Cited by Borowczk as his favourite amongst his films, Rosalie adapts a short story by Guy de Maupassant into a moving account of female desperation. The director’s wife Ligia stars as a servant girl on trial for infanticide and forced to justify her actions. Blending long stretches of monologue with animation, Borowczyk finds minimalist means to convey the moral profundity of Maupassant’s text.

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Perhaps the most concentrated achievement in Borowczyk’s singular career, Les jeux des anges, otherwise known as Angels’ Games, is a 12-minute masterpiece of surrealist horror. Constructed from a series of abstract paintings that recall the likes of Magritte and Bacon, the film allegorises both the Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulag in its depiction of innocence deconstructed. The film also marked the beginning of Borowczyk’s collaboration with composer Bernard Parmegiani, whose electro-acoustic score only adds to the stripped-back power of the director’s visual imagination.

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One of Borowczyk’s most well-known shorts, Renaissance deploys reverse stop-motion animation to picture the world caught in a cycle of destruction and reanimation. In the aftermath of an explosion, the remnants of a handful of objects (a trumpet, a doll, a stuffed owl) slowly reconstitute themselves – only to be blown apart once again. Borowczyk dedicates the film to Hy Hirsh, the American photographer and experimental filmmaker who died prematurely in 1961.

Watch Renaissance on Klassiki now.