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Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Son of the White Mare (1981)Pioneering Hungarian filmmaker Marcell Jankovics has died. Known for his fantastical and folkloric animations, Jankovics' films like Johnny Corncob (1973) and Son of the White Mare (1981) helped place Hungarian animation on the map. Last year, Jankovics discussed his recently re-released Son of the White Mare with Christopher L. Inoa. Amazon has bought MGM for $8.45 billion. Mike Hopkins, senior VP of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, has announced plans to reimagine MGM's "treasure trove of [intellectual property]," which includes 12 Angry Men, Basic Instinct, and Raging Bull. Cristian Mungiu will be the Jury President for this year's International Critics' Week at Cannes. The festival's lineup is set to be announced on June 7. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese has started production on his next film, supported by the International Film Festival Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund.

That bad boy of (mostly) French cinema Walerian Borowczyk has been converting doubters into fans for sixty years, even though his pictures were never easy to see. Before he took a headlong leap into soft-core epics, he made some of the most creative and influential short films of his time — and they eventually became more erotic as well.

The Walerian Borowczyk Short Film Collection

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1959-1984 / B&W and Color / 1:66, 1:78 and 1:37 flat Academy / 144 min. / Street Date April 25, 2017 / available through the Olive Films website / 24.95

Directed by Walerian Borowczyk

This release brings back memories of traveling short subject shows, usually several reels’ worth of experimental films that would tour college campuses. Even in High School I’d drag my girlfriend to the University of Riverside, where huge crowds looking for the ‘In’ place to be would stare in attention at hours of abstract visuals, expressing their approval...

Mubi's retrospective The Many Sins of Walerian Borowczyk is showing February 12 - June 18, 2017 in the United States and in many other countries around the world.The late 1970s marks a stylistic departure for Walerian Borowczyk, as the Polish director moved away from a controlled, painterly style and toward a ‘corporeal’ style, wherein changes in aesthetic choices allowed him to explore the human body in greater depth than in his previous films. While the liberal portrayal of sex and sexuality (lending itself to the liberal portrayal of bodies, human or otherwise) is present in Borowczyk’s live-action films as early as his anthology Immoral Tales from 1973, the preoccupation with the body specifically comes to the fore with the films Behind Convent Walls (1978), Immoral Women (1979), L’armoire (1979), Lulu (1980), and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981). It is in this four-year period that the viewer will notice Borowczyk's moving away...

Terry Gilliam is leading a Kickstarter campaign to restore Walerian Borowczyk’s classic 1968 film Goto, Island of Love (Goto, l’île d’amour).

Speaking the Polish filmmaker’s works, Gilliam said: “They activate a part of my brain that very few other things do…I haven’t seen any of these films in probably thirty or forty years, but they all have stuck with me. He needs to be restored and the world needs to be reminded.”

Earlier this year, Daniel Bird secured the permission of his widow Ligia Borowczyk to restore nine short films and two feature films including 1967’s The Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal (Le théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal) and 1971’s Blanche which will be released by Arrow films in spring 2014.

Bird said: “For fifteen years I have been trying to find a way to restore Borowczyk’s early films. Obviously, I am thrilled to be working with Arrow Films on this...