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 money to reissue a box set of “Boro”‘s features. In the end, he raised enough to restore a generous selection of short films and TV commercials as well, and it’s these bonus restorations that make up the bulk of the first disc in Arrow’s Region 2 collection.

As is contextualised in the magnificently-titled documentary extra Film is Not a Sausage, the Arrow set picks up Borowczyk’s story as he arrives in France, having already made a selection of successful animated shorts in his native Poland. He started working for the producer Jacques Forgeot, though he found it hard to comfortably accommodate his eccentric style and interests at Forgeot’s company. Not that you’d know from the confident, polished and witty Les astronautes, the earliest film in this collection, or from Concert, which introduces the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal.

The Kabals are two cracking grotesques, him short and tubby, her towering and angular, who run a cabaret which somehow always ends up becoming an expression of her violent hatred towards him. Borowczyk revisited their plight for his feature debut, the mostly-animated Theatre of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal, one of the strangest films ever made. This dispenses even with the loose structure of Concert in favour of a freeform comic jam, riffing off inscrutable running gags like as the strange old man who keeps interrupting Mr. Kabal’s ogling of beautiful (live-action) women, Mrs. Kabal’s long war against aggressive, apparently indestructible butterflies, and Borowczyk himself appearing for intermittent, doomed attempts at getting his characters to behave themselves.

Theatre is hugely memorable and ambitious, but even this outrageous creation can’t size up to the best of the shorts featured on this release. Among the highlights are Renaissance, a witty visual puzzle in which a destroyed room magically un-destroys itself, Grandma’s Encyclopedia, which uses animated lithographs for a series of goofs on industry, transport and war, and Diptych, which pairs a documentary portrait of a 100-year-old farmer with a deliriously kitsch montage of flowers and kittens.

Best oF all is Rosalie, a minimal, devastating adaptation of a short story by Guy de Maupassant that marked Borowczyk’s first sustained engagement with live-action cinema. It stars Ligia Branice, who gives an absolutely wrenching open wound of a performance. (Borowczyk’s widow, she has personally given her approval to these restorations) Branice also pops up in Les astronautes, playing a beautiful woman who the main character spies on as she undresses. This erotic strain would, of course, come to define Boro’s work, and this reviewer has been as guilty as anyone else of reducing his career to one bathetic gag – started off as probably Europe’s greatest experimental animator, ended up being fired from Emmanuelle 5.

And yet… judged against the evidence on this set, that was less an indignity and more another piece of irrefutable evidence that Borowczyk was the kind of wild talent who wouldn’t fit in anywhere. (After all, if you’re hired for something as glum as Emmanuelle 5, better to get fired rather than have the producers pleased with your contribution to their cash cow) Even his commercials are dizzyingly anarchic, particularly Holy Smoke!, his ten-minute promo film for the tobacco importers WD & HO Wills. Holy Smoke! follows a group of stuffy, out-of-touch aristocrats worried that WD & HO Wills are going to introduce the masses to the luxurious cigars they’ve tried to keep for themselves. It’s pure hard sell, but something about the venomously impersonated, Harold Macmillanish voices and Borowczyk’s paper-cut-out style gives it a genuinely dangerous, anarchic edge.

It also recalls Terry Gilliam’s work on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, of course, and Gilliam turns up to give a brief but gushing interview about Borowczyk’s influence on his own work. (Alas, his favourite – The Game of Angels, a completely abstract meditation on the Holocaust – was the only short that didn’t work for me) The late, great Chris Marker also appears, after a fashion – he supplies a text statement for Film is Not a Sausage, explaining that his co-director’s credit on Les astronautes was purely a ruse to enable Borowczyk (whose French passport had not arrived yet) to make a film for Forgeot. He had no creative input on the film whatsoever, other than to suggest changing the hero’s pet from a parrot to an owl, and his friendship with the Borowczyks would result in him casting Ligia as the mystery woman in La Jetee.

Even if you see Borowczyk’s career as a slow slide into the gutter – and Arrow disagree, pointedly releasing this on their high-class Arrow Academy imprint – this disc provides a myriad of other facets to his talent, a series of alternative Borowczyks that few will previously have been aware of. Whether it’s the absurd comedian of Gavotte, the technical wizard of Renaissance, the abrasive avant-gardeist of the disc’s main feature or the respectful documentarian who turns up to observe the painter Ljubomir Popović on The Greatest Love of All Time, they all shine in this lovingly restored, visually astonishing set. Barring the final short, 1984’s explicit theological comedy Scherzo Infernal, the pornographer in Boro sits this disc out – but don’t mistake it for a tame or safe selection. Borowczyk had many strings to his bow, but as this wild, ferociously imaginative selection shows, timidity was not a part of his genetic make-up.

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