The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne

Jekyll Finger Of Fate

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne
(aka Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes)
France/West Germany 1981
Directed by  Walerian Borowczyk
Arrow Blu Ray/DVD Dual Format Edition

I’m still not sure where I stand with Walerian Borowczyk. His cinema is rich and sumptuous in terms of its visual manifestation and, sometimes like here, its audio presentation. However, I find I react very differently to his movies... sometimes they’re a bit of a miss with me, other times a big hit. Or, like this one, the film is a combination of both with the sheer brilliance of some of the visual and aural distractions not always quite enough to keep me entertained for the full running time.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne is the film which won Borowczyk the 'Best Feature Film Director' prize at the Sitges Film Festival for 1981 but I, myself, found the first half an hour or so of the movie, which is the set up for the shenanigans which occur throughout the rest of the story, much more enthralling and generally noteworthy than the rest of the feature. I was given this movie by a couple of friends as a Birthday present in January and it came with the cautionary tale that, back in the 1980s, the father of one of the two who gave it to me had bought this in the UK in an early VHS tape edition. However, the gentleman in question was so unimpressed by the content of the film that he took it back for a refund. I can kind of understand where he was coming from in some ways... especially if the film frame was chopped up into a 4 by 3 aspect ratio, as was the norm for video tapes back then. I can kinda sympathise.

What is in no doubt, however, is that the people behind the scenes at Arrow have done a beautiful job at the restoration and transfer of this print, even making the Blu Ray and DVD multiregion, something which the company has not done in the past (see my review of Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales here) but which I personally see as a huge step forward for fans of art versus commerce, no matter what the copyright holder sees as the overruling factor in such situations. So good for them, is all I can say.

After a brief but striking title sequence which mixes bursts of credits appearing and disappearing at speed and mixed with sketches of old London in blue, each accompanied by eerie stabs of electronic, musical tone provided by composer Bernard Parmegiani (possibly needle dropped), we are hit up with a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson’s original story The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde before going into the film properly. The story then starts with the night time streets of London shot in a similar blue lighting which seems to indicate the outside world of the house in which the majority of the movie is set. Here we witness the near murder of a child which interpenetrates the story later on as one of the principal characters is a police investigator.

The setting of the film is an engagement party for Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne and the majority of the interiors seem to be made up of the absolute opposite of the exterior scenes in terms of colour, with lots of warm yellows and oranges seen in contrast to the treacherous night time settings of old London Town. There are also some great flash forwards during the main narrative in the early part of the film which come with similar stabs of atonal electronic music as we heard in the main title sequence and which are similar, in fashion, to the sudden blink and you’ll miss them rushes forwards and backwards in a lot of director Nicholas Roeg’s work. The way Borowczyk handles this is enhanced not only by the intrusive contrast of the score onto the previously musical bereft scene but also, of course, by using scenes often bathed in the blue lighting scheme of the earliest sequences of the movie in stark juxtaposition... so much so, in fact, that for a little while I actually thought one or two of the characters were flashing back to a back story element, rather than flashing forward to incidents seen later in the film.

Early shots within the house are particularly interesting as the guests such as Jess Franco favourite Howard Vernon and the always delightfully over the top Patrick Magee are welcomed into the home of Dr. Jekyll, played by the always watchable Udo Kier, and his beautiful fiancee, Miss Osbourne, played by the truly stunning Marina Pierro. What he does is to use the natural framing of a house with a lot of vertical interiors and then uses certain areas which also have a strong horizontal dominance... splitting the shots up into squares and rectangles and pitching the characters into these sections to add a certain dynamism to the frame. At one point it gets so predominant I kept being reminded of a checkerboard. Later in the movie, the horizontal splits aren’t so prominent but the verticals still dominate the action and make for an interesting look to the frames as they are edited together.

Many of the shots, especially in the second half of the movie, seem to be smaller frames surrounded by contrasting darkness or black at the extremes of the screen... giving one a sense, almost, that various sequences have been sculpted out of light and whittled away by a master craftsmen until they are teased out of the surroundings. Of course, since we’re talking about Walerian Borowczyk here, I don’t think the metaphor is inappropriate for a true artist of cinema such as he.

Alas, that’s all the enthusiasm I can muster for this because once Hyde makes an appearance, played with a real sense of chaos by actor Gérard Zalcberg, the film becomes a chase/romp around the house in a situation where anyone else would have maybe got the police properly involved and sharpish. Hyde is threatening and totally unsympathetic but his actions and movements seem choreographed in such a way that he seems more like one of Borowczyk’s early cartoon characters in his shorts (reviewed by me here) rather than a manifestation of the evils of the id out of control. This kind of takes away from the feel for him as a flesh and blood human character and, for me, eked out any sense of caring what happened for the remainder of the film... which seemed a little dull in comparison to the strong opening of the movie.

That being said, there are lots of good things about The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne and my brain certainly didn’t come away from this empty headed, so to speak, not withstanding the decreasing mental acuity of your less than humble reviewer. Arrow have done a bang up job of getting lesser known works by major artists released in as uncut a form as our stupid moral guardians will allow and are to be congratulated on this and many others of their releases, which it is a privilege to own in such wonderful prints and transfers. Not exactly my favourite Borowczyk movie, for sure, but certainly a interesting gem, boosted by a number of those little extras which Arrow tend to adorn these unmissable releases with. So if you're a Borowczyk fan, this is another essential purchase, I think. Probably the best international release this film has ever received and certainly a long way away from those days of early and considerably overpriced VHS tapes of yesteryear.

Immoral Tales

Topless N’ Tales

Immoral Tales
France 1974
Directed by Walerian Borowczyk
Arrow FIlms
Blu Ray Zone B/DVD Region 2

So, not long after seeing a selection of Borowczyk’s Short FIlms and Animations (reviewed here), I decided to give the director’s infamous Immoral Tales a spin, seeing as Arrow have nicely put out an uncut version in a groovy dual Blu Ray/DVD edition. And, yes, you guessed it, Fopp are selling this at a value for money price too, at the moment... just in case my motivations needed any extra explanation.

Before I go any further, though, I should probably post a fair warning to people who buy these things and love the medium here. Unlike most labels which will let you know and, in some cases, insult the stupid copyright holders who are insisting on their films being released in a Region specific format (I love The Masters Of Cinema’s region warning screens), Arrow’s blu rays do not warn you that you are trying to watch their films in a different region... they will simply just not load up and refuse to play. It took me a couple of days to figure out that there wasn’t anything wrong with the disc and I’d left the Blu Ray setting on Zone A. Frankly, I find this practice unacceptable and I would say that if you are a company who is being forced to comply with this horrible practice of Region locking your product you, at the very least, should let people know on screen so they know to buy a multiregion machine. Also, as a label, you can stop pretending you’re in any way interested in promoting the art of film if you agree to restrict access to a potential audience like this.

Now, back to the movie.

When I did finally get this thing playing, I found that the disc doesn’t just contain an excellent transfer of the original release of Immoral Tales, a film consisting of four erotic sections. It also contains a copy of the early print of the film from when it had five segments in it. The extra segment in the original was called The True Story of the Beast of Gevaudan and it was basically taken out before release because the director wanted to expand it into what became, probably his most famous movie, The Beast. So there’s that. Arrow have done a good job here... although they let themselves down a bit on another extra but... I’ll get to that later.

1. The Tide
The film in its theatrical version starts off with an episode called The Tide. This is the story of a young man (Fabrice Luchini) and his even younger, adolescent cousin (Lise Danvers) who he takes to a beach so he can introduce her to sex or, in this case, so he can arrogantly bend her to his will and have her service him orally on a secluded beach with the tide coming in, while he distracts and prolongs his self control by reciting facts about the oncoming tidal situation. He aims to come in her mouth, he tells her, at a specific time into the proceedings and in accordance with the tidal timetable we saw him covertly  rip from a newspaper in an earlier part of the film. Actually, the whole gameplay element to the  piece and the way the male character wraps everything up in a statistical package very much reminded me of the early work of Peter Greenaway... although that’s probably the only real similarity between the two directors.

The Tide starts off with static shots showing two sides of a conversation but, after a short while, the camera starts moving around and it seems to me to be a pattern, at least I thought so and especially in regard to this film, that this director likes to observe things from afar, like a long shot series of master shots, before he starts to get closer to his subjects in whatever environment they find themselves. Like the static shots of a landscape shown in longshot while the moving elements of the shot are the 20 year old man and his 16 year old cousin, as they ride their bikes towards the camera... or, the inverse of that, cutting to another long shot where they diminish in distance and size as the sequence plays out.

Even before the rules of the game are explained to his cousin, the director is focussing on body parts whenever he does decide to get in close to his subjects... displaying a propensity to concentrate on a sexualised or erotically perceived view of his cast in what might at first seem an innocent scenario. So he might focus on a lady’s butt as she rides a bike or on her lips etc... which is in turn enhanced in this particular segment by a colour palette consisting of pastel blues, white and grey neutral tops worn by the two characters, landscape greys and washed out sand colours... all complementing the flesh tones of the actor and actress. There is an impressive and extended shot, for instance, where the teen in question is playing with her finger in her mouth and the whole thing plays in extreme close up of just her lips and finger as it weaves in and out of her mouth, covered with her own saliva. It’s a shot with a certain amount of presence and I guess a lot of people must have thought the same thing because it was used as the basis of many of the original advertising posters for the film in various countries back in 1974 and, indeed, on the Arrow Blu Ray/DVD release that it’s currently on sale with.

This kind of focussing in on specific details is also matched at times in the sound design, such as when a close up of the girl’s ear when she is servicing her cousin is followed by a shot of flying insects and accompanied by bird song on the soundtrack... as if to highlight a point of view sympathetic to the body part the director has just chosen to edit into the sequence. We also have the sound of the constant lapping of the sea, of course, as a backdrop to the sexual shenanigans afoot and I have to say I admire the two performers' bravery in letting the sea come in and wash over them while they are writhing all over the place... hopefully it wasn’t too cold and gruelling for them. And always throughout, the director keeps cutting in views of the landscape in juxtaposition to what’s actually going on with the two figures... Borowczyk seems quite tuned in to constantly reminding you of the character’s place in their landscape. Like an obsession with establishing shots gone mad.

2. Therese Philosophe
After The Tide we have the second segment called Therese Philosophe and this concerns the character Therese, played by Charlotte Alexandra, and her relationship with religious iconography. That is to say, the episode starts off with her entering a church... She is alone and starts exploring the various elements in the room with her hands, obviously infused with lust at the sexual possibilities of assorted knobs, posts, organ pipes etc. When her mother catches up to her, she pulls her home and locks her in a room as punishment for what her mother perceives are her wrong doings.

Therese yells at her mother that she can’t be without her book of Stations of the Cross and after a short while her mother throws it into the makeshift prison for her, along with some food mostly comprising of uncut cucumbers... yeah, you can see where this one is going straight away, can’t you?

The girl then starts exploring all the artefacts in the room with the same fervour and sexual attitude as she did those in the church and it’s here that I was struck by the similarities between Borowczyk’s live action features and animated shorts. His films are as much about people exploring objects as they are about interacting with each other... it’s almost, at some points, like we are not watching live, flesh and blood performers but puppets or cut outs that Borowczyk can move around the screen however he wants. Now, of course, many people would approve of this notion, especially directors (I’m sure Hitchcock would have approved of this guy’s methods of film making, in some ways) and I’m certainly sympathetic to the idea that the actors are clay to be moved around by the director... it’s not the only way to work but it can be an effective way of creating, depending on what’s appropriate to a piece and your approach to it. However, the downside can be what you get in film like this which is... no matter how sympathetically some of the characters may be portrayed, there’s a feeling of disconnection being projected by the final product. No emotion or empathy coming through from the performers as they are rigidly straight jacketed by the directorial style.

Now I really don’t mind this... it’s not an issue for me and, depending on what else is on offer in a film, won’t necessarily detract from my viewing experience... but I do suspect some people may find Borowczyk’s films unnecessarily cold in places. I’m cool with it though.

Back to the specifics of the episode... when Therese finds a lewdly illustrated book, it further fans the flames of her desire so she gets her kit off and before you know it, she is laying face down on the bed, taking in all the religious paraphernalia and making full use of those cucumbers... and when I say full use, I’m sure my readers will understand that her mouth is not the orifice she is most using to reap the full benefit of this largely unsung vegetable. It’s interesting that Borowczyk takes a swipe at religion by sexualising it in this manner and he does so again, later in the movie... but I’ll get to that in a while.

There is one final thing of note on this segment, however. When the girl finally escapes the confines of her imprisonment, through a first story window, she moves away from the camera again in a static longshot which sees her blending into the distance. Again, it’s a similar style of fixing the characters in space that the director used in the first segment.

Now, in the original, unreleased version of the movie, The True Story of the Beast of Gevaudan came in as the third segment but, since it’s not in the theatrical cut to the movie, I’ll wait and review this segment last in the running order here, as an add on. So that means the next part of the movie, in its theatrical edition (and using that word loosely due to probable censorship issues over the years in various countries), is Erzebet Bathory.

3. Erzebet Bathory
Okay, we all know the story of this character by now. A large section of the British public probably know of her as Elizabeth Bathory and her story of cruelty and bathing in the blood of her tortured female victims to ensure her youth has been rendered in cinematic tales loads of times... with perhaps the most well known of a large batch being Ingrid Pitt’s go at her for Hammer in Countess Dracula (reviewed here).

Borowczyk’s version takes out the scenes of brutal torture, only glancing sideways and leaving these aspects of the story left to your imagination, somewhat, instead concentrating on the spectacle of the sexuality. And he’s got a pretty famous lady playing Bathory herself for his vignette about the legendary character... Paloma Picasso. Yeah, that’s right... Pablo Picasso’s daughter, no less. This film also concentrates on the fear that the reputation the lady in question bings, as she stops at a local village to pick up supplies... and when I say supplies I mean supplies of young, virginal women to have sexy times with. Supplies! Supplies! The unexpected hits them between the eyes. You can bet it does when a whole bunch of them goes back to Bathory’s castle for what amounts to a naked inspection, a long group shower and an orgiastic.. um... orgy of some sorts.

Again, some familiar signature items seem to be appearing and painting a picture of the director’s stylistic leanings here. Once again he focuses on various anatomical features... such as peoples eyes looking on in fear. Picasso’s eyes are even framed as a kind of strip of a section of her face, Sergio Leone style, at one point. There are countless shots of various sexualised body parts too, of course, and at one point Bathory spies on the many showering girls as they lather up their enthusiasm... various moments pitched against shots of her eyes to demonstrate the voyeuristic aspect of the scene. Of all the segments in this movie, this really is a celebration of women’s body parts and the amount of nudity in here is astonishing.

The narrative gets a bit jumpy at some point here. Bathory gives the many young ladies a swig of a special drink she’s concocted and throws herself to them. They all go about ripping her dress off and doing unspecified sexual stuff with her in some kind of mass, frenzied jumble of highly photogenic flesh, from what I could make out. For an actress who is the daughter of the man who popularised cubism, she’s less of a square than you might imagine. Then, after she leaves her ladies of choice, they all seem to start getting more wild and violent and streaks of blood begin to show where they start clawing at each other... I think. It’s not really dwelled on in any kind of detailed way but the implication is it must be bad because the next time we see Bathory, she is bathing in a big bath of blood... presumably culled from the many girls. And then, after one more scene of implied sexuality, there’s one last little but significant part to the ending of the tale... but I really don’t want to spoil that here... partially because I don’t want to give spoilers and partially because, frankly, in a film of this nature, it’s pretty much the only thing that could conceivably be considered a spoiler. These vignettes really don’t have much in the way of plots, to be sure.

4. Lucrezia Borgia
So the last segment is a scenario where Lucrezia Borgia, played by a truly stunning looking lady called Florence Bellamy, goes and visits the pope and his aide, where she disposes of her lover and has all kinds of sex with the two heads of the church, simultaneously. Like Borowczyk’s early animations, he shows a fascination for the scrutiny of objects and illustrations, making his characters interact with their environment as much as they interact with each other. The Pope shows Lucrezia various pictures of horses genitalia and the study of this phenomenon gets her juices up and kick starts the sex that follows. Like the second chapter in this collection, the director seems intent on ridiculing and tearing apart religious iconography... and you can’t get to be too much more of a religious icon, in this day and age, than the Pope, I guess.

Now, as I said earlier, Arrow's fantastic Blu Ray and DVD restoration transfer of this film comes with a nice little collection of extras and includes another version of the movie, this time with the basis for his next feature, The Beast, which he released as an expansion of this unreleased segment a year later.

2B. The True Story of the Beast of Gevaudan
Okay, it’s been a few years since I watched my 3 disc US restoration of The Beast but I’m pretty sure that most, possibly all, of the footage in this segment was retained and used in the later version of the movie. It’s basically the key scene or punchline scene (or possibly money shot scene if you want to push the metaphor to its logical conclusion) of that later film and, frankly, I think I possibly prefer it in this shorter, to the point, variant than the final feature version... although that version is not also without its charm.

The segment starts of with a slow zoom-in on a highly picturesque building and then pans down to the windows to show a woman inside playing her harpsichord. A young sheep tethered outside the house escapes and wanders off into the forest and she runs out and gives chase. An interesting thing to note is that the harpsichord music continues so, it’s an example of one of those fairly uncommon occurrences in cinematic history where a piece of diegetic music (music from an on screen source) on the soundtrack suddenly turns in to a piece of non-diegetic music (a composition composed to accompany, comment or support the scene) without calling attention to itself. This is good stuff.

As she runs through the woods, hot on the trail of her fleecy friend, she is spotted by some kind of man-beast creature who lusts after her with his massive, horse-like organ... chasing after her in order to have his wicked way with her. It has to be said that, for its time and almost even by today’s standards, the “man in suit” nature of the beast is very well done and it’s really not hard to suspend your disbelief. As our heroine continues running through the forest, various branches and conveniently placed twigs conspire to pull the girls clothing from her as she runs... look, I never said this wasn’t implausible and, seriously, beyond corny... but it’s a curious mix of a film. Mostly because this episode is all about bestiality and a whole load of body fluid spillage on the part of the beast. His enthusiasm throbs and dribbles beast-juice throughout the majority of the segment.

Now this film was banned in a lot of countries for years, from what I can recall, so I find it bizarre that it’s suddenly okay in the UK... where bestiality is a big ‘no no’ with the censors... or more probably with the obscene publications act... for this film to be suddenly accepted again. If you can get over the fact that this is about a big beast who rapes a woman before the woman starts getting into it and becomes a complicit lover, killing the beast with the consequences of his spent lust, then it actually becomes quite a ridiculously comical and entertaining piece. For instance, while she flees and throws her old timey wig at him, the beast (after much rubbing and dripping of his enormous beasthood) starts having sex with her wig. When she tries to escape by climbing from a tree and is caught hanging from a branch trying to get away, the pummeling of her fleeing feet on his huge pole of lustiness fans his hairy fervour even more and results in a lot more body fluid spillage.

Once the lady has sampled our hairy, beary antagonist’s unfiltered lust, she sheds more clothes and starts getting into it (oh right, it’s written and directed by a male, I get it), giving the titular character a hand/blow job and ushering in its doom... burying it in autumnal leaves after the “one sex act too far” is finished. Like I said, I prefer this cut without all the preamble of the feature length version of this film... at least until I get around to watching that one again, anyway.

And that’s about it as far as this movie goes. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy this spectacle of sexuality and, although some of the acting is quite terrible, it’s well put together, nicely composed, well lit and has a keen eye for detail imbued in it by the director. It’s a well put together film and the Arrow release is almost perfect. Almost because, there’s just one thing I didn’t understand... especially in light of the inclusion of The True Story of the Beast of Gevaudan on here. Bestiality is very much a big problem over here (and probably is in most countries, I would think) but there is an extra short film on here by Borowczyk called A Private Collection. It’s a documentary style narrative of a man, possibly the director, showing off his various sexual illustrations, curios and gadgets which he’s collected over the years and it certainly continues to highlight Borowczyk’s obsession with the pursuit of objects on screen. However, the distributors have also seen fit to include the rarer, slightly longer by a few minutes, alternate uncut version of A Private Collection on here too. The Oberhausen Cut, as it’s known, includes archival silent film footage of a woman having sex with a dog. However, because of the censorship issues, the scenes in question have been blacked out. Is it just me or does anyone else find it weird that they would bother to release an uncut version of the film and then censor all the bits that were cut from it in the first place? This seems complete madness.

All in all, though, apart from that bizarre ‘about turn’ on one of the extras, the UK Arrow release of Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales is a film I might possibly hesitate to recommend to most people but is also a film that I mostly enjoyed and will probably watch a few more times in my lifetime... if I can find that time. It’s filled with stunning women and there are very few characters you don’t see in a state of undress, if that’s what floats your boat. A problematic film in terms of moral judgements but, hey, the clue is in the title, I reckon. I think each potential, individual viewer can probably make up their own mind about whether they want to see this or not... and not leave that decision in the hands of the hateful, art destroying censors. Give it a go... or not... but certainly a disc I don’t regret buying at all.

Walerian Borowczyk Short Films And Animation

Living On Borowczyk Time

Walerian Borowczyk Short Films And Animation
France - various years
Directed by Walerian Borowczyk 
Arrow Dual Blu Ray Zone B/DVD Region 2

I’ve not seen a heck of a lot of films, over the years, by the famous and, quite possibly notorious, director Walerian Borowczyk because a lot of the material he turns his attention to is kind of edgy and it’s usually handled in the kind of matter-of-fact but playful way that drives British film censors wild and reaching for their loathsome, art defacing scissors. That being said, he was always on my mind when I was going through College in the late 1980s/early 1990s because his films often seemed to be playing at the equally famous Scala cinema... and I usually had one of their incredible “picture timetable” posters pinned above the desk while I worked, more often than not featuring shots of scantily clad ladies as illustrations for films by this director (and usually a few Russ Meyer ladies would be on there somewhere too).

I remember, when I was studying my Graphic Design Degree at the London College Of Printing, my old screen printing teacher, with whom I used to occasionally play badminton, telling me that she was off to a screening of Borowczyk shorts at the Scala one evening. I’m guessing the contents of this dual DVD/Blu Ray edition, which has been put out by Arrow films and which I got cheap... err... at a value for money price at Fopp is, probably, fairly near to what she saw that evening.

I’d have to say that this disc is really not what I was expecting from this Polish born director who worked in France and has a reputation of making erotic, probably pornographic to a large extent, movies of a certain level of acceptability for cineastes in this country. The vast majority of the content on here comprises animations with, I think, just a couple of live action films and I found it surprising that there was practically no erotic content of the kind you might expect to see from a man of Borowczyk’s particular interests and obsessions. That being said, having seen another of his feature length films since watching this collection, I can see that there is a little bit of correlation between the techniques used here and those deployed on his more famous works. I’ll hopefully get to say just a little more on that sense of continuity when I come to write a review of his Immoral Tales... coming soon to this blog!

All in all, the style of a lot of the films on this disc are something that I might expect to have come from the mind of modern surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer and both he and Borowczyk seem to share a passion for exploring what I am about to call... a cinema of textures. Investigating, through animation in this case, the way both animate and inanimate objects can be exploited as a celebration of flat surfaces and their juxtaposition with contrasting shades, colours and textures. And also, another similarity to Svankmajer’s work, things will often move around by themselves with no visible hand at work to explain the motivation and spirit of various paraphernalia.

The films show off a wealth of both visual and aural ideas as you go through the body of work, perhaps more obvious and less tempered than when they are restricted by the credibility expected from an audience when using live actors... especially made, as most of Borowczyk’s films were, in an era bereft of the CGI trickery modern audiences take for granted. There are around eleven shorts on here and one feature length animation, The Theatre Of Mr And Mrs Kabal, which is a sequel of sorts to an earlier short found on this disc, The Concert. 

Out of these, there are certain films which struck a chord with me more than others and I found myself admiring the minutia of an inner Borowczyk world unfiltered by the constraints which might leave his live action work bereft of the majority of such overt observations. I liked the way, for instance, his short film Les Astronautes is mostly animated by rapidly cutting stills together... well, yeah, that’s all film, actually, but what I mean to say is... doing it so that the eye can easily perceive the cuts. Like a lot of his shorts, the film pulls us straight into a world of abstraction but in this case, it does have at least a basic, easier to conceive, linear framework to hang things on to... the journey of an astronaut in his spaceship. It’s a cornucopia of absurdities which possibly wears a little thin by the time it’s played out but there are nice little touches like a periscope the main protagonist uses when he’s flying around the earth which shows his eyes visible in the top part as he watches a lady in her underwear from inside his perpetually morphing spacecraft. There’s another nice little touch when he is flying along upside down in space and his hat drops to the ceiling of his craft. Every time he reaches up/down and puts it on so he can be wearing it whilst driving, it just drops to the bottom/top of the ship again... so instead he sits on some books to make himself tall enough to wear it. It is somewhat whimsical and I might be tempted to say that the whole thing was influenced by The Beatles movie Yellow Submarine... except that it dates from 1959, long before that particular animated feature and long before space travel was a reality too, of course. So maybe the creators of Yellow Submarine saw this at some point.... it’s quite possible I would imagine.

His short work Renaissance features, more overtly, another device which I’ve also often seen Jan Svankmajer use, that of the self constructing or deconstructing ‘entity’... be that entity an animate or inanimate object or character. This one starts off, for instance, with an owl constructing itself from its basic components, the feathers growing thicker as time passes. After he’s done with the owl, Borowczyk focuses on various other objects in a room constructing themselves... trumpet, photograph, wicker basket, scary children’s doll etc. A bunch of grapes appear to the sound of a typewriter clunking away with added carriage return (not sure if any of my younger readers will be familiar with the expression ‘carriage return’ actually... which is a sobering thought about the rapidity of technological change in the scary world we’re living in these days, I think). The short ends with a hand grenade being constructed and then, quite rapidly, deconstructing the whole room again when it blows up.

Another of the many shorts on here which I took a shine to was Joachim’s Dictionary, which consists of a line drawing of a man with slightly different things happening to him as a new dictionary definition is applied to each mini vignette. There was a nice little two part joke which highlighted, in different definitions, the difference between Man and Boy by showing how each would eat a cherry and then just spit out the stone... that is to say, man and boy: no difference between the two. So that was cool although, the majority of the shorts aside from these three and another interesting one called Scherzo Infernale, detailing briefly the story of an angel who wants to be a prostitute, really didn’t do much for me. I had, very much, a feeling of ‘seen it all before’.

The feature length animation The Theatre of Mr and Mrs. Kabal, a sequel to the less interesting short The Concert (aka Le concert de M. et Mme. Kabal) held my interest a little better. The film starts off with the animator, possibly Borowczyk, entering the frames and conversing with Mrs. Kabal, who communicates with him in an electronic gibberish on the soundtrack which is subtitled in three different languages as she speaks. This one explores another surrealist environment and also hangs a somewhat linear, if hard to fathom, thread through the whole thing. Mrs. Kabal seems, I think, to have an aversion to butterflies but, when she ‘consumes’ too many, her husband has to find a way to help. Inspired by ‘a film within a film’ about the human body at his local cinema, he blows his wife up in size and goes to work on her, entering her insides in a manner similar to the protagonists in the movie Fantastic Voyage, but with the size difference achieved through reverse means. Turns out the butterflies have caused quite a lot of trouble in Mrs. Kabal’s body and it was interesting to see what I can only presume was the ghost of Mrs. Kabul, herself, wandering around inside her for a bit, too.

A well animated feature but, as I said, one out of many which held my attention much less than I was expecting. That being said, it is a very creative set of shorts in many ways and, if youre not too long in the tooth and were not inundated by completely incomprehensible Polish and Czechoslovakian surrealist cartoons playing as fillers between TV programmes in the early 1970s, then you may find that you’ve not seen stuff like this before. At the small amount of money I payed for this dual DVD/Blu Ray edition at Fopp, it’s definitely something I would advise any cinephiles to avail themselves of in the near future. As for me, I think I prefer Borowczyk’s live action features, what little I’ve seen of them, to his animated shorts but, even so, I can appreciate the hand of a genuine artist when I see one. Certainly, I’m glad I’ve seen these now and it’s not inconceivable that I’ll give them another watch in years to come. Put this one on your list if you are a fan of shorter works of cinematic art, is my advice.