Wednesday 5 February 2014

FM4 - Spectatorship - Walerian Borowczyk: Experimental and Expanded Film/Video


Walerian Borowczyk (September 2, 1923 – February 3, 2006) was a Polish film director. He directed 40 films between 1946 and 1988. His career as a film director was mainly in France.

Born in Kwilcz, 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, which earned him a national prize in 1953. In 1959, he settled in Paris.

His early films were surreal animations, some only a few seconds long, including several comic abecedaria (letter lists). His most acclaimed early films were Był sobie raz (Time Upon a Once) (1957) and Dom (House) (1958, with Jan Lenica).





In 1959, he worked with Chris Marker for Les Astronautes. Major works of this period include 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, and the nightmarish Jeux des anges (1964), selected by Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time. In 1967, he directed his first animated feature film, Théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal: un film dessiné pour les adultes (Mr. and Mrs. Kabal's Theatre).


His influence can be seen in the work of Jan Svankmajer and The Quay Brothers.

Darkness Light Darkness (1990) by Jan Svankmajer (mp4 360p) from Ron Schijfs on Vimeo.

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