"More, Professor!"THE ORIGINAL CUT: Just after the release of his most austere and subtle film, Blanche, A Private Collection announced the birth of Walerian Borowczyk: Pornographer. That sounds pejorative, but it is factually true - the film is a partial history of pornography through the ages - and the film itself makes the shift seem completely natural.As ever, Boro's main fetish is objects. I think some of the erotic drawings and sculptures here are genuine historical artifacts, but some of them are clearly his own creations - indeed, one of them pops up in a Daniel Bird documentary about Borowczyk's sculptures. Even at its most explicit, the film has a joyously fusty, archaic, academic air, and there is a real ingenuity to some of the objects. I particularly enjoyed the four apparently abstract images on semi-transparent paper which, when placed in front of each other, coalesced into a silhouette of a sex scene.Presumably the idea behind that, and a lot of the other objects, is to avoid the attention of censors. As with Blanche and Goto Borowczyk's view of authority is that it is corrupt and perverted, and this is incarnated here by repeated cuts to a wooden sculpture of a uniformed man with a telescope. The plinth of the statue reads "Morality Police". As ever, Borowczyk's editing and sound design are first-rate. Although very funny and entertaining, the only genuinely sexy moment for me was an old-fashioned tease, when the presenter's fingers kept just obscuring the explicit details of old pornographic daguerreotypes.Which brings us neatly to...THE OBERHAUSEN CUT: God knows what Borowczyk had against the audiences at the Oberhausen film festival. Given that cinephiles generally hear that town's name in conjunction with "manifesto", perhaps he felt it had become overly ideological since he first started attending. Whatever led him to do it, he decided that the Oberhausen audience needed a shock, and he delivered it with a special extended cut of A Private Collection.To put it as simply as possible, this is the version where the presenter's fingers are not on the photographs. Much of the film is the same other than that, until we reach one entirely new scene at the end. On the Arrow Blu-Ray, the impact of this is blunted, as the current UK Dangerous Pictures Act makes it an offence to even possess, let alone distribute or buy, such imagery - but the start and end of the silent movie clip are left in, and they make it perfectly clear what's happened.It's a bit unpleasant, really, lacking the bookish charm of the usual cut, no matter how much Borowczyk's direction and editing tries to sell it as another happy lark to file alongside masturbating dolls and explicit lantern shows. The Oberhausen cut is worth watching once, but frankly there's a reason Boro didn't make it his preferred version.
