GOTO - JEREMY MARK ROBINSON

GOTO: ISLAND OF LOVE

WALERIAN BOROWCZYK

POCKET MOVIE GUIDE

BY JEREMY MARK ROBINSON

Walerian Borowczyk (1923-2006) is one of cinema's great talents. Quite simply, there is no filmmaker quite like 'Boro'. Borowczyk's films have an astonishing, magical quality. They reach a place very rare in contemporary cinema, and are quite unlike the films of any other auteur. Borowczyk's films create their own space, with imagery, sounds and music of a really exceptional power.

The great Walerian Borowczyk masterpiece is Goto: Island of Love. It made a big impression on audiences and critics, winning a number of prizes. Goto can rank alongside the great films in the history of cinema. Immoral Tales could be placed in the masterpiece class too. The other Borowczyk films are often as fascinating, often more grotesque - certainly more sexually explicit - but probably not as wholly satisfying as Goto: Island of Love, from a conventional critical standpoint. But The Beast, Blanche, Behind Convent Walls, and Love Rites would count as extraordinary films by most standards. They may not be quite up there with Persona (Ingmar Bergman) or 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini), but taken together they form a group of works that mark Borowczyk out as a maverick original. Similarly, Borowczyk isn't a filmmaker celebrated by critics or filmmakers, like Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir or Sergei Eisenstein, and his films don't make critics' top ten lists. For detractors, Borowczyk's films were better when they concerned ideas rather than the senses - philosophy not sex.

You probably won't know many other people who've even heard of Walerian Borowczyk, let alone seen one of his films. His reputation as a producer of European arty porny films (art-as-porn films or porn-as-art films) is probably all that many people will have heard of him (movies with sex and nudity do seem to travel well, crossing borders). Needless to say, Borowczyk's films are not shown regularly on television, even by channels which boast of their open-mindedness and international film broadcasts. Similarly, you won't see Borowczyk's films at the cinema nowadays, even rep, arthouse and independent cinemas rarely screen his films. It's mainly home video releases (and, later, home DVD releases) that's enabled Borowczyk's films to reach a contemporary audience (the porny and arty elements make them perfect for niche marketing to the cognoscenti). And you'll have to hunt to find them all. You won't find The Beast next to Back To the Future and Bad Boys on the 'B' shelf in your local video store.

Contains illustrations from Goto, Borowczyk at work, and his favourite artists.

Bibliography, filmographies and notes. Illustrated. 232pp.

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