Walerian Borowczyk

The other evening The Yard (he may have fallen silent blogwise but he still walks the earth) and I were talking about the film-maker Walerian Borowczyk. This often happens. Borowczyk's weird early films were one of the surer delights of our intensive cineaste days when we would haunt arty cinemas and film clubs, taking whatever they could throw at us. Rather amazingly, Borowczyk enjoyed mainstream success for a while when he moved into feature films (Blanche was especially big over here) but it didn't last, and he gradually sank into making films that were barely distinguishable from standard pornography and were often marketed as such (he even directed one of the Emmanuelle franchise), until he gradually faded from view...
I've all but forgotten those early films of his, but they came back into my mind when I read the latest luminous piece by RetroProgressive Susan and watched the film of that extraordinary automaton. Didn't Borowczyk make some short films of automata? Looking on YouTube, I couldn't find automata as such, but what I did come across was this astonishing and moving piece of work. As you watch it, bear in mind that this was done in the days of celluloid - no digital effects here. As I say, astonishing.