Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

Terry Gilliam is fronting a Kickstarter campaign to restore the classic animated film Goto, l’île d’amour (Goto, the Island of Love), created by legendary Polish animator Walerian Borowczyk.

Speaking about the Polish artist and filmmaker’s work Gilliam says: “They activate a part of my brain that very few other things do…I haven’t seen any of these films in probably thirty or forty years, but they all have stuck with me. He needs to be restored and the world needs to be reminded.”

Born in Poland in 1923, where he studied painting and sculpture before establishing himself as a poster artist during the late 1950s, Borowczyk emigrated to France in 1959 where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. With films such as Renaissance (1963) and Rosalie (1966), Borowczyk played a major part in getting animated film recognised as a serious art form.

According to Amos Vogel, author of Film as a Subversive Art, Borowczyk’s harrowing 1964 animation Les jeux des anges (Angels’ Games) is simply “a masterpiece of modern art.” In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson describes Borowczyk as “one of the major artists of modern cinema, arguably the finest talent that East Europe has provided.”

Until now the majority of Borowczyk’s early films have been unavailable. However, earlier this year writer and documentary filmmaker Daniel Bird secured the permission of his widow Ligia Borowczyk to restore nine short films and two feature films including Le théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal (The Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal, 1967) and Blanche (1971) which will be released by as a box set by Arrow films in Spring 2014.

Box set producer Bird says: ”For fifteen years I have been trying to find a way to restore Borowczyk’s early films. Obviously, I am thrilled to be working with Arrow Films on this box-set.” The restorations were completed at Deluxe laboratories, London, under the supervision of leading film restorer, James White. This will be the first time that many of these films will be available in any home video format in any territory.

Click here to watch a video of Terry Gilliam talking about Borowczyk’s work.

In addition, Arrow Films has collaborated with Argos Films, Paris, to release two other Borowczyk films, Contes immoraux (Immoral Tales, 1974) and La Bête (The Beast, 1975) in newly restored high definition transfers, as well as five more short films. These acquisitions will form the basis of Arrow’s Walerian Borowczyk Blu-ray and DVD box set, which is to be released as part of the Arrow Academy series in Spring 2014.

The co-producer of the box set is Michael Brooke in conjunction with Ligia Borowczyk and the filmmaker’s regular assistant and producer, Dominique Segretin.