Walerian Borowczyk

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How does a filmmaker go from creating cutting-edge work and competing in Cannes to being labelled a failed erotic filmmaker? The debut documentary feature from Polish critic and academic Kuba Mikurda investigates the work of Walerian Borowczyk, a director of unparalleled creativity & sensitivity, revered in the 1970s for creations including Goto, Island of Love, The Beast, & Immoral Tales. The film interviews his closest collaborators, filmmakers, and leading intellectuals who put his work into perspective, including Bertrand Bonello, Neil Jordan, Patrice Leconte, Slavoj Žižek, Terry Gilliam and the late Andrzej Wajda.Read More »

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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 »

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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 »

The Margin (French: La Marge, also known as The Streetwalker and Emmanuelle 77) is a 1976 French erotic drama film written and directed by Walerian Borowczyk and starring Sylvia Kristel. It is loosely based on the novel The Margin by André Pieyre de Mandiargues.Read More »