Dzieje grzechu, czyli kontrowersje wokół polskiej recepcji twórczości filmowej Waleriana Borowczyka

Abstract

A story of sin: the controversy surrounding polish reception of Walerian Borowczyk’s cinematic works

Worldwide Walerian Borowczyk is known as a vanguard artist. In Poland, however, his works have been always divided into two categories: the “real art”, eg. his animated films made with Jan Lenica and “all the rest”, usually called “controversial” or demoralizing”, made abroad. Borowczyk’s late works (such as Immoral Tales, 1974, The Beast, 1975, or Emmanuelle V, 1987) confirmed his image of a pornographer, an iconoclast and controversial yet repetitive creator constantly shocking with (cheap) erotica. In that context, an insight on the reception of Borowczyk’s cinematic works in his homeland seems particularly interesting. An analysis of the aforementioned problem is followed by an attempt to find all the possible sources of such particular reception of the works of Walerian Borowczyk. He was a director viewed either as a pornographer or an uncompromising icon of bold film productions - the first real surrealist of Polish cinema.