Daniel Bird: The Mr. Skin Interview

What's the genesis of Polish erotic film?

Poland is a very Catholic country, but it has a very strong avant-garde tradition. Polish Romanticism and the avant-garde are very closely connected. Dziady, arguably the key text in Polish literature, is based on the confusion of Pagan and Christian rituals, and as a result, the "demonic" often figures in Polish culture. A good example is writers like Stanislaw Przybyszewski, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, whose stories often featured demonic women and occult-tinged orgies, usually under the influence of Schopenhauer and alcohol.

Later, in the early part of the twentieth century, you have a very interesting pulp writer, Stefan Grabiński, who combined highbrow ideas, like those of Henri Bergson, with supernatural pulp material and wrote a number of sexually charged short horror stories, some of which have been translated into English. However, eroticism is very much present in Stanislaw Witkiewicz, or Witkacy--a philosopher, playwright, painter, novelist who is, in many ways, a precursor of the "theatre of the absurd." Bruno Schulz too, who created a bizarre literary and graphic world--full of horses, dominating women, and submissive men--both in his writings and engravings.

However, I'd say Witold Gombrowicz is the writer who has influenced filmmakers like [Roman] Polanski or [Andrzej] Zulawski. He wrote a novel titled Pornography, which isn't what you might think. Rather it's about two old men "insinuating" a relationship between a young boy and a girl, fantasizing about their erotic possibilities.

Was there a homegrown industry or was it mostly ex-pats expressing themselves beyond the country of their origin?

In Poland, at least after the War, you had two forces in play: the Communist authorities and the Catholic Church. Erotica would have been opposed on ideological and moral grounds, respectively. Abroad, mainly in France, you had three filmmakers who didn't shy away from sex: Borowczyk, Polanski, and Zulawski.

Can you pinpoint the first Polish sex film?

That's a difficult question, as there has never been a Polish erotic film "genre" as such. I guess if we are talking nudity and sex scenes, the key film is Borowczyk's Dzieje grzechu, or Story of Sin. How did it get made? Well, Borowczyk was invited by Stanislaw R?icz, a filmmaker who was then creative director of the "TOR" film unit. Borowczyk based the film on a novel by Stefan Zeromski, who I guess you could call a "Polish Thomas Hardy."

It's not a great novel, very melodramatic. However, what's interesting about it is that it concerns sexual repression and the Church. It "attacks" dogma and hypocrisy. Borowczyk was certainly not a Communist, but it's interesting to see a Polish director who regarded himself as Catholic attacking the Church with the ferocity of, say, [Luis] Bu?.

Remember, this was when Poland had a reputation for making the "cinema of moral concern." It's funny now that all those "subversive" anti-communist films from the '70s have been canonized this one still has some teeth. When it was released in 1975, it was a big success.

It was up against [Andrzej] Wajda's Land of Promise. Interestingly, Wajda recently cut a sex scene from Land of Promise, so as not to upset Catholics, whereas the only scene to have been cut from Story of Sin was a scene involving Russian soldiers on Polish soil, which was deemed too controversial at the time (Poland, when the film was set, was partitioned, so it technically didn't exist). Here was Wajda, a filmmaker well known for his politics, cutting a sex scene, and Borowczyk, a filmmaker known for sex, cutting a political scene!

What would you describe as some of the classics of the sexploitation genre?

As I said, it isn't a genre. However, there are a lot of Polish films with a notable sexual content. There is a sexual undertone in two of [Wojciech] Has's "fantastic" films, The Saragossa Manuscript and The Sanatorium under the Hour Glass, the latter based on Schulz.

I guess a similar thing could be said of Mother Joan of the Angels, which was based on a book by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, who based his novel on the same historical sources as Aldous Huxley did for The Devils of Loudun.

Zulawski has a decadent orgy in The Devil and a cosmic orgy in The Silver Globe. However, it's only with a film like Thais you get a film where costume is really a pretext for nudity. That's based on Anatole France and concerns a poor Christian trying to persuade a beautiful Egyptian courtesan to convert. Now the film looks very kitsch, but it has a very good ritual orgy.

Around the same time was Sexmission (Picture: 1), a science-fiction comedy about a future world only populated by women. It's a cult film; you always hear people quoting dialogue from Sexmission in Poland.

Walerian Borowczyk is one of Poland's best-known directors of erotica, especially films like Immoral Tales, Immoral Women, and, of course, The Beast (Picture: 1 - 2). For those unfamiliar with these bizarre examples of sexploitation, please give us a primer.

Borowczyk was born in Poland, 1923. After the War he studied painting and lithography in Krakow, before moving to Warsaw, where he worked as a poster artist. During the '50s he established himself as one of the masters of Polish Poster Art, along with Roman Cieślewicz and Henryk Tomaszewski. In 1957 he collaborated with Jan Lenica, another major poster artist, on a short animated "cut out" of film, Once Upon a Time.

In essence, they imported their skills and experience from poster design into animated film. Borowczyk and Lenica's graphic style was revolutionary, and they can be considered spiritual ancestors of "cut out" animation, including Monty Python and South Park.

Together, Borowczyk and Lenica made a few more films, each in different styles, the last of which, Dom, was awarded the Grand Prix at the Brussels Festival of Experimental Film in 1958. After that, Borowczyk and Lenica parted company, though both moved to France.

Borowczyk was employed by Les Cineastes Associes, where he made a number of groundbreaking short animations, including Renaissance and Les jeux des Anges, which in many ways paved the way for many of Jan Svankmajer's experiments with "object animation" and some of Peter Greenaway's early shorts, like A Walk Through H.

Towards the end of the '60s, Borowczyk moved into live action, and in many ways his first film, Goto, Island of Love, remains his masterpiece. In the '70s, just when the censorship laws were being relaxed, Borowczyk experimented with sexually explicit cinema, like many New Wave filmmakers like [Dusan] Makavejev and [Nagisa] Oshima, not to mention polymaths like [Pier Paolo] Pasolini and [Shuji] Tereyama.

Immoral Tales and The Beast split the critics, but they were both box-office smashes. However, towards the end of the '70s, the novelty of sexually explicit cinema was wearing off, mainly due to the video revolution and the advent of hardcore. Despite making a number of interesting and experimental films in the sexploitation genre, Borowczyk appeared to get stuck in a rut and retired from filmmaking largely in obscurity during the early '90s.

However, during the last ten years, there has been something of a Borowczyk revival, with filmmakers like Terry Gilliam and the Quay Brothers expressing their admiration. In Poland, Borowczyk is still largely unknown, or at least forgotten. However, all this is slowly starting to change, with young journalists curious about this very strange filmmaker . . . you can see some of Borowczyk's short films at: http://www.ubu.com/film/borowczyk.html

Borowczyk's casts many European actresses, but few if any Polish-born natives. Who are the sex stars of Poland past and present?

As there was no genre, there were no "sex stars" as such. However, Zulawski's second wife, Malgorzata Braunek, was definitely a star during the late '60s and early '70s. Then she became a Buddhist.

Grazyna Dlugolecka, the star of Story of Sin, could also have been a star, if she had a better chance at handling the bad press surrounding the production. That could also be said of Iwona Petry (Picture: 1 - 2), the star of Zulawski's Chamanka. She was very brave; she's also fantastically beautiful; she has a real demonic streak. It's a real pity that she didn't do anything after Chamanka.

More recently, Agnieszka Wlodarczyk (Picture: 1) has cornered the market on doing "sexy" roles in Polish comedies. In short, Poland is full of very talented and beautiful actresses, but unfortunately the current generation of Polish filmmakers seems to be incapable of producing anything anyone might vaguely be interested in watching.

Are there any more mainstream or artistic Polish directors and/or actresses not from the exploitation field that might surprise us with some unknown or little-seen sexy work?

Don't forget Polanski. Let's not forget his early shorts, Knife in the Water and sex comedies like What? (Picture: 1 - 2) and Bitter Moon (Picture: 1).

Finally, what is it that you find most arousing about the work of the Polish sexploitation industry?

I've never tried to analyze it.