Walerian Borowczyk Short Films and Animation

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Review added by
Stuart McLean

Certificate: 18
Running Time: 140 minutes
Retail Price: £19.99
Release Date: 08/09/2014
Content Type: Movie

Synopsis:
For the first decade of his career, Walerian Borowczyk exclusively made short films, initially in his native Poland, but then mostly in France, where he settled permanently in the late 1950s. This disc includes the vast majority of the shorts that he made between 1959 and 1984, apart from ones that were originally intended to accompany specific features.

Far from being prentice work or optional extras, the shorts include many of his greatest films, such as the cut-out Astronauts, the reverse-motion Renaissance and the extraordinary Angels’ Games, a one-off masterpiece of the macabre that would alone establish Borowczyk as one of the cinema’s most innovative artists.

In 1967, Borowczyk made his feature debut, a grotesque and surreal fantasy about the physically and temperamentally mismatched couple Mr & Mrs Kabal. Made with a tiny production team at a time when animated feature films were far scarcer than they are now, it’s almost the polar opposite of a Disney film, with angular, mainly monochrome graphics bringing the Kabals’ universe to startlingly vivid life. Both this and all the short films are presented in brand new high-definition restorations from original 35mm elements.

Special Features:
New high definition digital transfers of the feature and the shorts
Uncompressed Mono 2.0 PCM Audio
Optional English subtitles where necessary
The short films Astronauts (1959), The Concert (1962), Grandmother’s Encyclopaedia (1963), Renaissance (1963), Angels’ Games (1964), Joachim’s Dictionary (1965), Rosalie (1966), Gavotte (1967), Diptych (1967), The Phonograph (1969), The Greatest Love of All Time (1978), Scherzo Infernal (1984)
Introduction by filmmaker and animator Terry Gilliam
Film is Not a Sausage, a documentary about Borowczyk’s animated work featuring Borowczyk, producer Dominique Duvergé-Ségrétin, assistant André Heinrich and composer Bernard Parmegiani
Blow Ups, a visual essay by Daniel Bird about Borowczyk’s works on paper
Commercials by Walerian Borowczyk: Holy Smoke (1963), The Museum (1964), Tom Thumb (1966)
Reversible sleeve featuring original poster designs
Collector’s booklet