Blood and Chemicals, Surgery and Sexuality, All Up for Grabs: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, selected by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Steven Soderbergh has The Knick, but Walérian Borowczyk (1923-2006) had the flick. It’s his auteur trademark, his intimate calligraphy, but if you blink you can miss it: sometimes just a few frames at the end of a shot, where WB moves the camera off whatever he has been filming, creating a sudden, inconclusive swerve of vision. He often kept it in the final edit — to confound our contemplation and shake up our senses. It’s like the dazzling rays and reflections of light in his images, like the ever-crashing chords and synthesised swirls of Bernard Parmegiani’s music: Borowczyk opens up realms of perception that are beyond the niceties of cultural taste, past the laws of genre, and that pay no heed to the supposed distinction between narrative and experimental cinemas.

Actually, there is much common ground between Soderbergh’s knick and Borowczyk’s flick as practiced in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981): both artists explore a not-so-distant but seemingly medieval past in which the meaning and use of bodies and psyches, blood and chemicals, surgery and sexuality, were all up for grabs. WB’s film suspends us between ultra-rationalist, bourgeois dinner table talk of empirical science (embodied by Patrick Magee and Howard Vernon) and the magical metamorphoses performed, with the aid of a full bath, by Jekyll (Udo Kier).

Behind the cabinets of curiosity, someone is watching Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde: it is his fiancée, Miss Osbourne (Marina Pierro). Is she shocked, scandalised, betrayed in the knowledge that the man she loves is secretly, truly an Other? Not a bit; she wants total immersion. Miss Osbourne is Surrealist Woman, one in a long line of ‘heroines of evil’ that Borowczyk celebrated. They go all the way, beyond good and evil. This heady brand of feminism is what WB added to the classic Robert Louis Stevenson novel that serves as the loose, mythic scaffolding or merest point of departure here.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne ends like no other movie: in media res, in a phantom carriage that seems propelled of its own accord, with a man and woman between life and death, between ecstasy and the abyss, between everyday flesh and the new, metamorphosed flesh that Cronenberg later imagined. Borowczyk suspends us once more; he flicks us out of the narrative, the screen — in order, no doubt, to seek and live these delights ourselves.

Cristina Álvarez López is a video artist, film critic, translator, and co-editor/co-founder of the online Spanish magazine Transit: cine y otros desvíos. Her texts have appeared in the journals Trafic, Frames, Caiman, Sight & Sound, Screening the Past, de Filmkrant, LOLA and Shangrila, on the website Fandor Keyframe, and in books on Philippe Garrel, Chantal Akerman, Bong Joon-ho, Max Ophüls and Paul Schrader. Her audiovisual essays appear regularly in Transit and MUBI Notebook, and on the resource website The Audiovisual Essay. She co-edits the Audiovisual Essay section of the academic journal NECSUS. She teaches at Goethe University, Frankfurt.

Adrian Martin is Professor of Film Studies at Goethe University (Frankfurt), and Monash University (Melbourne). He has been translated into over twenty languages, with regular columns in de Filmkrant and Caiman. He is the author of seven books including ¿Qué es el cine moderno? (2008) and is co-editor of the online film journal LOLA as well as the books Movie Mutations (2003) and Raúl Ruiz: Images of Passage (2004). His latest book is Mise en scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (Palgrave, 2014). His audiovisual essays appear in MUBI Notebook and The Audiovisual Essay websites.

Another Way Way to View and Hear the Movie

One of the aims of our audiovisual essay work is to find, through a creative montage, the ‘other film’ hidden inside any given film: a secret logic, a counter-film, a hidden pattern. We seek another way to view and hear the movie, turning and observing it from a new angle, or locating a hitherto concealed entry-point. Sometimes, this means discovering the experimental film that is lurking inside a seemingly classical, narrative, conventional one — stripping out the fiction and the characters, the evident themes and arcs. In the case of Walérian Borowczyk and his The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, however, we are (beyond the grave) collaborating with a director who had already, as it were, entirely turned the glove inside out: although there is always a story line, it is his remarkably intricate work with aesthetic exploration that seizes the foreground. Looking into his unique style of representation, we ask: what this foreign country called the past, or history, for him, and how did he reveal its strangeness? How did he connect technology with flesh? And how did he move — both serenely and violently — across the social division of the sexes?