Boro, l’ile d’amour: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk, is a thought-provoking collection of different essays commenting on the life and films of a renowned Polish film director, Walerian Borowczyk. An inimitable and often disputed author of controversial fiction films unabashedly presenting openly erotic images bordering on the pornographic, according to some critics, is in fact a complex artist, prolific both in live-action cinema and in animation. His films draw from the cultural and social traditions of Europe in that they contain direct references to classical literature, European mythology. They also play on a specific sense of humour and a deep understanding of the undercurrent of the erotic in the Catholic religion.

Borowczyk mastered a surprising variety of visual techniques like animation, trick photography, and live action, which he had already learned in Poland before moving to France. From the entire book, Borowczyk emerges as a feverishly busy person, constantly working on his projects, relentless in his searches for new locations, new actors, and actresses.

One of the strengths of this book is that the authors of the essays link Borowczyk’s artistic output with the social and artistic environment of Poland in which he grew up, and of France, where he spent most of his adult life. Actually, the first and the second chapters written by the editors of the book include an astounding list of names of famous writers, visual artists, and filmmakers from France and Poland who have written reviews about Borowczyk’s films or with whom Borowczyk collaborated. Borowczyk was well known in the film and literary circles of Paris as an artist respected for his innovation and modernist resourcefulness.

The book contains sixteen chapters that cover the director’s biography and analyze his animation and live action films. What I found particularly interesting and refreshing was the choice of authors who represent not only the academic world (Kamila Kuc, Jonathan Owen, Jakub Marmurek and Iwona Kurz) but also film critics, curators, broadcasters, translators and filmmakers themselves, (for instance, Kuba Mikurda and Michal Oleszczyk).

The introductory chapter written by the editors of the book constitutes a thorough summary of Borowczyk’s films and other pieces representing his creative output. As they phrase it, the essence of Borowczyk’s films lies in the fact that “Borowczyk’s universe is intensely focused on processes and objects that surround and envelop individuals, without ever truly penetrating them” (7). Followed by a comprehensive biographical chapter by Kuba Mikurda, thoroughly researched in archives in Poland, France and the UK, the beginning of the book offers a fascinating discussion of the director from many perspectives, including literary, philosophical, sociological, and technical. This introduction is followed by an exploration of the main themes that appear in his films: surrealism, sadism, misogyny, Victorianism, motherhood, eroticism, love, death, and, symbols, images, and rituals associated with the Roman Catholic Church.

From my own perspective, the two chapters on surrealism in Borowczyk’s films are the most illuminating, as they provide an original position on the filmmaker’s disturbing images. The first article, “Cruel Imagination: Borowczyk’s Post-Traumatic Surrealism” by Iwona Kurz, who postulates after Jeremy M. Robinson that violence presented in Borowczyk’s films has links to the Holocaust and WWII, which have dominated the twentieth century. Robinson finds this kind of violence in Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales and especially in his animated shorts, such as House and Angel’s Games, but Kurz finds this violence in almost all the films Borowczyk has produced. She ascribes it to Borowczyk’s early experience as a forced laborer under the Nazi occupation of Poland, when he was exposed to German war atrocities. In this sense, Borowczyk was in excellent artistic company with Polish artists such as Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polanski, Andrzej Wroblewski, Tadeusz Rozewicz, and Tadeusz Borowski, who similarly transformed horrific memories into works of art. Of particular interest in this analysis is the link between the cruelty of the Holocaust and the cruelty recognized by Surrealists as an inherent part of life. In a Bataille’s vein, Kurz analyses Borowczyk’s films taking these two concepts as equipollent parts of human activity. In her analysis applied to Immoral Tales, Kurz points to the delicate intimations of the Holocaust’s visions as “intangible at first, but nevertheless persistent, suggestive of a feeling one cannot exactly put one’s finger on” (71).

Another article that raised my interest is “Laugh in the Doll House. On Victorian Surrealism in the Films of Walerian Borowczyk” by Kamila Wielebska, a curator, art historian, and writer. It explores visual content in the filmmaker’s films in a broad sociopolitical context. Wielebska offers the analysis of Borowczyk in view of French surrealism mixed with Victorian iconography. She effectively persuades the reader that not only are his films full of surrealistic elements in Emmanuelle and Immoral Tales, but also in A Private Collection and in Goto, Isle of Love. Surrealism is filtered through the Victorian iconography of woman as a doll/mannequin, oddly reinforcing Borowczyk’s ideas of total control over women and over the films in which he presented them. As Wielebska puts it: “The Victorian era, which I call up here, is of paramount importance to the works of Walerian Borowczyk. His films were created as total works over which he wanted full control, and for which he built the stage design” (122).

Borowczyk is such a complex artist that one wishes for an all-embracing analysis of all aspects of his films through one unifying perspective, such as is usually applied to Luis Bunuel or Federico Fellini. Alas, such a unifying perspective is impossible in the case of this artist, who does not follow one consistent ideological or artistic path. This diversity of opinion is vivid in all the essays presented in the book, whose authors tried to unravel the multiple mysteries and charms of Walerian Borowczyk’s films.