Walerian Borowczyk – short films 1

A brief history of poster art co-authored by Borowczyk that encompasses everything from the technical aspects of printing through to the use of sexual imagery in advertising. Embellished with clips from Eisenstein, this short documentary features the work of a range of Polish poster artists including Jan Lenica (not to mention Borowczyk's own poster for Raymond Bernard's 1952 film, Judgment of God).

According to Jan Lenica, Borowczyk approached him with the idea for a short film. The poster artists approached Jerzy Kawalerowicz, then head of the Kadr Film Unit. When asked what their film was about, the pair emptied paper cut outs from an envelop onto Kawalerowicz’s desk… While not the first cut out animation, Once Upon a Time is without a doubt one of the most innovative. In effect, Borowczyk and Lenica transformed the economy, wit and intelligence of the Polish poster into cinema. It is also notable for a groundbreaking electro-acoustic soundtrack courtesy of the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio.

Borowczyk and Lenica’s second collaboration is a politically correct romance told through the paintings of Jan Płaskociński. Playful, witty and ironic, Rewarded Feeling is augmented by a rousing score courtesy of the Warsaw Gasworks Brass orchestra – a detail which caught the attention of the young Jean-Luc Godard, then a critic casting a critical eye over the short films on offer at the Tours Film Festival. Not only is the film a testament to both Borowczyk and Lenica’s economy of means (something that Borowczyk’s would hone in his masterpiece, The Game of the Angels, 1964) but it also highlights the former’s interest in naif painting and folk art.

A crude, paper striptease that ends in a semiotics gag – Borowczyk and Lenica at their most pithy.

A brief newsreel interlude advertising the journal of the Polish Youth Union (ZMP), ‘Sztandar Młodych’ (Banner of Youth), both recycles the montage of found footage in Once Upon a Timeand adds a hand painted element, recalling the pioneering films of Norman McLaren and Len Lye (whose work must count as a major inspiration for both Borowczyk and Lenica) and preempting later works by Julian Antonisz.

A young woman inside a house succumbs to a succession of day dreams, fantasies and nightmares. Arguably Borowczyk and Lenica’s masterpiece, House served as Borowczyk and Lenica’s ticket to the West. The result is a veritable compendium of animation techniques, which both look back at the European avant-garde of the 1920s (Cocteau, Richter, Ray, Ernst, Calder, Duchamp etc.) while paving the way for the likes of latter day Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer. It also features a remarkable electro-acoustic soundtrack by Włodzimierz Kotoński.

A solider is put through a succession of increasingly ridiculous training moves before retreating into day dreams and fantasy… Borowczyk’s first professional solo work, The School is almost exclusively made up of photographs of an actor (Bronisław Stefanik), which are then ordered to create movement. Once again, recalling the innovation of Norman McLaren, Borowczyk nevertheless harks back to the fantasy of Georges Méliès, not to mention the pre-cinema of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge.

In 1976 Borowczyk was commissioned by ZDF’s Eckart Stein to make an experimental portrait portrait of his adopted home, Paris. Shooting on 16mm film cartridges using a compact, clockwork Krasnogorsk movie camera, Borowczyk presents the French capital as an urban hell. Unlike the ‘city symphonies’ of Vertov and Ruttmann, there is no optimism here, but rather the loneliness of an atomised, overly mechanical and resoundingly consumerist society. A brief glimpse of a giant billboard advertising The Margin testifies to the sheer range of Borowczyk’s vision. Also, look out for Borowczyk’s reflection behind the eyepiece of his camera…