SPOTLIGHT
By Lloyd Haynes
Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk, photographed in Paris in 1965, on the occasion of a retrospective of his animated works.
Over the last two to three years, the UK’s Arrow Films & Video has established itself as one of the premier distributors of cult cinema from Europe, America and beyond. Raising the company’s stakes considerably was their CAMERA OBSCURA: THE WALERIAN BOROWCZYK COL- LECTION, a lavish 10-disc box set (five BD, five DVD) of 2K restorations, strictly limited to 1000 copies, released in September 2014. Exclusive to this release were two books, one (edited by Daniel Bird and Michael Brooke) consisting of new essays and important archival writings from such writers as Raymond Durgnat, Philip Strick, Patrice Leconte, David Thompson and Chris Newby, and Brooke’s account of the meticulous restoration process in- volved; the other the first-ever English translation (by Michael Levy, the director’s assistant) of ANATOMY OF THE DEVIL, “Boro”’s 1992 collection of short stories. It sold out almost immediately. The
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individual releases which have since replaced the box set in circulation consist of the same five vol- umes, with the contents of the box set’s essay book meticulously re-edited by Michael Brooke into self- contained liner note booklets.
The first of these, WALERIAN BOROWCZYK: SHORT FILMS AND ANIMATION, collects 11 of the late Polish-born writer-director’s celebrated short works, together with his first feature, the animated THEATRE OF MR. AND MRS. KABAL (1967). Following his award-winning collaboration with
Jan Lenica, “House” (Dom, 1958; the Gold Medal winner at the 1958 Brussels Festival of Experimen- tal Film), Borowczyk relocated from Poland to France, where he was approached by the Paris-based head of Argos Films, Anatole Dauman, to direct a short animated film. The result was “The Astro- nauts” (Les astronautes, 1959), an indescribable
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