Before it became possible (in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) to imprison young heirs and heiresses in mental institutions in order to gain control of their inheritances, greedy families had for centuries “given” their daughters to convents without the girls’ consent. Usually, such nunneries were only nominally religious, and their involuntary inhabitants lived a life of relative ease and luxury compared to their genuinely religious (or poorer) sisters. In the film Interno di un Convento, a zealous, handsome priest, who is the confessor for a convent full of such women, encourages the equally zealous abbess of one such institution to enforce the same strict rules on these unfortunate women that are applied to others. In doing so, they uncover a snake pit of sexual couplings, both lesbian and heterosexual, as well as many tools for masturbation. At the same time, a particularly disturbed inmate manages to poison herself and many of the other novitiates in yet another scandal which is covered up by church authorities.

http://nitroflare.com/view/C8330402E6CDC51/Behind_Convent_Walls_%28Uncut%29.avi

Language(s):English (Dubbed)
Subtitles:none

The post Walerian Borowczyk – Interno di un convento aka Behind Convent Walls (1977) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The Astronauts (1959) is a short, collaborative animation project between eccentric filmmakers Walerian Borowczyk and Chris Marker. Borowczyk would later move into live-action film-making, turning his attention to a cinema of perverse eroticism with projects like Goto, The Island of Love (1969), The Immoral Tales (1974), Beast (1975) and Emmanuelle 5 (1987). Likewise, Marker would produce the short masterpiece La Jetée (1962), the celebrated proto-documentary Sans Soleil (1983) and his critical study of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, A.K. (1985). The film, at twelve-minutes in length, is a testament to the creative energy and ideas of these two filmmakers, not only standing as an interesting short film in its own right, but as a window into the creative world of these two, highly skilled, highly original filmmakers. It remains an amazing piece of work for this very reason, more so perhaps than any other; even if it is admittedly impossible to distinguish between which filmmaker was responsible for each individual part of the creative process, leaving us to assume that it was a pure collaboration in every sense of the word.

In terms of actual style, The Astronauts can be seen as an obvious precursor to Terry Gilliam’s work on the “Monty Python” (1969) television series, with surreal, copy and paste photographic images hand-printed and cropped to work in a bizarre, almost stop-motion approach, stressing the use of collage and caricature. Clearly, it is no surprise that Gilliam cited Borowczyk’s film Les Jeux des Anges (1964) amongst his ten best animated films of all time (alongside work by Jan Švankmajer, the brothers Quay and the Pixar animation studio), with both the visual look, sense of wonder and sly satirical humour of this particular approach all showing an influence, not only on his work with the Monty Python team, but on classic films like Brazil (1985) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). Like those particular projects, The Astronauts is certainly worth experiencing; if only for the window that it offers into a completely unique creative mindset, wherein Borowczyk and Marker succeed in putting together some astounding little sequences and ideas to create this warm and enjoyable sketch.

It seems odd that these wildly different filmmakers could get together and produce a work of utter, creative symbiosis, and yet here, with The Astronauts, they deliver a fantastic work of short-form animation filled with clever visual references, an expressive and experimental approach to the manipulation of sound, and an extraordinary amount of visual and thematic imagination conveyed by both the story and the actual presentation. Clearly, it is the kind of film that will be of more interest to fans of these particular filmmakers and of avant-garde animation in general, but I think it is definitely a film that is worth experiencing at least once; if not for the obvious thrill of the creative act itself (and in the ideas presented on screen), then for the delightful little story that is really quite witty and brilliantly delivered over the course of its comparatively short, twelve-minute duration.

https://nitro.download/view/2BD60EB174971D9/Les_astronautes_(1959).mkv

Language(s):None
Subtitles:None

The post Walerian Borowczyk & Chris Marker – Les astronautes (1959) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Walerian Borowczyk’s second feature was just as original as his first. Almost entirely live action this time, it is situated on the archipelago of Goto, which has been cut off from the rest of human civilisation by a massive earthquake and has consequently developed its own arcane rules. Melancholic dictator Goto III (Pierre Brasseur) is married to the beautiful Glossia (Ligia Branice), who in turn is lusted after by the petty thief Gozo (Guy Saint-Jean) as he works his way up the hierarchy.

Quote:
Goto Isle of Love (Goto l’île d’amour), made in 1968 and released the following year, was Borowczyk’s second feature. Unlike the mostly animated Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal, it is entirely live-action, though stylistically not too far removed from his animated work. It’s of that kind of fantasy which qualifies as such because it takes place in a fantasy world – one hermetically sealed from this world – though none of the events of the story are fantastic. One great example of this subtype of fantasy – a literary one – is Mervyn Peake’s Titus trilogy, particularly the first two volumes (Titus Groan, 1946; Gormenghast, 1950) which take place in the vast edificial building of Gormenghast Castle, where the inhabitants are as grotesque as the world they inhabit, though as there is no magic nothing that could not conceivably happen in this world takes place there.

And so it is with Goto, an island nation on this earth, mostly submerged after an earthquake in 1887, ruled by a succession of governors all called Goto (we’re now on the third, played by Pierre Brasseur), and where everyone has a name beginning with G. One of these is Grozo (Guy Saint-Jean), a petty thief who, spared execution, becomes Goto III’s boot-cleaner, dog-feeder and fly-catcher. Goto is married to Glossia (Ligia Branice). The royal marriage is a loveless one: Goto much prefers to watch her in the riding stables via a pair of binoculars, latest in a long line of Borowczyk voyeurs. Glossia has plans to flee the island with her riding instructor Gono (Jean-Pierre Andréani). Meanwhile Grozo becomes obsessed with Glossia and plots his path to the throne when he discovers her and Gono’s affair. If Goto’s attraction to his wife is voyeuristic, Grozo’s is fetishistic. At one point he instructs a prostitute to wear her dress while they have sex.

If this is a fantasy environment, it is an intensely detailed one. Borowczyk is a filmmaker who creates his own hermetic, intricately detailed worlds. (Other examples of this type would include Wes Anderson and, on much larger major-studio budgets, Stanley Kubrick.) Borowczyk made many of the props himself, notably the fly traps and the three-way portrait of Gotos I, II and III, and made much of the film inside Marie and Pierre Curie’s laboratory, Guy Durban’s camera drinking in the varied textures and surfaces of the walls. We never see the fortress wherein the film takes place from outside: the characters and the viewer are sealed in this world too. Goto isn’t an animated film, but in some respects it does resemble Borowczyk’s earlier work visually. Flurries of interest in 3D notwithstanding, cinema is a two-dimensional medium, though many filmmakers have tried to at least simulate the z-axis of depth by means of a moving camera. By contrast, Borowczyk keeps his camera mostly static, with the occasional pan or tilt. He shoots much of the action straight ahead, a telephoto lens reducing depth still further. The use of a handheld camera towards the end of the film becomes truly disruptive. Goto is shot in black and white, but there are six separate shots in colour, mainly for emphasis, mostly pointing up particular objects: a pair of slippered feet, a bucket of blood after an execution, meat being fed to dogs. While mixing colour and black and white is not unheard of, it’s more usual to use them for whole scenes rather than, as here, single shots. It’s something less seen later, partly because in 1968 black and white was becoming obsolescent in western commercial cinema, but Edgar Reitz was to take the technique much further in his Heimat films. Borowczyk has a fascination for objects, often pointing his camera towards a particularly intricate or interesting one while the characters in the scene are talking offscreen. At the start, an overturned chair takes his interest rather than an embracing couple. In the end, a dead body is just another object amidst several others.

Goto went some way towards establishing Borowczyk’s reputation in the West, and picked up a cult following in the UK on its release in 1969, with the novelist Angela Carter among its fans. Meanwhile, its totalitarian themes caused it to be banned in the Eastern Bloc countries and in Franco’s Spain. With the downturn in its director’s reputation, it became harder to see, and inevitably 35mm prints fell into disrepair. Some prints had the colour inserts printed in black and white. Worse still, the original negative became lost. It has had DVD releases before now, but thanks to a Kickstarter campaign (full disclosure: I contributed to it) it has now been restored in HD (2K resolution) and can be seen as closely as is now possible the way its maker intended.
~thedigitalfix.com

The Extras:
1) “The Concentration Universe” (21:24) is a look back at the making of the film, which began production in Paris in 1968 just before “les événéments” of that year. If you were in any doubt about Borowczyk’s obsessive nature, you would not be after this, as that attention to details extended to Jean-Pierre Andréani’s haircut. (He also wrote the Goto National Anthem.) Interviewees are Andréani, assistant cameraman Noël Véry and camera operator Jean-Pierre Platel, all speaking in French (optional subtitles available).

2) “The Profligate Door” (13:15) looks at Borowczyk’s “sound sculptures”, often made from varnished wood without the aid of glue or nails. They are held by the museum at Annécy and our host is curator. As the soundtracks of all the films are inevitably mono, this item’s Dolby Digital 2.0 will give your setup something to play with.

3) “Introduction” (8:13) by artist and Turner Prize nominee Craigie Horsfield

https://nitro.download/view/3B49E9212718294/Goto,_Isle_Of_Love.mkv
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/838875C67FAF2A0/Craigie_Horsfield_Intro.mkv
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/DADD1905CB1966E/Making_Goto%2C_Isle_of_Love.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/5B72F6457EF113E/The_Profligate_Door.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Walerian Borowczyk – Goto, l’île d’amour aka Goto, The Isle Of Love [+Extras] (1969) first appeared on Cinema of the World.