and grotesque inspired by the surreal. It is worth noting one more thing. Borowczyk was the absolute maker of his films, not only the director and script writer, but also the set designer. He imposed the way the films were shot, and as critics emphasized and he never denied, he was a film maker who prepared everything meticulously and was in full control of the production process. Even such great cameramen as the cinematographer for "Story of a Sin", Zygmunt Samosiuk, had to submit to him completely. One could even say that Borowczyk created not only the film reality but also himself, since the image of 'Boro' was clearly created for the benefit of the liberal critics and French audiences. Perhaps his altered date and place of birth (Wojnowice 1932), different from what can be found in encyclopaedias, which the author mentioned in the afterword to his collection of short stories "L'anatomie du diable", was an element of that creation.

Filmography

Animated films - short and full-length as well as short documentaries and feature films:

• 1946 "Sierpień / Mois d'août" (approx. one minute). Poland
  
  
• 1949 "Głowa / The Head" short feature film (approx. one minute). Poland
  
  
• 1949 "Magik / The Magician" (approx. one minute). Poland
  
  
• 1950 "Tłum / The Crowd" (approx. one minute). Poland
  
  
• 1955 "Żywe fotografie/ Photographies Vivantes" short documentary made in Paris. Poland
  
  
• 1955 "Jesień / Autumn", short feature film. A melancholy stroll in an empty park in the autumn, where colourful summer returns suddenly for a moment. Poland
  
  
• 1955 "Atelier de Fernand Leger" short documentary film made in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, at the studio of Fernand Léger. Poland
  
  
• 1957 "Dni Oświaty / Education Days" (with Jan Lenica), for the Polish newsreel service. Poland
  
  
• 1957 "Strip-Tease" (with Jan Lenica) approx. 3-minute animated film for the Polish newsreel service. Poland
  
  
• 1957 "Był sobie raz / Once Upon a Time" (with Jan Lenica), animated film (cut-outs and cartoons). The film was made using the simplest graphic means: geometric figures cut out of coloured paper, together with a collage of figures cut out from old magazines. It played with form, but this play was subordinated to deeper subtexts. (Awards: 1957 - 7th International Festival of Documentaries and Short Films, Venice, Silver Lion of St. Mark in the experimental film category, Polish Festival of Animated Films Warsaw, Third Prize; 1958 - "Warsaw Mermaid" award from Polish critics for the best short film in 1957, 7th International Festival of Documentaries and Educational Films Mannheim, First Prize - Gold Ducat) Poland
  
  
• 1957 "Nagrodzone Uczucia / Love Requited" (with Jan Lenica) in the repollero technique (unanimated boards). About the work of the naive painter J. Plaskociński. A playful tale about the requited love of a shy young man. Poland
  
  
• 1958 "Dom / House" (with Jan Lenica) - combined (some animated shots). Featuring the director's wife, Ligia Branice-Borowczyk. Urszula Czartoryska wrote that "House" was characterized by "a free, loose structure, preference for inanimate objects and non-artistic creations of man, use of real objects, close-to-surrealist overall atmosphere". (Awards: 1958 - Grand Prix at the Expo-58 Brussels International Experimental Film Competition) Poland
  
  
• 1958 "Szkoła / School" short film, combined technique. Animated photographs (made together with Jan Lenica) with elements of animated cartoon. A display of military drill. Aleksander Jackiewicz wrote ("Film" 27/1967): "an excellent tale made in the technique of animated photographs - about people, drill and the army: a tale about the man robot, always ready, made up of a uniform and a rifle, composed solely of deliberate movements". (Awards: 1960 - 6th International Festival of Short Films, Oberhausen, special mention) Poland
  
  
• 1958 "Sztandar młodych / Banner of Youth" (with Jan Lenica) - animated, approx. 3-minute cartoon encouraging viewers to read "Sztandar Młodych", made at the Documentary Film Studio (WFD). Poland
  
  
• 1959 "Les astronautes / The Astronauts" (dir. with Chris Marker), short, mixed technique. Drawings and old engravings. Shots edited and copied into one another, interlaced with drawn elements. A funny science-fiction film about space travel. The story of an amateur astronaut and his tawny owl travelling in a cardboard spaceship. (Awards: 1960 - International Film Festival Oberhausen, FIPRESCI Prize) France
  
  
• 1959 "Terra incognita" animated film in which Borowczyk utilized Alexandre Alexeieff's pioneering idea of using pins to achieve a shadow and movement effect. Black and white. France
  
  
• 1959 "Le magicien / The Magician" animated film. An amusing story about a man and his unruly top hat that changes form. France
  
  
• 1959 "La tète / Head". France
  
  
• 1959 "La foule". France
  
  
• 1959 "Les Stroboscopes: Magasins du XIX Siecle / Stroboscopes: 19th Century Stores". France
  
  
• 1960 "l'ecriture / Writing". France
  
  
• 1961 "La Boite a Musique / The Music Box" animated film. France
  
  
• 1961 "Solitude". France
  
  
• 1961 "Les bibliotheques / Libraries". France
  
  
• 1961 "Les ecoles / Schools". France
  
  
• 1962 "Le concert de M. et Mme Kabal / The Concert of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal" animated short. Slapstick comedy. France
  
  
• 1962 "La fille sage / A Well-Behaved Girl" animated film. France
  
  
• 1963 "l'Encyclopedie de grand-maman en 13 volumes / Grandmother's Encyclopaedia" animated short. A playful film made using etchings from the Art Nouveau period. Between surrealism and Monty Python. France
  
  
• 1963 "Renaissance" animated short. Featuring real objects that are destroyed, and thanks to reversing the tape are then restored to existence. Aleksander Jackiewicz ("Film" 27/1964): "This is the story of matter being reborn after a catastrophe". (Awards: 1963 - International Film Festival Tours, Jury's special prize) France
  
  
• 1963 "Holy Smoke". France
  
  
• 1963 "Gancia". France
  
  
• 1964 "Les jeux des anges / The Game of the Angels" animated short. Abstract forms in a setting evocative of a concentration camp created by the universe. (Awards: 1964 - 10th International Days of Short Films, Tours, Jury's special prize and FIPRESCI Prize). France
  
  
• 1964 "Le musee / The Museum". France
  
  
• 1965 "Le dictionnaire de Joachim / Joachim's Dictionary" animated short. The self-destruction of an old wooden gramophone. (Awards: 1966 - International Film Festival Oberhausen, FIPRESCI Prize, International Film Festival Melbourne, Prize) France
  
  
• 1965 "Un ete torride" an episode from the full-length film "Le theatre de Monsieur et Madame Kabal / Mr. and Mrs. Kabal's Theatre". France
  
  
• 1966 "Rosalie" short feature film based on Guy de Maupassant's short story "Rosalie Prudent". Borowczyk's first short film fully his own. A white background, on it a face speaking about the murder of the newly born babies of the heroine - a seduced servant, played by Borowczyk's wife, Ligia Branice-Borowczyk, with one-second stills showing objects associated with murder and the crime in question, including a bundle of newspapers and rags, a garden spade, the seducer's picture, spread out on the judge's desk. (Awards: 1966 - International Film Festival Berlin, Silver Bear, 19th International Film Festival Locarno, youth jury's special mention for a short film; 1967 - 4th International Short Film Festival Krakow, Golden Dragon) France
  
  
• 1966 "Le petit poucet" animated film. France
  
  
• 1967 "Dyptique" short feature film. (Awards: 1967 - International Film Festival Mannheim, Interfilm Award) France
  
  
• 1967 "Le Theatre de Monsieur et Madame Kabal / Mr. and Mrs. Kabal's Theatre" full-length animated film. Borowczyk's first full-length animated film "for adult and mature people", as the director said at the screening in 1967 ("Film" 40/1967). The dark and grotesque story of a married couple: the wife - a mechanical monster made up of iron parts, and her henpecked husband. When Mrs. Kabal eats a butterfly, she gets indigestion and her husband has to travel to his wife's insides to search for the cause of her illness. The film includes colour photographic inserts - Mrs. Kabal's dreams. France
  
  
• 1967 "Gavotte" short feature film (Awards: 1967 - International Film Festival Mannheim, Gold Ducat). France
  
  
• 1969 "Le phonographe" animated film. France
  
  
• 1973 "Une collection particuliere" short documentary. A collection of erotic dolls and gadgets. France
  
  
• 1975 "Brief von Paris" medium-length documentary. France
  
  
• 1981 "Hyper-Auto-Erotic" short. France
  
  
• 1981 "Hayaahi" short. France

Full-length feature films:

• 1968 "Goto L'ile d'amour / Goto, Island of Love". On an island that survived an earthquake in the previous century, the bloodthirsty tyrant Goto reigns. One of his favourites, something of a monster, falls in love with the tyrant's beautiful wife. He kills her lover and the tyrant. But the woman of his dreams prefers death to life with a horrible dwarf. At the moment of death, she will find out he truly loved her. Featuring Ligia Branice-Borowczyk and Pierre Brasseur. (Awards: 1969 - Georges Sadoul Prize, France) France
  
  
• 1971 "Blanche" based on the play "Mazepa" by Juliusz Słowacki. A free adaptation, the setting being moved to mediaeval France. Forbidden love between a stepmother and her stepson leads to family tragedy. (Awards: 1972 - International Film Festival Berlin, Grand Prix) France
  
  
• 1974 "Contes immoraux / Immoral Tales". Four stories, including one about Erzsebet Bathory - Countess Dracula, and Lucrezia Borgia. The film was banned in France and was only shown after protests from a number of prominent figures. No wonder, because though visually beautiful, it is bloody and saturated with sex (in one of the stories, the heroine has intercourse with a gigantic cucumber). Borowczyk's first financial success. (Awards: 1974 - Le Prix de l'Age d'Or from the Royal Film Archive in Brussels) France
  
  
• 1975 "Dzieje grzechu / Story of a Sin" based on the novel by Stefan Żeromski. A faithful adaptation of Żeromski's novel. Noteworthy for its rich set design and attention to detail. The action took place in real interiors, and genuine paintings were hired for the film. Poland
  
  
• 1975 "La bete / The Beast" based on motifs from Prosper Merimée's short story "Lokis". A young American woman is to marry a marquis, but a beast appears and falls in love with her. Borowczyk's variation on the fairy-tale material used in 1946 by Jean Cocteau in his film "Beauty and the Beast". While that film was poetic, Borowczyk's is a horror story, or as someone wrote - a study of the power of animal sexuality (a gigantic penis on screen). Polish premiere in 1992. France
  
  
• 1976 "La marge / The Streetwalker" or "The Margin". France
  
  
• 1977 "Interno di un convento / Behind Convent Walls" based on motifs from Henri Stendhal's "Promenades dans Rome". Sexual life and nuns' fantasies behind convent walls. Italy
  
  
• 1979 "Les heroines du mal / Heroines of Evil". France
  
  
• 1979 "L'armoire" a segment of "Collections Privees / Private Collections". France
  
  
• 1980 "Lulu" based on motifs from the play by Frank Wedekind. France-Germany-Italy
  
  
• 1982 "Docteur jekyll et les femmes" based on motifs from Robert Louis Stevenson's novel "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". Erotic horror film. On the eve of his wedding, mysterious murders take place at Jekyll's house. All this is accompanied by sex and a gigantic penis on screen. (Awards: 1981 - Catalonian IFF Sitges, Catalonia, Clavel Medalla Sitges en Plata de Ley Dorda) France
  
  
• 1983 "Ovide: L'art d'aimer / Ars Amandi". An interpretation of the famous poem by Ovid. France-Italy
  
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• 1986 "Emmanuelle V" (directed with Steve Barnett, script written with Alex Cunningham and Howard R. Cohen) based on Emmanuelle Arsan's novel "Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman". Emmanuelle is kidnapped from her yacht in Cannes and imprisoned in a harem by an Arab sheikh. France
  
  
• 1986 "Almanach des adresses des demoiselles de Paris" and "Un traitement merite", episodes of "Série Rose". France
  
  
• 1988 "Ceremonie d'amour / Love Rites". A prostitute's client starts obsessively spying on her. France

Other:

Together with Szymon Bojko, Walerian Borowczyk also co-wrote the script for the documentary "Sztuka ulicy [Street Art]" (1958), directed by Konstanty Gordon. He made trailers for his feature films, including "Goto, Island of Love" and "Blanche".

Author: Jan Strekowski, April 2004; updated February 2006.

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