Films by Walerian Borowczyk are showing on MUBI in many countries in the series The Many Sins of Walerian Borowczyk.
Ligia Branice is extremely clothed in the three features she filmed with Walerian Borowczyk. Outfitted hat-to-boot in a pale, monochrome riding costume or a black lace Victorian gown, she is lodged in time on Goto, Island of Love (1968). As the titular character in Blanche (1971), Branice is medievally sheathed in a grey houpeland hood so tightly drawn her framed face appears like a floating animation. The flat blackness of the nun’s habit in Behind Convent Walls (1978) abstracts her body completely. The extreme clothedness of Branice fixes a signature Borowczyk dualism, for each film juxtaposes moments—in flight, in ecstasy, in exception—where she is notably unclothed.
I was instantly captivated by Branice’s enigmatic screen quality: a Garbo, ever more matte. The actress’s visage, rendered in narratives of entrapment and seized on camera, resists the possessive facet of to-be-looked-at-ness. It’s a peculiarity I find in 30s Hollywood actresses, the anti-loquacious arrest of foreign-born stars, like Garbo, or Dietrich. With cool and supernatural indifference, they take on the camera. Emanating, celestial faces opaquely reflect and return, enforcing a collaborative relationship between the photographed and photographer, actress and director. That Borowczyk and Branice were married, I later learned, firmed for me the pair as creative accomplices, these three feature films forming an intrigue to understanding Borowczyk’s erotic, allegorical cinematic work at large.
There is little documented of the preternaturally private Borowczyks’ personal life. Borowczyk, the son of a railway worker, studied painting in Krakow in the 1940s where he met the aristocratic and beautiful Branice. After relocating to Warsaw, the couple emigrated to France at the end of the 50s, armed with a fetishistic conception of individual freedom induced by their experience as artists in authoritarian communist and Catholic Poland. Branice, credited as Ligia Borowczyk, appeared in several of the filmmaker’s animated shorts before starring under her stage alias in Goto, Borowczyk’s first live-action and feature film. She appeared in few non-Borowczyk productions, most notably enshrined as a static image, an unearthly and canonical representation, A woman from the future in Chris Marker’s meditation on memory, love, technology, and photography, La jetée (1962).
“Live action is animated photography,” Borowczyk explained, merging his two methods of working. A woman from the future, Branice is historically, uncannily inseparable from the photograph. Playing, in Borowczyk’s features, a medieval countess, cloistered nun, a perpetually 19th century spouse, Branice beholds and eschews the camera with darting, ethereal eyes which are painted futuristically in white and metallic winged liner. The space-age cosmetic accentuates Branice’s inherent anachronistic or achronistic presence, always past and always future, a purely photographical mode of being. Imaged by her lover, Branice is spectral, alien, animated, mediated and preserved. Cloaked monochromatically in white or black, the disarticulated body becomes background to Branice’s expressive portrait. When onscreen, context falls away; like a Warhol screen test, what remains is only human animation. Branice is plastic, opaque, all surface, an ageless animal.
“Socially unavailable” in public or print, to access Branice is to pass into her representation. Being photographed by a lover has an erotic dimension; the body of the photographed links to the gaze through “carnal light.” Borowczyk captures Branice’s spirit; her sexual spirit; her alien heart. Branice’s innate photographic qualities—ethereality and materiality—give expression to the polar binaries in Borowczyk’s films, functioning as decoder to these painterly, weird, erotic pictures. If the act of photography is an act of love, the films themselves are strictly about corporeality: bodies and sex. “Your eyes sparkle like a lover’s,” a woman flirts and taps the Count’s son’s chest in Blanche; what resounds is a cold metal armored clang. Borowzcyk’s films are allegorical rather than narrative. Character psychology and drama are neglected for concepts. Though cast as innocents, we know Branice, collaborator in the Borowczyks’ carnal vision, is mature. Sex, in the films, is always a repudiation of law. Glossia’s affair with her horse trainer undermines her husband/dictator, Sister Clara trades in desire of Christ for carnal consummation with Priest Rodrigo. Saintly Blanche covets her step-son as her gaze caresses an icon of Jesus.
Blanche is introduced during opening credits stepping from her bath fully nude. The abbreviated shot is the only nakedness in the film, and in vivid contrast to Blanche’s otherwise amplified covering. The opening credit montage is intercut with establishing shots of the remote, pastoral fortress and Blanche’s pet dove, tightly framed, fluttering in its cage. As Blanche moves through the maze-like fortress, often at a clip, she is frequently in flight from a quartet of men in relentless pursuit of her body and affection. Bartolomeo declares: “Blanche, all my hope rests in your body.” She cries, “There is none. None!”
No hope and no body, rigorously as it is enclothed. Blanche’s rigorous enclothment denotes the invasive inscription of the law upon the body itself. Entrapment is extremely reproduced: the gated castle, her small quarters within, the punishing bricking-of the bedroom within her quarters. The Borowczyks’ filmic worlds portray brutal, pervasive jurisprudences from which there is no possible escape. Voyeuristic apparatuses that facilitate systems of surveillance proliferate in the films: interior windows, peepholes, binoculars, opera glasses. Surplus enclosure encourages surplus perversion. Peering into binoculars through a loft window, the dictator Goto gazes upon his wife Glossia exposed, unclothed with her lover. This viewing results ultimately in murder, an execution, a suicide and a breakdown. Spectatorship is shown to circumscribe and define human alienation.
Blanche’s nude bathing scene, in excess of narrative, visualizes the free, animal or alien body within oppressive architectures. Blanche’s formal and metaphorical alliance with the caged dove identifies her within the “creaturely” realm. Branice’s movement, particularly in Goto and Blanche (and characteristic of the Sisters generally in Behind Convent Walls), is akin to a critter’s scurry, aimless and frolicsome, or—significantly in each film—in flight from capture. Attentiveness to the animalic is central to Borowczyk’s project. Branice, otherworldly, alien, inscrutable, with an animal gaze, captivating and captive, evokes that realm. In the unclothed moments in these films, her characters experience fleeting, ephemeral, exhilarating freedom. The night after the “confinement was violated” in Behind Convent Walls, the night of Sister Clara’s sacred/profane extended and ecstatic penetration, the Father Confessor seeks to obtain answers. Branice, habit split open and body bared, apprehends the Father with the cool, defiant insouciance of Marlene Dietrich, ultimately reaching rapture, attacking the priest gleefully and animalistically with a barrage of objects.
Borowczyk is preoccupied with the man/animal, sovereign/creature binary—in their difference, but also their moments of proximity. In Behind Convent Walls, a libidinous nun and her male lover indulge in illicit copulation upon a cage of chickens as the Abbess, in her study, peers over pinned moths. Goto’s servant (and murderer/replacer) captures democratic swarms of insects in elaborate, masochistic traps built painstakingly by hand. The outside, that outside to which Branice’s characters are never permitted, betrays another disorderly threat of violence in exposure: Bartolomeo is tethered to and dragged through the wilderness by a horse, rabid peasants attack a man escaping the debased convent, the wild sea surrounding the island Goto devours all venturing escape.
Each of Branice’s characters ends in death; it is in sex and death that the human approaches the creaturely. At the end of Goto, in final flight from her fanatic pursuer, Glossia throws herself from a staircase. Laid prone, the camera pans gently over Branice’s clothed body, from her boots, her skirt, to her chest. Her chest rises briefly with breath, her lined eyes flicker once, imbued with liveliness, Branice animates. Undeadness is the state of the lover photographed.
