No record of the greatest achievements of animated film worldwide would be complete without mention of two Polish artists, Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica. Their joint film from 1957, Once Upon a Time, followed by films they made together such as House in 1958, and also their individual productions, triggered a revolution in this peripheral film genre. They turned animated film into an art capable of communicating the most complex, difficult and serious messages.
Borowczyk was born in 1923 in Kwilcz near Poznań, he lived in France from 1959. He died in France in 2006. He was an accomplished visual artist, scriptwriter, stage designer, director of animated and feature films, and writer. He studied painting and graphic arts at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1951. As a student, he made amateur short films including animations. He designed theatre and film posters and, from 1950, published satirical drawings in the magazines Szpilki and later in Nowa Kultura and Życie Literackie. At the National Art Exhibition in Warsaw in 1951, he won third prize for graphic art. With Jan Tarasin, Borowczyk published the picture album Rysunki satyryczne in 1953, maintaining the typical socialist-realist style. In the same year, he received the Polish National Prize for his cycle of lithographs Nowa Huta.
He started a collaboration with Jan Lenica in 1956. They made an animated cartoon in 1957 titled Once Upon a Time, which brought them international fame. After making several more films, including one on his own titled School, Borowczyk left Poland for good in 1959 and settled in Paris, where he went on to make short and feature-length animated films and short feature films. After 1969, Borowczyk focused almost completely on full-length feature films.
Excerpt from the animation Scherzo Infernal, dir. Walerian Borowczyk; watch the entire film on ninateka.pl
Borowczyk was involved in many art genres. Beside animated films, short feature films that the critics hailed as masterpieces, and interesting full-length productions, he was one of the main creators of the Polish poster school and, first and foremost, of artistic erotic cinema. He made satirical drawings, sculptures and film sets, and exhibited his works in Poland and abroad. He received many prizes for his artistic output. He also wrote a volume of short stories, L'anatomie du diable / Anatomia diabła, published in France in 1992 and in Poland a year later, and a book of memoirs, Mes années polonaises / Moje polskie lata written in French and published in 2002.
Borowczyk was awarded the Max Ernst Prize for his life's work in animated films in 1967, and the President of the Italian Republic's Gold Medal in 1971, and was a recipient of awards at festivals of short films, including those in Oberhausen, Mannheim, Tours, Berlin, Venice and Krakow.
Borowczyk and Lenica
Marcin Giżycki was accurate when he wrote that "in animated films ... there were two eras: before and after Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk" (Kino 12/2001). As "milestone works" he mentions their joint projects Once Upon a Time and House as well as Lenica's Monsieur Tète, Labyrinth and New Janko the Musician, and Borowczyk's The Astronauts and School.
Before the films of Lenica and Borowczyk, animated films in Poland were a less valued form, regarded as films addressed to children without any great artistic or visual - not to mention philosophical - aspirations. In Giżycki's estimation,
Lenica and Borowczyk's brilliance did not reveal itself in technical innovation or inventiveness, on the contrary, it was demonstrated in their nonchalant approach to existing techniques and conventions. ... Their films made no secret of the simplicity of means they utilized, camouflaged nothing, their movement and montage as simplified as possible. Just a few pieces of coloured paper, old photographs, junk objects, fragments of found drawings.
The "cut-out" technique they used in their first films worked well as a means of conveying a humorous, amusing message as well as surreal grotesque expression, right up to absurdity and horror like that of Ionesco and Kafka. From the start, Borowczyk treated animated film as a form of "highbrow" art. One example of his serious treatment of this genre is Renaissance (1963), which was shown at the film festival in Krakow in 1964 next to Lenica's Rhinoceros, and which enchanted the esteemed film critic Aleksander Jackiewicz, who judged it even more highly than Lenica's film. It is worth quoting his words, as they reflect the value of Borowczyk's art (Życie Literackie 24/1964):
This is an animated story about the world being ruined as a result of some disaster. The world - a real table, the real objects lying on it, the basket under the table - has physically fallen apart. And then it comes together anew, matter organizing itself into objects again. The trumpet lying on the table starts playing triumphantly. Then a second disaster strikes. The history of matter, the persistence of matter in the face of the forces of destruction - shown on one square metre and a few odd pieces of junk!