Contemporary Films 75th Anniversary

Walerian Borowczyk’s critically acclaimed and influential medieval tale — a beautiful tragedy told with pitch-black humour and the director’s remarkable idiosyncratic inventiveness.

Arguably Borowczyk’s most ambitious film, a meticulous recreation of medieval life by way of references from the history of art, not least Giotto’s religious paintings. Occupying the space between Pasolini and Parajanov as a sort of flat, two-dimensional moving tapestry, Blanche is based on a drama by the great Polish romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki, Mazepa. Featuring one of the last performances by the Swiss actor Michel Simon, not to mention a spirited turn by the late Jacques Perrin (also serving as an uncredited producing partner here), Blanche herself is played by Ligia Branice as a Sadean stock character whose innocent gothic beauty evokes male lust inevitably followed by bloody violence.

While Borowczyk was able to realize his medieval masterpiece with complete artistic control, Blanche was a critical if not commercial success in France, but fared much better during Contemporary’s British run where it played for 20 weeks at Contemporary’s Paris Pullman cinema alone.

Enthusiasts included documentary filmmaker Leslie Megahey, whose own Schalcken the Painter (1979) it influenced, Monty Python’s Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam (the latter cited the film, along with Pasolini, as key references when conjuring the medieval onscreen in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Jabberwocky), and the novelist and critic Marina Warner, who included Blanche in her study of fairy tales From the Beast to the Blonde.

More than half a century later, two aspects of the film remain particularly striking: the way Borowczyk creates a flat, face-on world, like an animated tapestry, and its soundtrack, which set out to reconstruct the sound of authentic 13th-century musical instruments.

The screening will be introduced by Daniel Bird, Co-founder of Friends of Walerian Borowczyk, a non-profit association based in Paris that manages the rights to the painter, sculptor and filmmaker. He will discuss Borowczyk’s association with Contemporary, and will be joined by Kathleen Wallfisch, Music Supervisor for film and TV, to talk about the music of the film and how it is arranged and presented on screen.