New screencaps from TV series and movies with a focus on Borowczyk & Almodóvar

Walerian Borowczyk

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If you love 70s erotic oddities, you should take a look at Polish artist and director Walerian Borowczyk. We have just added four movies to our collection (Immoral Tales, The Beast, The Streetwalker and Immoral Women), all of them are quite surprising and very aesthetic. Borowczyk’s art is to film transgressive (and sometimes forbidden!) subjects with a visual imagination that combines gentleness, dreams, contrast and sensuality.

Before directing many erotic movies, Borowczyk designed movie posters and then made experimental animated films inspired by surrealism, which made him famous throughout Europe. He then turned to live-action film and, in particular, erotic live-action film.

Released in 1973, Immoral Tales was Borowczyk's most transgressive film at the time. Immoral Tales is an anthology film consisting of four erotic stories: first sexual experience, discovery of the body through masturbation, bloodlust and eternal youth, debauchery inside the House of Borgia.

Many shots are reminiscent of nude paintings, particularly paintings by Raphael and Ingres: Borowczyk, who studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, films sculptural, voluptuous, and nude bodies as in The Turkish Bath or Grande Odalisque. Other shots of objects or food are filmed as baroque still lifes or vanitas, as in Immoral Women, released in 1979.

This movie is divided into three self-contained stories set in different eras and featuring three women whose names all begin with the letter M (for 'mal', French for evil). One of them, Margherita, is inspired by the ambitious mistress of the painter Raphael, Margherita Luti, who is the model for one of his famous paintings, La Fornarina. In this story, many shots that punctuate the sensual sequence of Margherita posing, are inspired by Renaissance and baroque still life.

The Beast, which consolidated Borowczyk's position as a maker of artistic erotic films, is a free adaptation of Lokis by Prosper Mérimée: a woman has erotic dreams after reading a book about an ancient curse that haunts the family because a woman had sex with a monstrous beast two hundred years ago.

The Streetwalker is less ethereal and light, more dramatic and dark than the other movies. It tells of Sigismond's extramarital affairs with a prostitute (played by Sylvia Kristel, best known for her role as Emmanuelle). After his erotic escape, Sigismond learns of the death of his wife and son two days earlier, as if the fulfillment of fantasies had something to do with death. Some of Borowczyk’s movies are indeed like cruel tales in which eroticism involves forbidden love, blood, or even death.

However, even when Borowczyk films drama or blood, he always puts into his movies his own gentle and luminous vision of humanity and pleasure. As he said in conversation with Andrzej Markowski:

Quote Eroticism, sex, is one of the most moral parts of life. Eroticism does not kill, exterminate, encourage evil, lead to crime. On the contrary, it makes people gentler, brings joy, gives fulfillment, leads to selfless pleasure.

Pedro Almodóvar

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We have recently added manys films by Pedro Almodóvar, from Labyrinth of Passion, his second feature-length film, to Parallel Mothers, his last movie released in 2021. All these movies represent more than 3,300 stills! And what we like to do with a collection like this is to use the "search inside" tool, looking for some cinematic obsessions of a director.

For Almodóvar, you can try "interior decors", "telephone conversations" or "red clothes"... This will give you a collection of stills from his films, with their kitschy sets and dresses, their artificial and theatrical compositions, their vivid color palettes, etc. In a few words you can get an overview of all the recurring motifs and themes that make Almodóvar so famous.

So waiting for our complete collection of Almodóvar’s movies, enjoy these thousands of stills.