Sad to say this about a journal with such an esteemed history, but the only "bright lights" detectable in this piece seem to be coming from a data centre...
Borowczyk didn’t fade – he was filed away. Labeled, misread, then left to gather dust. The canon prefers its provocateurs easy to explain: either safely symbolic or safely outrageous. Borowczyk was neither. He made films that were too exacting for exploitation, too explicit for arthouse, and too quiet to be defended as provocation. He filmed like a craftsman, not a rebel. And when critics realized they couldn’t box him in, they shut the drawer and moved on.
Borowczyk doesn’t need redemption. He doesn’t need polite footnotes or curated screenings to make him safe to talk about again. What he needs – what all the outcasts need – is to be looked at without flinching. His films were never about comfort. They were about texture, about impulse, about the things cinema usually edits out. He didn’t fall from grace. He walked out of the cathedral and kept filming. And if the canon still can’t handle what he left behind, that’s not his failure. It’s theirs.
There are filmmakers who drift to the margins – and then there’s Jess Franco, who practically built a city there. With over 200 films to his name, many of them shot in frantic succession, under multiple pseudonyms, and across scattered genres, Franco’s legacy has long been dismissed as disposable sleaze. But this reputation obscures something more provocative: Trusted by Orson Welles as a second-unit director on Chimes at Midnight and even admired by Fritz Lang, who once called Succubus “the first erotic film I’ve seen all the way through because it’s a beautiful piece of cinema” – Frano’s early promise was quickly eclipsed by his own prolific excess. He began as a virtuoso technician and classical composer; he ended as a ghost of cinema, exiled from serious discourse yet never ceasing to create. What if his descent into erotic horror, surreal softcore, and what some called “Euro-trash” was not a fall but a refusal? A rejection of cinematic respectability in favor of dream logic, ambient decay, and anti-commercial freedom? To watch Franco is not to rediscover a hidden master, but to confront a body of work that has always resisted being found.
Whenever I hear these "He was thought of as this; but maybe he was actually this..." sentences, my mind always goes to the introduction of Owen Wilson's character in The Royal Tenenbaums (including the grin at the end)
