Walerian Borowczyk

From Freepedia

Walerian Borowczyk (born 2 September 1923 at Kwilicz, near Poznan) is a Polish film director. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, then devoted himself to painting and lithography, including the creation of posters for the cinema. In 1959 he settled in Paris.

He directed 40 films between 1946 and 1988.

His early films were surreal animations, some only a few seconds long, including several comic abecedaria. Major works of this period include the nightmarish Jeux des Anges (1964) and the stop motion film Renaissance (1963), which uses reverse motion to depict various destroyed objects (a prayer book, a stuffed toy, etc.) re-assembling themselves, only to be destroyed again when the last object (a bomb) is complete.

Borowczyk moved into live-action feature film with Goto, Isle of Love (1968) and Blanche (1971), both tales of illicit love thwarted by jealous husbands, and both starring his own wife, Ligia Branice. His later work, including The Beast (1975), Immoral Tales (1974) and Rites of Love (1988) has been controversial, lauded by some for its unique surrealist vision and derided by others as contentless pornography. In 1981 he made Docteur Jekyll et les femmes, known in English as Blood of Dr Jekyll, a version of the Jekyll and Hyde story starring Udo Kier and Patrick Magee and depicting Jekyll's transformation as a violent rebellion against the hypocrisy and sexual repression of Victorian Britain. In his 1988 book Nightmare Movies, (ISBN 0517573660) Kim Newman described the film as "dark, misanthropic and interestingly offensive".

Many of Borowczyk's films use historical settings, including The Art of Love (1983), set in the time of Ovid (and featuring the poet as a character); Blanche, set during the Middle Ages; and three of the four episodes in Immoral Tales, set respectively in the nineteenth century, the sixteenth century and the Borgia papacy.

A number of his films (Immoral Tales and the 1976 La Marge) were based on stories by André Pieyre de Mandiargues.