Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

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MichaelB
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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#801 Post by MichaelB » Wed Jul 08, 2015 9:00 pm

Ashirg wrote:So how come Arrow is releasing The Beast and Immoral Tales in US? I thought these titles were with IFC Midnight in North America or was it only for theatrical releases?
I presume it's only for theatrical releases.

However, Arrow will definitely not be releasing the other three Borowczyk discs in the US - the rights to his first three features and all the shorts are tied up elsewhere. Which is why the short films had to be dropped from the US editions of Immoral Tales and The Beast, but in (hopefully hefty) compensation we've ported across every single extra from the other discs that wasn't tied in to a specific film - i.e. the big Borowczyk interview, the docs about his works on paper and his sound sculptures, the three TV commercials, the short Gunpoint and its intro. So they're pretty crammed discs.

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bainbridgezu
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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#802 Post by bainbridgezu » Wed Jul 08, 2015 10:46 pm

Are the rights to the other Boro films tangled up in some legal mess, or does another label intend to release them?

I can't imagine Cult Epics would have held onto Goto and let go of The Beast. Aside from maybe Synapse, Criterion would be the most likely candidate -- unless Zeitgeist nabbed them as part of their Christopher Nolan-funded blu-ray push.

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#803 Post by Erik Morton » Wed Jul 08, 2015 10:49 pm

In lieu of the collection winning so many home theater awards (and deservedly so), anyone know what the chances are for the original limited edition box set itself making a comeback at some point?

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andyli
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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#804 Post by andyli » Wed Jul 08, 2015 11:31 pm

I was thinking of the same thing. It's like performance awards are still being sent out to an actor who has already passed away. At least in this case we may have the power of bringing back the dead.

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#805 Post by Ribs » Thu Jul 09, 2015 12:05 am

As was mentioned way back in the thread, the release was discontinued and replaced by individual rights as Arrow was only given license to print 1,000 copies of the short stories in the included book.

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#806 Post by Erik Morton » Thu Jul 09, 2015 1:23 am

Right, I remembered it was something along those lines, but what I meant was whether a timely new licensing agreement could be made while the awards wave can still be ridden, so to speak.

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#807 Post by MichaelB » Thu Jul 09, 2015 3:04 am

bainbridgezu wrote:Are the rights to the other Boro films tangled up in some legal mess, or does another label intend to release them?
The rights to Borowczyk's first three features and all the shorts* were indeed acquired by another US label. I don't think they've made any public acknowledgement of this, so I'd probably best not name them here until they do.

(*excluding the TV commercials and The Beast of Gévaudan, the last of which is technically a very long deleted scene from Immoral Tales.)

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#808 Post by MichaelB » Tue Jul 21, 2015 3:19 pm

Raymond Durgnat's exhaustive Film Comment piece, 'Borowczyk and the Cartoon Renaissance', the single biggest chunk of the big Camera Obscura book (so big that we couldn't fit it into any of the individual booklets and reluctantly had to drop it), has just been published in full on the official Durgnat website.

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#809 Post by MichaelB » Wed Jul 29, 2015 3:12 am

An interview with me on the excellent Satanic Pandemonium blog, which has also been publishing some impressively in-depth reviews of Borowczyk's films this month - including the titles not (yet?) released by Arrow.

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#810 Post by perkizitore » Wed Jul 29, 2015 5:55 am

Is there a chance of bundling the films on this set with Docteur Jekyll et les femmes? (minus things affected by copyright arrangements)

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#811 Post by MichaelB » Wed Jul 29, 2015 6:01 am

perkizitore wrote:Is there a chance of bundling the films on this set with Docteur Jekyll et les femmes? (minus things affected by copyright arrangements)
There are no plans to reissue the box, with or without Dr Jekyll, although all six discs remain available separately.

Also, the title is The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne - Borowczyk loathed the one that was imposed on him by his French distributors. Not least because it's utterly nonsensical - there's only one dramatically significant woman, and Mr Hyde is an equal opportunity rapist and murderer.

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#812 Post by MichaelB » Thu Aug 27, 2015 7:22 am

Beaver on the US edition of Immoral Tales.

This does indeed contain exactly the same encode of the main feature as the UK edition - the latter wasn't broken, so didn't need fixing.

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Goto, Isle of Love (Walerian Borowczyk, 1968)

#813 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Sep 28, 2015 6:33 am

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Re: Goto, Isle of Love (Walerian Borowczyk, 1968)

#814 Post by Drucker » Mon Sep 28, 2015 9:52 pm

This was the standout film for me when the Boro box set came out last year, especially because I'm really not all that interested in erotica, or however you would define Boro's later films. This one is still a delight, fresh, fun, and incredibly well made.

One thing that immediately sticks out to me are the moments of discomfort accented within the film, especially early on. During the first prisoner fight, we get some uncomfortable close-ups of Goto III. When the losing prisoner ends up in the guillotine, the amount of time spent staring at him feels a bit longer than necessary. In this sense, the film does a fantastic job of extending the length of scenes to really allow the viewer to feel what is going on from the character's perspective. Both the feeling of time and the feeling of being in the film, and the discomfort that comes with it, are further accented in that same scene, when the spitting takes place. When Goto III catches his wife having an affair, that's another scene that goes on far longer than the immediate discovery and effect of explaining the scene.

Visually, this element of the film is complimented by a superb effects soundtrack. As people run up stairs, the steps are loud. The sound of explosions erupt from off screen. The sound of the ocean and the boat hitting against the rocks. So many of the films harshest sounds come out of nowhere and cut through the quiet very sharply. And beyond hearing and seeing, there is a feeling of discomfort that these scenes have, as I mentioned above. Think about the scenes with grime and bugs, as happens when we see Gono's bedroom for the first time. Boro does an incredible job of affecting all of one's senses, even in this early film.

As far as the story goes, it's farcical nature is delightful. We never truly get the sense that most of the inhabitants of the Island of Goto are all that unhappy. While Goto III is certainly unaware anybody could have negative feelings about him, he seems, on the whole, mostly benevolent! There is an orderliness to his kingdom that is well-sustained across three generations. Rather than take an isolated society and insist it needs to be changed, the film seems to show how, on the whole, a steady hand at leadership can be good for a society. As soon as Gono is able to take out the leader of the society, he begins destroying and having damaging effects on the people and institutions around him. Now, of course, Glossia was one of the few people we know for a fact was unhappy living on Goto, so maybe her character is doomed the whole time. Nonetheless, by showing a society that is bound by the same conventions since the disaster of 1887, the film shows how pervasive that mindset can be...and illustrates a society where nobody wants to change as long as society isn't changing either.

I don't mean to insult the film, but the plot seemed mostly secondary to the unique way Boro showed/edited/and told the story. The film is charming and delightful, and if the story is a bit sparse in places, that's okay, as the effect of the film as a whole works.

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Re: Goto, Isle of Love (Walerian Borowczyk, 1968)

#815 Post by Lemmy Caution » Tue Sep 29, 2015 4:52 am

I watched the first hour last night before it got too late.
I agree about the strong dramatic sound effects, especially the waves.
I liked how the camera lingers on faces and things.
Particularly the escape rowboat which gets tossed around and slowly sinks.
I think the held-takes helped ground the film, and make this sort of artificial almost fairy tale world seem more real. The characters all border on farce but then have recognizable doses of humanity.

I really like the visual style of the film, with rather minimalist sets. There's also some rather unusual placement of people (ie the dog-fly-boot master lying below the man about to be guillotined; the king kneeling almost prayer-like to spy his wife's affair from the attic; and to a lesser extent the prostitute bathing scene).

I'll need to finish it tonight.
Btw, my disc has Borowczyk's (& Marker's) famous short Les Astronautes (1959) as an extra.

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Re: Goto, Isle of Love (Walerian Borowczyk, 1968)

#816 Post by Sloper » Fri Oct 02, 2015 1:44 pm

Drucker, you raise an interesting point about the film’s attitude towards this isolated culture. You’re right about the way Borowczyk immerses us in this world, and I do think this often tends to forestall the kind of reactions we might normally have to such a dystopian vision – or encourages us to draw parallels between this world and our own, which is what dystopian visions usually do. I’m not sure I wholly agree with you about the benevolence of Goto III. His subjects’ mindless reverence for him, the insidious way he acts on his suspicions about Glossia, and his readiness to hire Grozo as an assassin (again, insidiously, without directly telling him to murder Gono) seem to mark him out as a ruthless dictator of sorts. At times I thought this film bore some resemblance to The Party and the Guests, which we were discussing precisely one year ago – but I must say that Goto III is a good deal less overtly sinister than the Host in that film. If anything, he seems as oblivious as the rest of the island’s inhabitants, caught up like they are in the way of life he’s inherited, and unaware that there might be anything amiss, with the island or with his own rule. The moment when he talks to the child taking food to his father in the quarry is representative of the ambiguity with which the film invests him. Is he displaying solicitous concern for this ‘pauvre être’, or is he interrogating him to see if he’s a subversive? Either way, the boy seems cagey and nervous, which might indicate something about Goto’s reign.

Like Nemec’s party guests, the Gotoans have all been assimilated into an absurd, barbaric mode of existence, and have simply made themselves at home in this context. We get a nice example of this at the start, when we see a stage covered with musical instruments, lying unused, while a man plays what he can of the Handel organ concerto on a wobbling saw. The prisoner, Gras, listening from the elevator, recognises it as the ‘andante larghetto’ movement. This is the version of that concerto the inhabitants of Goto are familiar with. They don’t ask why several musicians haven’t formed a group to play the whole thing, or why the next performer plays on a cello made from bits of scrap rather than the perfectly good cello standing behind him. They just applaud happily.

(It’s significant that when we hear Handel’s music on the soundtrack, played by the orchestra the film’s characters will never hear, it is associated most of all with Glossia, in the title sequence just before we see her making love to Gono, in that wonderful extended close-up when she watches the boat sinking, and at the end during her death scene. She dreams of a fuller existence beyond the island, but is still trapped fantasising about the one piece of classical music permitted on Goto. The hymn sung by the schoolchildren was composed by Borowczyk - does anyone know what the cellist is playing?)

And this weird musical prelude turns out to be the warm-up act for an even weirder staged execution. The two prisoners, having been brought up to the stage together by elevator, have to fight to the death: the stronger is put at a disadvantage by having a bag put over his head (the removal of which counts as a forfeit) and being left weaponless, while the weaker is given a stick to beat him with. Whoever wins will be pardoned, even if it’s the murderer rather than the binocular-thief.

We’re left to wonder precisely how this custom came to be established, although it’s not too hard to see the logic behind it. As well as being an entertaining public spectacle, this is also a clever way of avoiding the need to maintain a prison on the island: since the winner is pardoned, he can be reintegrated into society, and since only one prisoner dies the island isn’t de-populated too much. The contest in itself might suggest that this culture prizes physical strength above other virtues, but the way the contest is rigged in favour of the weaker combatant suggests that guile, cunning and even cowardice are even more valued – hence Grozo’s rise to power as the film goes on. So again, like Nemec’s film, or like Lord of the Flies, Goto seems preoccupied with the organic processes whereby principles and ideas – specifically those that benefit certain interested parties – become immutable, oppressive, but unquestioned laws.

The schoolchildren are taught that the isolation of the island since 1887 has allowed for the maintenance of old customs, and of the royal authority that has been passed down to the successive Gotos, but it’s comically obvious that most of what we see has been invented from scratch, probably by the unscrupulous survivors of the disaster (if there ever was a disaster), and that Goto I probably had nothing to do with the royal family who, as the precocious schoolboy puts it, ‘found their deaths in the abyss of the sea’. The clock/barometer has not simply been broken, it has had its hands ripped out, so that it is always both the 12th of January 1887 and no time at all. Notice the un-motivated close-up of the broken clock during the minute’s silence for Goto III, which isn’t really a minute; notice also how Gono tells Glossia it’s 11.40 when his watch says 12.15, an innocent ploy to spend more time with her but also another suggestion that time has lost much of its meaning on this island. I’m guessing that Borowczyk is alluding to Waiting for Godot in his choice of title and the naming of his characters, and there is something Beckett-like about the sense of timeless, mind-numbing (and often darkly comic) stasis in this isolated setting.

The fact that the film, its setting, and one of its main characters – or rather, two of them by the end, when Grozo has presumably turned into Goto IV – are all called Goto, and that all the characters’ names begin with a ‘G’, brilliantly encapsulates the mass-myopia that seems to be Borowczyk’s central theme. Everything and everyone is Goto, or a variation on Goto. The three-sided portrait underlines this idea, turning the three successive rulers into one. What does it mean when the teacher sadly puts this portrait away at the end? Is it just that some other way of representing the same idea will have to be found, since a four-sided portrait might not be possible? Or, as Drucker suggests, does the rise of Grozo represent a new, bleaker phase of the island’s development, and is this what the teacher (who clashed with Grozo earlier, and may expect retribution) is contemplating?

As well as painstakingly evoking the dilapidated physical condition of everything on Goto, Borowczyk also uses a shooting style that at times recalls early silent cinema, as though the film itself were stuck in the past. Some of those frontal shots, with action playing out almost two-dimensionally against spare 19th-century decor, could have been lifted straight out of an Edison or Biograph short: the staging of Goto III’s death-slump after he’s been shot looks more like something from 1908 than 1968. Of course, there are also a lot of strikingly modern close-ups, disorienting play with space, and so on, but in various ways I feel like there’s a deliberate ‘primitive’ quality to the style that harmonises well with the subject matter. Drucker, you make a great point about the soundtrack, and it seemed to me this had a similarly rough-hewn, barbaric quality.

What do people think is the point of the brief colour shots? They tend to draw our attention to objects rather than people: Glossia’s boot, Gras’s blood collected in a bucket, the pieces of meat being fed to the dogs, a quill and paper on a desk, some jewels that spill out on the floor, the women’s clothing strewn about Grozo’s bedroom. These are all fleeting moments, and maybe that’s the key to understanding them. It’s not just that the film is in black and white, these characters only ever see things in black and white, but for the odd fleeting moment their emotions or desires jolt them into perceiving the bright, luxurious colours around them, or just imagining those colours. The momentary flights into a realm of colour accentuate the sense of entrapment the rest of the time. Like the flies caught in Gomor’s elaborate trap, waiting to be washed away by salt water, the inhabitants of Goto are trapped in their intricately-made but constrictive dystopia, just waiting to be tipped into the sea (which ‘devours everything’) when they die. The film is about that feeling of entrapment, and the instinctive impulse to reach beyond it. Grozo’s machinations, like Glossia’s escape attempt, ultimately express a longing to attain something beautiful and transcendent beyond the limitations of his current existence.

Another question, for which I really don’t have an answer: why does Glossia open her eyes for a second in the final shot, before relapsing into death? Both Daniel Bird and Philip Strick, in the Arrow booklet, see this as a last-minute resurrection, but I think the fact that Glossia closes her eyes again suggests that she’s just doing a Desdemona. It’s a brilliant touch, but I’m not sure why. It feels ironic and poignant at the same time.

One final, related question for those who know this director’s work well: does Borowczyk have a thing about hearts continuing to beat after death? This is referred to several times in Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, and I think I noticed something similar in a clip from The Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal – is it a sort of running theme?

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Re: Goto, Isle of Love (Walerian Borowczyk, 1968)

#817 Post by swo17 » Fri Oct 02, 2015 3:13 pm

I like your point about the difficulty (impossibility?) of moving from a 3-sided picture to a 4-sided one. New ways of doing things might seem weird and wonderful at first, but can eventually prove trying, oppressive, or perhaps even unsustainable, in this case after several generations of an eccentric social regime. Social orders have to be able to adapt when necessary, looking forward to future developments coming from happy accidents rather than trying to force sustaining what might have worked or at least seemed novel in the past.

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Re: Goto, Isle of Love (Walerian Borowczyk, 1968)

#818 Post by Drucker » Fri Oct 02, 2015 3:47 pm

I ask this out of total ignorance: to what degree is the film inspired by Boro's real life political inclinations/beliefs/experienced events? Between Goto III and Michel Simon's character in Blanche, it sure seems that Boro gets a lot more pleasure sending up and creating a farce out of the leaders then of making some damning, political, detailed expose. And to add fuel to the fire Goto III is not really done in by any sort of master foible, but someone on the very bottom of the social ladder, who is almost treated parasitically in the film....someone who just won't die or go away.

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#819 Post by JabbaTheSlut » Mon Apr 11, 2016 1:12 am

Documentary on Borowczyk coming soon http://cineuropa.org/nw.aspx?t=newsdeta ... did=307176" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#820 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Tue Apr 18, 2017 7:18 am

Question probably aimed at Michael B... The recent Pompidou exhibition catalogue of Boro in a 4 vol slipcase. Is this just a reformatted bi-lingual version of the book in the Arrow box?

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Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#821 Post by MichaelB » Wed Apr 19, 2017 1:39 am

I honestly don't know - I suspect Daniel Bird is the man to answer that.

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#822 Post by olmo » Tue Jul 04, 2017 4:51 pm

If anyone is interested I'm selling my Boro set as part of a job lot of Arrow Academy & a few miscellaneous on Ebay.

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#823 Post by GaryC » Mon Jul 10, 2017 9:12 am

Goto, Island of Love is showing in its restoration on Mubi UK for thirty days starting today. Immoral Tales is showing there for thirty days from tomorrow.

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#824 Post by Morbii » Wed Jul 12, 2017 6:20 am

In regards to The Beast, it seems that the R2 version has some shorts not present on the R1 version. Are there features on the R1 version not found on the R2?

I'm guessing this is just a rounding difference or something, but amazon.com lists the film as having a run time of 1:33, while amazon.co.uk lists 1:34. Is there an actual difference?

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Re: Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

#825 Post by MichaelB » Wed Jul 12, 2017 9:56 am

Morbii wrote:In regards to The Beast, it seems that the R2 version has some shorts not present on the R1 version. Are there features on the R1 version not found on the R2?
Yes, and yes. Olive Films licensed all the non-Polish shorts for the US, so Arrow couldn't include the original supporting shorts for Immoral Tales and The Beast on their own US editions - but instead they ported over all the non-film-specific extras that were included on their editions of Goto, Blanche and Mr & Mrs Kabal. There's no unique material on the US discs - everything can be found somewhere on the UK ones - but it's been shuffled around a little.
I'm guessing this is just a rounding difference or something, but amazon.com lists the film as having a run time of 1:33, while amazon.co.uk lists 1:34. Is there an actual difference?
It's not just the same feature but the same encode! It wasn't broken, so didn't need fixing - and it was much easier just lifting the .m2ts file off the UK master than re-encoding everything from scratch.

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