Walerian Borowczyk (1923-2006)

“Matter is the most passive and defenseless essence in the cosmos. Anyone can mould or shape it; it obeys everybody. All attempts at organizing matter are transient and temporary, easy to reverse and to dissolve.” —Bruno Schulz

Bringing objects to “life” is the essence of Borowczyk’s cinema. Buster Keaton aside, he is cinema’s greatest prop specialist. Borowczyk has made clear his “positive feelings towards objects”, not to mention a mania for those crafted in the 19th century. Why? Because in these objects we still find “traces of man’s hand”.

Nonetheless, hands are conspicuously absent from Borowczyk’s early shorts. At first glance Renaissance (1963) and Le Phonograph (1969) appear eerily materialistic. After the catastrophic explosions that both initiate and complete Renaissance, the charred piles of wood and twisted scrap metal may well stand as “evidence” of the fate that has met the bodies of which these objects once belonged. But they are only wrecked objects. Nonetheless, we’re amused (if not comforted) by the knowledge that the cycle will occur again (eternally!). Also, the faint sound beneath the rubble of smashed up wax drums and broken glass suggests that there may be a ghost in Le phonograph after all. Borowczyk isn’t pessimistic, rather “catastrophic”. Such catastrophism belies a worry that craftsmanship is dying. “Vivacity” is being displaced by what Borowczyk describes as the “mechanical society” - one based on excess.

If Borowczyk’s overt preoccupation is with the 19th century fin-de-siecle era, then it’s one undercut by motifs of 20th century excesses: the atom bomb “gags” in Le theatre de Monsieur et Madame Kabal (1967) and the concentration camps in Les jeux des anges (1964) and Goto, l’ile d’amour (1968). But images of overproduction and saturation suggest commercial excess too. If the latter result in a “dulling of our senses”, Borowczyk’s obsessive studies of handcrafted objects now appear as genuinely “erotic”, the accent less on their symbolic properties, more on the visual qualities, their sounds and textures.

Of the shorts, Rosalie (1966), Gavotte (1967), Diptyque (1967) and Une Collection Particulière (1972) involve at least one visible human element, albeit one often obscured. To act in front of Borowczyk’s camera, the actor has to surrender his (or usually her) will entirely, and become, not so much one of Bresson’s “models”, but one of Keaton’s “props”. But like Bresson, Borowczyk discarded character “psychology” as superficial - he’s more interested in “how” rather than “why”. A fascination for objects can degenerate into fetishism when it serves little or no narrative “function”. Barthes gives us an idea of what that function could be in an essay on Bataille’s Histoire de l’Oeil:

“How can an object have a story? Well, it can pass from hand to hand, giving rise to the sort of tame fancy authors call The History of my Pipe or Memoirs of an Armchair, or alternatively it can pass from image to image, in which case its story is that of migration, the cycle of the avatars it passes through, far removed from its original being, down the path of a particular imagination that distorts but never drops it.”

If we grant a “poetics” of cinema, then it’s obvious that Borowczyk’s shorts are of the second kind. Of the features, the most successful “object stories” are neither entirely fanciful nor metaphorical, as Barthes later has object “novels” and “poems”, but rather amalgams of the two. For example, Goto, l’ile d’amour and La Bete (1975) could be conceived as sequential transactions of binoculars and shoes, roses and corsets between human (and in the case of La Bete, not-so-human!) characters, but that would ignore the considerable metaphorical play taking place. As Ray Durgnat noted, in Goto, l’ile d’amour, Borowczyk relishes a linguistic, satirical fetishization of Grozo’s tasks: brushing ch-auseurs, taking care of ch-iens and drowning mou-ch-es. In La Bete (and to a lesser extent, Dzieje Grzechu, 1975), rose petals are put to good use in female masturbatory fantasies – female genitalia is so often compared to rose petals (e.g. Kane’s “Rosebud”) – here Borowczyk offers a literal on-screen deflowering! —© Daniel Bird, 2003

Featured Films for Download from UbuWeb:

Dom
Format: avi | Size: 96mb
Dirs. Walerian Borowczyk & Jan Lenica (Poland, 1957) 12 mins
An eclectic collage of film fragments and styles bound together by a shared preoccupation of self-consciousness as being trapped in a cruel world.

Les Astronautes
Dir. Walerian Borowczyk [co-directed by Chris Marker] (France, 1959) 12 mins
Chris Marker contributed his owl to this knock-about sketch about an inventor and his makeshift spaceship.

Une collection particulière
Format: avi | Size: 124mb
Dir. Walerian Borowczyk (1973)
A representation of Mandiargues’s collection of pornographic items

Escargot de Venus
Dir. Walerian Borowczyk (France, 1975)
This is the portrait of painter Bona Tibertelli De Pisis – wife of writer Pieyre De Mandiargues – while working in her atelier, together with fragments of her graphic works inspired by one of Remy de Gourmont’s writings.

L’amour monstre de tous les temps
Format: avi | Size: 100mb
Dir. Walerian Borowczyk (1977)

Scherzo Infernal
Format: avi | Size: 53mb
Dir. Walerian Borowczyk (1984)

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