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Vain clothing buyer Hugo meets beautiful Myriam on the subway and pursues her, discovering to his delight that she’s a prostitute. The crafty Myriam, of course, has more in mind for their encounter than smug Hugo bargained for. Love Rites turns the sexual tables with perverse exactitude.Read More »
Commissioned by the ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen), this is an experimental essay on the city of Paris shot in 16mm in Les Halles district with an entire section devoted to the construction of the Centre Pompidou in 1976. An urban hell, full of noise and fury.Read More »
A witty and eye-opening tour through Borowczyk’s own collection of vintage erotica. Originally intended as part of his ‘Contes immoraux’ , it was released first as a separate short, and is therefore marks the turning-point between Borowczyk’s career as a highly-regarded animator and surrealist filmmaker, and his subsequent career in the sexploitation field.Read More »
Borowczyk’s portrait of the painter Bona Tibertelli de Pisis and her erotic fusions of men, women and molluscs.Read More »
Before it became possible (in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) to imprison young heirs and heiresses in mental institutions in order to gain control of their inheritances, greedy families had for centuries “given” their daughters to convents without the girls’ consent. Usually, such nunneries were only nominally religious, and their involuntary inhabitants lived a life of relative ease and luxury compared to their genuinely religious (or poorer) sisters. In the film Interno di un Convento, a zealous, handsome priest, who is the confessor for a convent full of such women, encourages the equally zealous abbess of one such institution to enforce the same strict rules on these unfortunate women that are applied to others. In doing so, they uncover a snake pit of sexual couplings, both lesbian and heterosexual, as well as many tools for masturbation. At the same time, a particularly disturbed inmate manages to poison herself and many of the other novitiates in yet another scandal which is covered up by church authorities.Read More »
Plot Summary:..
Four erotic tales from in various historical eras. The first, ‘The Tide’, is set in the
present day, and concerns a student and his young female cousin stranded on the beach by the tide, secluded from prying eyes. ‘Therese Philosophe’ is set in the nineteenth century, and concerns a girl being locked in her bedroom, where she contemplates the erotic potential of the objects contained within it. ‘Erzsebet Bathory’ is a portrait of the sixteenth-century countess who allegedly bathed in the blood of virgins, while ‘Lucrezia Borgia’ concerns an incestuous fifteenth-century orgy involving Lucrezia, her brother, and her father the Pope.Read More »
The film takes place before, during and immediately after the engagement party of Dr.Henry Jekyll and Miss Fanny Osborne, attended by numerous highly respectable guests (a general, a doctor, a priest, a lawyer), the last of which informs the company that a child has been murdered in the street outside. While the others watch a young dancer perform, Dr.Jekyll instructs the lawyer to alter his will, leaving everything to a certain Mr.Hyde. Shortly afterwards, the dancer is found murdered, and the guests realise that one of their number must be a maniac with a prodigious sexual appetite… Read More »
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In this remarkable film, Borowczyk, through his commitment to ambiguity (notably in his framing, which forever denies the foreground/background opposition) and his belief in almost entomological observation, transforms his 13th century characters – a foolish old Baron, an overproud King, a lecherous page and a stupidly handsome lover, all of whom are in love with and/or lust after the simple Blanche, the Baron’s young wife – into tragic figures caught up in a dance of death over which they have no control. In exactly the same way, the castle and its decor, photographed by Borowczyk as though it were living and its inhabitants were mere dolls for the most part, is seen as the backdrop to a happy fairytale, and at the same time as the root of all evil, as rooms and bizarre machines are opened and set in motion.Read More »
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The Astronauts (1959) is a short, collaborative animation project between eccentric filmmakers Walerian Borowczyk and Chris Marker. Borowczyk would later move into live-action film-making, turning his attention to a cinema of perverse eroticism with projects like Goto, The Island of Love (1969), The Immoral Tales (1974), Beast (1975) and Emmanuelle 5 (1987). Likewise, Marker would produce the short masterpiece La Jetée (1962), the celebrated proto-documentary Sans Soleil (1983) and his critical study of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, A.K. (1985). The film, at twelve-minutes in length, is a testament to the creative energy and ideas of these two filmmakers, not only standing as an interesting short film in its own right, but as a window into the creative world of these two, highly skilled, highly original filmmakers. It remains an amazing piece of work for this very reason, more so perhaps than any other; even if it is admittedly impossible to distinguish between which filmmaker was responsible for each individual part of the creative process, leaving us to assume that it was a pure collaboration in every sense of the word.Read More »