By the early 1970s, Borowczyk enjoyed a rather “particular” status as a filmmaker. He lived in a quiet suburb 20km from Paris, and his universe took the form of an immense chalet-workshop – a former granary – lined with mirrors, grandfather clocks and paintings (whether by Max Ernst or some unknown craftsman hardly mattered), and filled with display cases, shelves and cabinets crowded with the strangest antiquarian finds and objects of his own invention. Among these unusual collections – ranging from medieval puzzles to secrétaire bookcases and Baroque daggers – one in particular stood out for its sheer eccentricity: an array of obscene objects, figurines, trinkets and magic lanterns. Borowczyk’s passion for rarities and curiosities, combined with the sensibility of a refined eroticist, led him to make Une collection particulière, a short film in which he and the writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues present this collection of sexually themed contraptions, setting them “in motion” before the camera in a series of close-ups. “The film set out, in the face of the degeneration represented by the banal production of contemporary porn shops, to reclaim the naïve inventiveness, humour and poetry of a popular craftsmanship that has now been entirely lost” (André Cornand). It is, in fact, a micro-documentary marked by two powerful sensibilities: a disgust for progress at any cost and a rejection of manufactured science fiction. Une collection particulière celebrates obsolete ingenuity and kitsch mischievousness in opposition to the supermarket of plasticised styles.

Valerio Caprara, Walerian Borowczyk, La Nuova Italia, Florence 1980