Perhaps the best description of master eroticist filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk’s is that of a “genius who was also a pornographer.” An apt description of a man who, throughout his prolific film career that spanned over four decades, directed over 40 films that have come to inhabit the cult pornography canon. Yet ‘pornography’ is also not the most accurate descriptor for Borowczyk’s work, as his films were always more than simple carnal pleasures devoid of intrinsic merit.
Borowczyk trained as a sculptor at the Academy of Arts in post-World War II Krakow and subsequently devoted himself to film, starting out with animated features before casting his own mold in erotic cinema. His first features were ingenious animated excursions in cartoon art—crudely executed, infused with absurdist messages and sly humor. But his big break came with 1958’s Dom (House, 1958), whom he co-produced with fellow graphic designer Jan Lenica. Through its combination of realism, retro and the abstract, Dom was a masterful success for Borowczyk that stood proudly above anything that was out at the time. After Dom, Borowczyk moved to Paris, where he went on to became the most significant Polish artist working in postwar France. It is France where Borowczyk starting dabbling in fiction: His first foreign endeavor was Les Astronautes (The Astronauts, 1959), an adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s 1951 novel of the same name. For The Astronauts, Borowczyk borrowed from his earlier work, but evolved in his use of electronic music and cut-up collage imagery, which became more technically polished. This was followed by his first feature films, which included Goto, l’île d’amour (Goto, Island of Love, 1968), which tackled themes of lust, power and oppression.
These themes became more prevalent, and more obsessive, to Borowczyk in the coming years. His feature films visited themes of desire, sexuality, death, religion and obsession. Borowczyk—or Boro, as he’s affectionately nicknamed—began evoking sexuality in way that was less subtle than, say, the work of Luis Buñuel, an auteur who was a major influence on Borowczyk. His later films titillated,provoked, and shocked.
His best-known film, La Bête (The Beast, 1975), opens with an explicit scene of horses mating. It is an unexpected image that sets the tone for a movie that plays like an erotic farce of frantic fantasies of bestial sexual submission with tones of political commentary reminescent of Buñuel’s bourgeoisie smack-downs.
Immoral Tales, 1974
The Beast is an exploitation flick, a brazenly provocative one, yet Borowczyk’s fascination lied with the movement of sexuality, not with sex as an end. Movies that followed, Immoral Tales, Immoral Women and Behind Convent Walls tackled sexuality in a similar way: through graphic themes of nunspolitation, revenge, desire and corruption.
Behind Convent Walls, 1978
Throughout his work, Borowczyk’s approach to portraying women has remained equally fascinating. His heroines aren’t damzels in distress, nor are they delicate daisies in search for sexual liberation. They are true “heroines of evil”, fully-formed sexual protagonists aware of their sexual maturity and how they can go about fulfilling it.
This week, the Lincoln Society Film Center is celebrating Borowcyk’s career through a retrospective of his work: running through April 9th, the retrospective, titled Obscure Pleasures: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk,
will air all of Borowcyk’s most famous feature length movies with multiple screenings per day.
Obscure Pleasures: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk runs through April 9 at the Lincoln Society Film Center in New York. For tickets, see here.