Before we turn our attention to the last disc of Arrow’s Blu-Ray Borowczyk restorations, let us take stock of the man’s career up to this point. A shoestring genius of experimental animation, “Boro” had proved his versatility with four massively different features; the crackpot animated comedy of Theatre of Mr. […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Immoral Tales (1973) Art, History and Sex Cinema in the hands of Borowczyk (Review)
Since one of the stated aims of Arrow’s Walerian Borowczyk collection has been to rescue his reputation from an association with pornography, it seems strange to say that including two of the late-period erotic films is a masterstroke. And yet it is. Viewed in context, Immoral Tales and its supporting […]
War and Peace (2002) monumental War Documentary more committed to peace than bloodshed (Review)
War When Mark Cousins started his monthly column in Sight & Sound magazine in 2012, a large chunk of his inaugural piece was spent discussing the work of Anand Patwardhan. Patwardhan is one of those documentarians who the international film festival cognoscenti know and love, yet is almost completely unheard-of […]
Blanche (1971) More Jacobean Tragedy than Euro-Kink Nightmare (Review)
The third film in Arrow’s acclaimed series of Walerian Borowczyk restorations, Blanche is an entry into the late 1960s and early 1970s cycle of Medieval films that produced notable work by Jacques Demy and Pier Paolo Pasolini, before Borowczyk’s disciple Terry Gilliam helped to lovingly spoof it to death with […]
Goto, Isle of Love (1968) Boro thriving on artifice and precision (Review)
The second feature in Arrow’s extensive restoration of Walerian Borowczyk’s work, Goto, Isle of Love is a live-action French film that cannot be anything other than the work of a Polish animator. Its venomous contempt for authority and its poker-faced sense of humour are both unmistakably Eastern European, and its […]
Story of my Death (2013) A Dracula film for the more adventurous moviegoer (Review)
There’s an inherent risk to saying this on the internet these days, but here we go: sometimes spoilers aren’t a bad thing. Every single synopsis or review I’ve read of Albert Serra’s seventh feature film, Story of My Death, mentions a character who doesn’t turn up immediately, and as such […]
Walerian Borowczyk Short Films and Animation (1959 to 1984)(Review)
The story of Michael Brooke’s [EDIT – actually Daniel Bird; see comments section] restoration of the films of Walerian Borowczyk deserves to be film-restorer’s folklore by now, a Cinderella story about one of cinema’s least Disney-esque animators. After facing plenty of indifference, Brooke turned to Kickstarter to try and raise […]
The Cruise, Camouflage and Shivers (Polish Cinema Vol. III)(Review)
One of the key dilemmas faced by anyone looking to distribute or exhibit foreign-language cinema is this: do you distribute films that offer insights into a different culture, or do you distribute films that are universal? The former, of course, is something that many arthouse habitués would cite as a […]
Fruit of Paradise (1970) Vera Chytilova, Free-Form and Unchained (Review)
The utterly unique career of Věra Chytilová, and the story of Czech cinema in general, finds itself at a crossroads with 1970’s Fruit of Paradise, now released on DVD by Second Run Films. It feels like the product of a golden age; as noted in Peter Hames’s hugely informative booklet, […]
Electricity (2014): Unforgettable Showcase of Agyness Deyn’s acting talent (Review)
Right at the start of Bryn Higgins’s sophomore film, there’s a credit for the Wellcome Trust as producers. Having one of the world’s largest financiers of cutting-edge medical research in your opening credits sets out a mission statement; when it comes to medical accuracy, this tale of an epileptic girl […]