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Listen to… the equally extraordinary electro-acoustic score by Bernard Parmegiani (1927-2013), who furnished Borowczyk with some of his most memorable soundtracks. Watch it for… The way Borowczyk conjures up an entire universe from the simplest means. With this film, Borowczyk definitively proved that animation could be regarded as one of the fine arts, to rank alongside the canvases of Goya and Francis Bacon. After a seemingly endless train journey through a night studded with shells flying overhead, are the pipe-riddled rooms that we eventually reach part of a prison, a factory, or a grim fusion of both? And does the constant parade of beheadings and mutilations serve a specific purpose, or is it merely part of some twisted caprice? His personal experience of life under both Nazi and Soviet occupation has led people to divine allegorical portraits of both the Holocaust and the dehumanising industrial processes of the Stalin era, but its stripped-down, uniquely suggestive approach makes it impossible to pin it down to any specific era. If he’d made nothing else, this macabre, 12-minute masterpiece would grant Borowczyk cinematic immortality on its own. “With its mixture of poetry and burlesque, this is a masterpiece of surrealist incongruity.” (Monthly Film Bulletin) Les Jeux des anges (1964) Listen to… the still surprisingly ‘modern’ score by Andrzej Markowski (1924-86), overlaying unexpected chirps and tweets on top of recordings of classical music.
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Watch it for… one of the best examples of Borowczyk’s early animated style, a deceptively ‘primitive’ blend of jerky cut-out figures and alternately photorealistic and abstract backgrounds. The astronaut himself isn’t above the occasional sly bit of voyeurism en route, in a sequence that foreshadows the work that would make Borowczyk notorious a decade and a half later. The shared directing credit with Chris Marker was more for funding than artistic reasons, and Marker’s creative input was minimal, although he did come up with the astronaut’s pet owl, one of many characteristically bizarre visual touches. A would-be astronaut (complete with top hat, moustache and pipe: no fresh-faced test pilot but a latter-day Heath Robinson) constructs a viable if ramshackle spacecraft on the roof of his house and launches it to the moon, only to be caught up in an interstellar shootout and a rescue mission. The first animated short that Walerian Borowczyk made outside his native Poland remains a delight to this day.