Les Jeux des Anges (Walerian Borowczyk, 1964) 12 mins
14 FEBRUARY 2018
After a long night-time train journey we arrive in a concrete-looking windowless room – or inter-locking series of rooms, in fact – where pipes jut from the wall. Is it a prison, a bunker, a factory? We don’t know. In these gloomy spaces we come across jumbled piles of ‘things’ - you’d be hard-pushed to say what exactly - and various weird mutilations and beheadings are underway.
Director Walerian Borowczyk had lived under two totalitarian regimes – Nazism and Communism – and this film is generally read as an allegory for concentration camps or gulags. The beauty of it though, is that the hell it presents remains undefined. Named by Terry Gilliam as one of the 10 greatest animated films of all time, “Les Jeux des Anges was,” he said, “my first experience of animation that was utterly impressionistic. It didn't show me anything specific, just sound and movement from which you create a world of your own.”