16 Aug at 9:15 pm
Summerhall (venue 26) / 1 Summerhall (EH9 1PL)
Tickets: £5/£4
Box office: 0845 874 3001
Duration: 1 hours 30 minutes
Age restrictions: 18+
The screenings present Walerian Borowczyk and his work, filled with surreal imagery and experimental avant-garde techniques. Apart from screenings of the filmmaker's works, the audience is presented with a contemporary film about Borowczyk, Boro-in -the-box, directed by Bertrand Mandico
A still from Szkoła
Borowczyk’s Shorts
Walerian Borowczyk was a Polish film director. His early films were surreal animations, some only a few seconds long, including several comic alphabet presentations. His most acclaimed early films are Był sobie raz (Once Upon a Time) (1957) and Dom (House) (1958, with Jan Lenica). 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. Borowczyk's nightmarish Jeux des anges (1964), was selected by Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time.
The House (Dom)
Walerian Borowczyk, Jan Lenica, 1958, 11 min
The last film to be made together by the two artists was also the one which opened the door to their international careers. Lenica and Borowczyk explicitly stated that they were strongly inspired the French 1920s film avant-garde while working on this short form. A conventional narrative is replaces with a series of scenes which take place in various rooms of the art-nouvau building. A wig comes alive in one of the interiors, and drinks milk out of a bottle, while a neighbouring compartment has two fencers from a photograph tackle each other in battle...
The School (Szkoła)
Walerian Borowczyk, 1958, 7 min
Aleksander Jackiewicz commented on the film in 1967: "The story of a working man, always ready, always dressed in a uniform and geared with a rifle, always maneuvering with repeated, purposeful movements". The School links over 400 animated images together, and the work is an expression of protest against military routine, depicting the way in which it strips humans of their individual personality.
Boro in the Box
By Bertrand Mandico, 2011, 40 min
From the day he was conceived to his cinematographic death: the phantasmatic life-story of the filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk. Boro-in-the-box discovers a cruel and obscene world, with experiences of trivial yet colourful adventures, from Poland to Paris, in an imaginary Alphabet.