Universe Without Borders: Walerian Borowczyk’s Transnational Cinema

Iwona Kolasińska-Pasterczyk

Abstract

Walerian Borowczyk is portrayed by the author as the kind of artists who crosses borders in three dimensions: thematic (through eroticism associated with the transgression of various taboos), the model of national cinema (by giving up the local perspective in order to refer to the European cultural heritage) and timelessness (the universalisation of human sensuality, despite the stories being dressed in “historical costume”). These variants of crossing the limits are illustrated by Borowczyk feature films made in the period of 1968­-1988 (that is from Goto, Island of Love to Rituals of Love). Films by Borowczyk (a Pole living in France in the years of 1959-2006) have to be qualified as European, meaning films that refer to the world of the Old Continent (and not directed towards the New Continent). Transnational specificity of this art has its source in a wider paradigm of European literary and visual art, from Ovid to Mandiargues, including artists combining erotic and religious discourses (e.g. de Sade, Bataille and representatives of the 20^th century avant-garde), and stylistic references to the tradition of ”female nudes” in European painting, i.a. Moreau, Ingres, Courbert respectively. While the timeless, universal dimension of erotic tensions results from the trans-historical perspective adopted (from antiquity to World War I, and excluding post 1950 Europe).