The Early Films Of Walerian Borowczyk Part One: Co-Directed With Jan Lenica (House and School)

1. DOM (HOUSE) 1958, co-directed by Jan Lenica and featuring Ligia Borowczyk.

2. L'ECOLE (SCHOOL) 1958

The Early Films Of Walerian Borowczyk Part Two: Co-Directed With Chris Marker (Les Astronautes Parts 1 and 2)

3. LES ASTRONAUTES, 1959, Co-directed with Chris Marker and featuring Ligia Borowczyk.

Part Two

The Early Films Of Walerian Borowczyk Part Three: (Concert, Renaissance, and Grandmother's Encyclopedia)

4. CONCERT OF MR. AND MRS. KABAL, 1962.

5. RENAISSANCE, 1963.

6. GRANDMOTHER'S ENCYCLOPEDIA, 1963.

The Early Films Of Walerian Borowczyk

Recently I noticed that YouTube had a selection of some of Walerian Borowczyk's early works available for viewing. I thought I would post some of them here for those interested, so scroll down to watch them if you'd like.
I have made no secret of my admiration for Borowczyk's later feature work, and I find these early pieces valuable as well. I won't attempt to go into any in depth analysis on any of them, just give them a look, and have your mind blown. Then visit the following links for more information on the great Polish maverick.

UBUWEB has several more of Borowczyk's short films at this section of their incredible site.

A great English language article detailing some of these films can be found here from Polish Culture.

And of course, Mondo Erotico remains the best all around Borowczyk resource on the net.

For more on some of Borowczyk's early collaborators please visit,
this Chris Marker page which has information on the great French filmmaker as well as more links.
Also please give Kinoeye a visit for their profile on Jan Lenica.

Rare Walerian Borowczyk Poster

This striking poster for for Raymond Bernard's 1952 feature LE JUGEMENT DE DIEU is currently being offered on Ebay.
It features artwork by the great Walerian Borowczyk and I was really struck by it so I thought I would repost the image here.
I love how even at this early stage you can already see clear connections to the animated work he would be doing a decade after this.

An Introduction To Walerian Borowczyk

Recently I did a presentation on Walerian Borowczyk for a film class I am taking. To go along with it we were asked to submit a short paper acting as an introduction to their life and work. Here is a version of mine (with most of the cited page number listings removed to make it more readable) that I thought I would share here. Fans familiar with Borowczyk will find this tiring, but hopefully anyone reading who isn't familiar with his work might get something out of it.

Rarely has an important filmmaker fallen from critical and popular grace as hard as Polish director Walerian Borowczyk. Once included in the same league as filmmakers like Bunuel and Fellini, Borowczyk now hardly occupies even a footnote in mainstream film studies. Still, his work resonate and his themes of “casual brutality, malignant direction by superior forces” and perhaps especially “the fragile, elegant past represented by faded snapshots and piecemeal lithographs” (Strick, 145) continue to haunt generations of maverick filmmakers inspired by Borowczyk’s wildly independent spirit.
Born in Kwilcz, Poland in the late summer of 1932 (some reports list the date as 1923), controversial director Walerian Borowczyk’s earliest influence was his father who was a painter. All of Borowczyk’ works would be marked profoundly by this early influence as all of his films have a very painterly quality about them. This quality is weaved in well with the other themes that continually occupy his films such as voyeurism, obsession with antiquity and a distrust of the wealthy and the church.

Borowczyk did indeed begin his career by studying painting at the prestigious Krakow Academy Of Fine Arts as a teenager. This led to his first entry into the film world, as a poster designer in Poland in the early fifties, which would prove to be a very fruitful and important period for him. Borowczyk’s poster designs got him immediate recognition and many of the images he painted in this period would turn up in his later career, marking him as an auteur before he even stepped behind his first camera.

Borowczyk’s attentions soon turned from painting to the world of animation, an art-form he thought had been misused by the likes of Walt Disney and other children’s animators. Shortly before moving to Paris in 1959 Borowczyk began making his short animated films, first with Polish artist Jan Lenica and then by himself.
His animated shorts were immediately acclaimed as the work of a visionary and they all focused on the problems of modernization and were known for Borowczyk’s inter-cutting of live action (shots often including his wife Ligia) and for his habit of drawing directly onto the film frame. His most famous early-animated works include Dom (1958) and Les Astronautes (1959), a collaboration with his friend acclaimed French filmmaker Chris Marker.

Borowczyk continued making animated shorts throughout the early and mid sixties and garnered numerous awards for his efforts. His work Renaissance (1963) was a major hit and won many accolades from his peers. Raymond Durgnat said that the film was “a remembrance of things past” and a “meditation…on what is life-affirming” and “life-denying”. After a couple of more years of short animated works Borowczyk would deliver his first and only full-length animated feature in 1967 with Mr. And Mrs. Kabal’s Theater before switching to live action films in 1968.
The first two live action films from Walerian, Goto, Island Of Love (1968) and Blanche (1971), garnered him a lot of acclaim from the critics and public. Goto, Isalnd of Love continued many of the themes he had began with his animation and set in motion the obsessions that would haunt the rest of his career. Critic Christian Kessler noted that Goto, Island Of Love “was a simple but forceful examination” of when “sexual ignorance leads to ultimate doom”.
Blanche, another period piece, was an even bigger popular and critical hit than Goto, Island of Love and like that film it would star his wife Ligia. The film would play at many festivals and Pete Tombs would note twenty-five years after its release that Borowczyk’s look at the “destructive power of sexuality and sexual repression” has lost none of its resonance. However, despite the success of his first two live action features, Borowczyk’s time as a critical darling was about to end as his next feature would scandalize his reputation and his career.
1973’s Immoral Tales would be a smashing popular success upon its release in France (it would be the second biggest money maker of the year there) but the conservative press rather viciously attacked Borowczyk’s work as a pandering to the adult film market with its emphasis on sexuality and nudity. Tombs noted that some critics looked upon the film with outrage and suggested that it was “a slide away from art and a move towards grubby pornography”. Hurt by the caustic critical reception granted to a film that the public loved, Borowczyk returned to Poland briefly to film his one feature there, 1974’s The Story Of Sin.
The Story Of Sin, the most financially successful Polish film of 1974, would go a little ways towards reestablishing Borowczyk’s reputation with the critical community. Thomas Kessler described it as “an extraordinarily understated movie” and Borowczyk described it as an attempt as a “popular film” but the brief return to critical favor would be destroyed for good with The Beast, a 1975 satire that would get him in trouble with the censors, the public, the critical establishment and the authorities.
The Beast caused a major scandal upon its release and Borowczyk was nearly brought up on obscenity charges. The film was subjected to major cuts all over the world and the uncut version didn’t appear on home video legitimately appear until just a few years ago. Pete Tombs described its reception as being a complete “fallout” and that it was “profound as nobody who saw it was untouched”.
The furor caused by the film would hurt Borowczyk’s career beyond repair and he would have trouble getting funding and distribution for the rest of his career.
Borowczyk attempted to save his career in 1975 by working on his first modern day film, La Marge, which featured two of the biggest stars of the seventies (Sylvia Kristel and Joe Dallesandro). The film was mis-marketed though as a follow up to Kristel’s Emmanuelle (1974), cut and universally ignored by critics causing Borowczyk’s works to become more cynical, angry and at time violent. La Marge has its fans though (myself included), such as Video Watchdog critic Brad Stevens who called it a “masterpiece” and it is notable as being one of the only modern day films in Borowczyk’s canon.

His next film, 1977’s Behind Convent Walls, would be an all out attack on the conservative press and religious groups that had had him all but blacklisted from the mainstream film world. While not one of his most noteworthy films, it is of massive importance as it was the first time Borowczyk had worked with Italian actress Marina Pierro, a performer who would feature in nearly every film he shot after. Behind Convent Walls is an angry and unsettling satirical work set in a convent. It would prove even harder to market than La Marge and was little seen at the time of its release, something that would plague all of his work from this point on.
After contributing the short film L’Armoire for the 1979 anthology film Private Collections, Borwoczyk delivered his next film Three Immoral Women (1979) (often looked upon as a companion to Immoral Tales) which was quickly followed by a re-imaging of Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, 1980’s Lulu.
1981’s Docteur Jekyll et Les Femmes is today regarded by many top critics (Sight and Sound recently listed it as one of the seventy five greatest under the radar films in history) as perhaps Borowczyk’s masterpiece. A cold and savage retelling of Stevenson’s classic tale starring again Pierro and German star Udo Kier, Borowczyk’s film despite all of its obvious attributes also failed to find any real audience and legal disputes have kept it out of public view for the past three decades. A pity as Kessler points out the film is clearly Borowczyk’s “most personal” and Tom Milne referred to it as “splendidly apocalyptic”.
After the mystifying failure of Jekyll, Borowczyk only managed to complete two more films, The Art Of Love (1983) and Love Rites (1988) both of which starred Pierro. He was briefly assigned to the production Emmanuelle 5 (1987) but walked off the set disgusted and unhappy after the producers refused to let him do what he wanted with the film. With the exception of some TV work, Walerian Borowczyk’s career ended with the failure Of Love Rites in 1988.

Borowczyk’s name began to come up in the early nineties as both Terry Gilliam and The Brothers Quay named him as an influence on their work. In 1994 Video Watchdog ran a major story on him that re-introduced an entire new generation to his films and life. The Tohill and Tombs book Immoral Tales followed in 1995 and their chapter on Borowczyk managed to introduce even more to his then hard to find films.
The past decade has seen the home video debut of many of Borowczyk’s key works in America and Europe. As of 2008, only four of his films are not available on either Region One or Region Two DVD. It is a pity that the four are Blanche, La Marge, Lulu and Docteur Jekyll Et Les Femmes, which are major works.
Walerain Borowczyk died in Paris in 2006 with his wife and key collaborator Ligia at his side. While his career will probably never gain the recognition it deserves by the mainstream, more adventurous film fans will continue to find much to value in his very distinct body of work.

A Recent Interview with Marina Pierro

A very kind reader notified that Moon in the Gutter favorite Marina Pierro had recently appeared at an Italian Convention, and that an interview had been posted at YouTube. It's remarkable to see Pierro again, and it makes me wish I could speak Italian! If some kind soul who happens to be fluent in Italian wishes to watch and translate the highlights in the comments I would be most appreciative. For my older related posts on this remarkable figure in European film history, please click here.



An extremely kind Italian reader was nice enough to offer a translation in the comments and I wanted to share it here as well. Thanks so much to him for taking the time to do this:

"How did you meet with Borowczyk?

I've met Borowczyk after his famous films "the Beast" and "Immoral Tales", when he came in Italy. I already knew him and his movies and I thought of him "he's crazy or a genius" and actually he was both. He was looking for me cause he was impressed by a picture portraying me; I wasn't so famous at the time so it was hard for him to find me. I was wondering why he looked for me and after a while he told me that, as a fan of Italian renaissance painters, he found in me the classic Italian figure.

Borowczyk and animation?

I discovered during our working collaboration that he was a master of animation pictures. After the first movie together I understood why his pictures where so controversial: people loved him or hated him but hardly understood his way of doing cinema. I suggested him to do a short movie to be seen before his films to explain to the audience what they will be see: I studied arts when I was young and I get easily that his way to tell a story was unconventional.

(This part is not so easy to understand in Italian too maybe cause I don't know exactly what she's talking about [Borowczyk and animation])

Then she praise the Trieste Film Festival as she finds the Borowczyk retrospective very interesting and respectful of the director production."

Who's That Lady?

Note: I have since changed the picture in teh template above, but invite you to please read my tribute to Mariana that is linked below.

I have gotten several emails in the past couple of weeks inquiring as to who the striking lady is that is currently gracing my template above. For those who don't know and are wondering, that is Italian actress Marina Pierro in a still from Walerian Borowczyk's THREE IMMORAL WOMEN. Pierro is best known for her wonderful work with Borowczyk, surely one of the great partnerships in all of modern cinema, and she can also be seen in Jean Rollin's unforgettable THE LIVING DEAD GIRL and briefly in Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA.
I wrote a bit on Marina early on in this blogs history so if anyone would like to read that tribute please click here.

Marina's official website has some of the most breathtaking pictures online and it is linked above as well. I plan on switching the template design pretty regularly but I must admit that this one hasn't even began to grow old yet. Thanks to the people who inquired.

Artist and Muse #2

Walerian Borowczyk and Sylvia Kristel prepare for a shot on the set of 1975's La Marge.

The Great Ones Vol.1 (Side B Track 3)

The IMDB has very little to say about Marina Pierro. It lists her as just having ten credits, that she was born in 1960,although a specific date and location aren't given, and when you click on contact information it shows you a blank. There is no trivia concerning her or photographs. Do an Internet search and you will turn up little else. You might find some sites listing her as appearing in Argento's SUSPIRIA or Bido's WATCH ME WHEN I KILL but good luck locating her in either one of those films.
Marina Pierro becomes even more mysterious when you start looking at that filmography. Her first three roles, including one with Visconti, were just bit parts supporting more well known people like Stefania Casini and Laura Antonelli, which leaves us with just seven credits left. Why should you care about an obscure actress with only seven roles credited to her that hasn't been heard of since 1990? I'm not totally sure if I can answer that but I know that I have seen, and continue to see, something truly incredible and unique in her that would cause me to call her one of the great ones.

I have often wondered how Walerian Borowczyk and Marina Pierro met. I am sure this is recounted somewhere but I have never read of it. I have wondered if Borowczyk knew right away, the way Godard must have felt the first time he saw Anna Karina or Pabst when he layed eyes on Louise Brooks.
Borowczyk is the only director that Pierro would work with, one exception will be discussed later, and it's their collaboration that continues to stick with me. Pierro was only 17 when she first worked with the 54 year old Borowczyk yet something clicked. I have started a series on this blog focusing on artists and muses because it seems to be something that is increasingly misunderstood and undervalued. There is an equality in these rare relationships until finally the line is blurred and they are both the artist seeking and finding answers in their discovery. Pierro's stare is just as important as Borowczyk's images, just as PANDORA'S BOX belongs to Louise Brooks as much as Pabst. A true muse is an artist.
Pierro thrived in Borowczyk's period settings, looking impossibly beautiful and almost alien like. Her astonishing face seemed tailor made for his obsessive painterly framing. She is so alive in these early period pieces like BEHIND CONVENT WALLS and THREE IMMORAL WOMEN that you almost forget you are watching a film, it's almost like you are watching some strange documented time capsule. It's only when she is placed in modern roles that her mystery begins to fail, her brutal fetishistic performance in her final feature LOVE RITES is as difficult to watch as it is engrossing.

Borowczyk wasn't the first director to take her out of the past, Jean Rollin would do that with his disturbing THE LIVING DEAD GIRL. Rollin, in his commentaries for LIVING DEAD GIRL speaks of how honored he was to work with her but it's in his fantasy that strips Pierro of her magic. Separated from Borowczyk she was capable of giving a good performance but, much like Irene Jacob away from Kieslowski, something was missing. Marina Pierro is literally torn apart at the end of Rollin's film and in a way she never recovered.

Borowczyk would make one more period feature with her, the beautiful ART OF LOVE, but even here Borowczyk would add an odd coda set in the present. The dream was over and LOVE RIGHTS would mark the final feature for each of them. The TV series that followed, SERIE ROSE, is the final mark in both their filmographies.
I have left out one film. The greatness of Browczyk and Pierro is evident in all of their work together but it is 1981's DOCTEUR JEKYL AND HIS WOMEN (Bloodlust) that stands as their greatest achievement.
Borowczyk's surreal take on the Stevenson novella is one of the great films of the 80s and one of the finest works of his influential career. He would pair Marina with another one of cinema's greatest faces, Udo Kier. Borowczyk creates the only film I have ever seen that feels like an hallucination. I have watched it many times and I still can't shake it's strange dreamlike quality. Watching it is like that moment right before sleep, when everything is almost as it should be but isn't. Borowczyk's cutting back and forth between close ups of Pierro and Kier's faces in the film's final moments literally feels like they are breaking the film apart. It's a film I can't shake and, like Anger's LUCIFER RISING or Roeg's BAD TIMING, even repeated viewings can't take away it's mystery and magic.
Watching these films today I always find myself wondering where Pierro is. I wonder if she is aware, or cares, that some of these films are finally getting DVD releases and some respect. I wonder what her thoughts were when Borowczyk passed away almost a year ago, had they kept in touch or had she disappeared from his life too? I wonder in her 47th year what she looks like, I can't imagine that she has lost much of her beauty. I can imagine her face is as before and her stare could still dismantle not only any camera filming her but any audience watching.

****MAJOR UPDATE****
A kind soul left a comment pointing that Marina has an official website, and I urge everyone to check it out. It's a nicely designed site with some of the most beautiful photos you will find on the web, and shots of Marina in Argento's SSUSPIRIA so that mystery is solved for me.
It's so nice to see that she apparently has fond memories of her film career and I'm glad to see she is involved in stage work. She still retains all of her mystery and I am really thankful to have had this site pointed out to me.

My Look At Borowczyk's At The New Esotika Website

Mike, who runs the excellent ESOTIKA EROTICA PSYCHTICA blog, recently opened up a great website and he has selected my look at Walerian Borowczyk’s La Marge, that I featured here a while back, for inclusion over there. Here is the link to his excellent new site, which I highly recommend and I wanted to thank Mike for reposting my look at this sadly obscure and truly wonderful film. A quick note for those who happen to be at work that Mike's site and his posting of La Marge article does contain some nudity but hey this is a Borowczyk film.
Also the MySpace tribute that I opened up a while back in dedication to La Marge's star, Sylvia Kristel, has been a smashing success. I have had requests from hundreds of Sylvia’s fans all over the world and even a couple of her friends and co-workers. If you haven’t visited the page, which I update whenever I come across a new rare photo, I invite you to now.

Walerian Borowczyk's L’Armoire

Shot in the late part of 1978 for inclusion in the erotic Anthology film Private Collections (1979), Borowczyk’s L’Armoire is admittedly one of his minor works but is a pleasing and important addition to his wonderful filmography none the less.
Adapted from a short story by Guy de Maupassant and featuring lovely Marie-Catherine Conti and handsome Yves-Marie Maurin, Borowczyk’s short film centers on a lonely upper class gentleman (Maurin) in the late part of the 19th century who, unable to sleep, wanders out into the Paris night to find a prostitute (Conti) for company. After meeting up with one and escorting her back to her house where they make love, he realizes that all is not what it seems with the young woman who he has been trying to shape into a certain warped ideal he has of what he wants her to be.
There is much to admire in this, one of Borowczyk’s slimmest works. His photography is as usual quite stunning and his noted obsessive detailing of antiquities and the human form is well on display here. The film is surprisingly slight on the sex and nudity factor, especially when compared to the works offered up by Just Jaeckin and Shuji Terayama for the same film, but this is clearly the work of Borowczyk from the beautifully lonely opening shots of Maurin smoking a cigar to the final frenzied images of the backstage calamities of a Parisian burlesque show. Even at his most minor, Walerian Borowczyk was clearly one of the key auteurs of the second half of the twentieth century and L'Armoire is a fine part of that legacy.
L’Armoire has much more in common with Borowczyk’s films like Blanche and The Story Of Sin rather than the angry and bruising Behind Convent Walls that had just proceeded it. There is something down right tender throughout L'Armoire but like many of Borowczyk’s films, their is a certain heartbreaking poignancy underneath even its lightest moments.
Borowczyk’s contribution to Private Collections is less about sex and more about people’s needs to throw their own obsessions and desires on to other people they come across. The film is at its best when our nameless lead seems incapable of understanding exactly who it is he is spending the night with and what her situation is. Instead he quietly demands that she conform to his own opinion of who he wants her to be. When this dream is shattered at the end by a certain discovery in her closet, he seems to realize he has to choose between the isolation and loneliness of his own false life or finally wake up and accept reality in order to save himself.
If L’Armoire stylistically recalls the painterly period work he did on a film like Blanche, thematically it is much more connected to the masterful La Marge, with its look at what begins as a soulless exchange between a prostitute and a john but becomes something much more. L’Armoire also continues Borowczyk's preoccupation with voyeurism, seen here in a wonderful visual motif that he would repeat throughout his entire career of someone peering through a keyhole at something the audience can’t see. For Borowczyk, even more interesting than the watched is the watcher and L’Armoire plays into this idea wonderfully well.

The look of the film, courtesy of Borowczyk and Director of Photography Noel Very is absolutely mesmerizing. The shots and photography of the film are so perfect and fresh that at times it feels like the brilliantly alive colors the two are painting with might start to suddenly drip off the screen. Like all of Borowczyk’s period based works, L’Armoire is an absolute visual masterpiece.
Borowczyk’s short film finally works as a sad but not hopeless little mediation on a life in denial, as many of his best films did. The final moments in the film suggest though that perhaps our nameless lead character has discovered that it is this denial of reality that has been holding him back. L’Armoire, in these last shots, actually becomes one of Borowczyk’s more hopeful pieces, or at the very least one of his most humane.

Private Collections is available on a absolutely beautiful DVD courtesy of Severin. Extras include the original trailer and an entertaining interview with Jaeckin on his section. It is a really fine disc that I highly recommend, and while I really admire all three short films, L’Armoire is the absolute highlight of it for me.

Cinema's Great Faces: Grazyna Dlugolecka in Walerian Borowczyk's Dzieje Grzechu (The Story of Sin)

Recently while I was watching Natalie Portman's extraordinary performance in Black Swan I was reminded of Grazyna Dlugolecka's startling turn in The Story of Sin (1975). Of course the two films are stylistically and thematically very different works but there was something about the way Darren Aronofsky obsessively concentrated his camera on Portman's face that reminded me of the way Walerian Borowczyk filmed Dlugolecka in his own masterful film. It was a personal response and I am not trying to make any broad comparisons, but it did plant the thought in my head that I needed to pay tribute to one of Borowczyk's greatest works here, hence this post. I'd like to dedicate these stills to their subject Grazyna Dlugolecka, a marvelous actress who deserved many more great roles than she was granted in her career.

The Great Video Store in the Sky: A Walerian Borowczyk Double Feature

My video store in the great beyond will have a full section dedicated to the complete works of Polish Master Walerian Borowczk, with a special shelf dedicated to the different versions of these two astonishing films:

Antonioni: Eight Disciples

Just as the career of Brian Eno is often overlooked as completely altering the modern music landscape, the films of Antonioni are undervalued in how influential they have been. It would be impossible to even began to list the number of filmmakers who have name checked, copied and paid tribute to Antonioni in the past forty years but here are eight whose films would not have been the same without the master's work. I chose eight who are all very different from one another, who span five different countries, several different generations and many different genres.

With the exception of Mario Bava, no director has had more of an impact on the films of Dario Argento than Antonioni. His first feature THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1969) immediately springs to mind as a work that owes much to Antonioni's astonishing composition and color schemes but it is Argento's DEEP RED (1975) that plays as an almost valentine to Antonioni's works, specifically BLOW-UP (1966). Argento's obsessive and penetrating study of misplaced memories and fractured personalities seem to spring directly from Antonioni's towering works on alienation such as L'AVVENTURA (1960) and RED DESERT (1964).

The handful of films that Jack Nicholson has directed since his striking and hard to see debut DRIVE HE SAID (1971) have all be indebted to Antonioni's work. Nicholson, who would give one of his great performances in Antonioni's THE PASSENGER (1975), has been one of the master's biggest vocal supporters and presented him with his honorary Oscar over a decade ago. All of Nicholson's films, perhaps none more so than the carefully designed THE TWO JAKES (1990), share Antonioni's very specific ability of presenting a past that is deliberately and regretfully being disintegrated. The final moment in the THE TWO JAKES where Meg Tilly screams at Nicholson's defeated Jake Gittes, "Does The past ever really go away?" to which he responds with a broken, "It Never Does" could have been lifted from any number of Antonioni's greatest works.

Polish director Walerian Borowczyk might be one of the only filmmakers in history who managed to match the painterly and always awe inspiring compositional skill of Antonioni. They also both knew how to use music to often devastating effect. Pink Floyd has been used in a lot of films but watch the endings of Antonioni's ZABRISKIE POINT (1970) and Borowczyk's LA MARGE (1975) to see two of the bands most famous songs transformed into purely cinematic works for two of the great masters to manipulate and add unquestionable dimension to.

Would Travis Bickle have been possible without the films of Antonioni? I'm not sure but I am willing to bet that the despairing alienation that Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader were able to bring TAXI DRIVER (1976) would have been a lot less without Antonioni's early black and white work. Everything from the film's striking one sheet to the many shots of De Niro's fragmenting psyche recall many moments in Antonioni's canon, specifically Monica Vitti's astonishing turn in RED DESERT.

Like Argento's DEEP RED, Brian De Palma's masterful BLOW-OUT (1982) plays like a love letter to BLOW-UP. Perhaps more noteworthy is De Palma's acceptance of cinema as an art form where extremes are not only at times welcome, but necessary. Match up the final explosion in ZABRISKIE POINT or the final ten minute tracking shot in THE PASSENGER to some of De Palma's more elaborate and breathtaking set pieces, the ending of THE FURY (1978) and the Cannes sequence of FEMME FATALE (2002) come to mind, and suddenly it isn't the ghost of Hitchcock who most often occupies De Palma's films.

When he was preparing one of his final films, BEYOND THE CLOUDS (1995), Antonioni called in German born Wim Wender's to assistant him as a stroke had taken most of his ability to speak away. All of Wender's films are clearly directly descended from Antonioni. From the loneliness of ALICE IN THE CITIES (1974) to the simultaneously searching and running away Travis in PARIS TEXAS (1984), Wender's lonely variations on the road film are unthinkable without Antonioni.

Egyptian born Atom Egoyan's characters often seem trapped in a world they feel they can't inhabit while at the same time being indebted to the convenience of it. Outside of the obvious compositional comparisons to Antonioni's films, Egoyan's fascinating look at the strife and deceptions between family members seems more than just cinematically connected to the failing marriage in RED DESERT or the doomed affair in L'ECLISSE (1962). Egoyan's best films, such as EXOTICA (1994) and THE SWEET HEREAFTER (1997) possess Antonioni's ability to connect a seemingly simple gesture with a world threatening to fall apart.

When Sofia Coppola won her much deserved Oscar for her screenplay to LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003) she went out of her way to thank Antonioni. Watching her three features, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (1999), LOST IN TRANSLATION and MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006) it seems clear that the thoughtful and powerful works of Antonioni are not going to disappear any time soon. LOST IN TRANSLATION'S final moments play like a promise that Antonioni's often ambiguous art house dreams aren't as dead as so many film goers and critics like to believe.

There are many others I could have singled out but these eight all seem particularly indebted and worth mentioning as I begin my tribute to Michelangelo. I can imagine if asked what they would say to him, they would all offer the one word he had for The Academy the night he won his honorary Oscar..."Grazie."