Subversive Saturday: The Games of Angels (1965)

Director: Walerian Borowczyk
Country: France
Genre: Animation | Short
Watch It: Here

The following review is a continuation of Matthew Blevins’ Subversive Saturdays series.

The ominous rumbling of trains provides the foreboding soundtrack in anticipation of the horrors of our unknown destination. Terrified breaths in the dark echo that of the audience, both audience and passenger unsure of what darkness hides and ill-comforted by the tepid revelations of daylight as we are given a firsthand perspective of the horrors of a concentration camp, its wretched concrete walls and homogenous cubes all designed with the express intent of stripping humans of their defining characteristics.

Organ music offers the soundtrack for other sequences of this atmospheric exploration of humanity’s wretched depravity, its notes accompanied by the nerve-grating sawing of bones.

Chanting inspired by the chants of the prisoners of Nazi concentration camps in Poland grounds the abstract images in an unsettling reality, a reality that is too recent for comfort but mostly forgotten as all disquieting facts have a tendency of doing. Organ music offers the soundtrack for other sequences of this atmospheric exploration of humanity’s wretched depravity, its notes accompanied by the nerve-grating sawing of bones. Humanity’s innocence is lost when our own wickedness severs the wings of angels and allows their husks to wither to bone, isolated in their cold damp cells with nothing more to ponder than their own misfortune and the reprieve that only impending death will provide.

The odd imagery and strategic use of sounds in Walerian Borowczyk’s The Games of Angels presents a fascinating filmic exploration of atmosphere. It is a film of contradictions, allowing the real and surreal to inhabit the same world in the aim of effectively simulating the experience of being transported to a concentration camp and the subsequent horrors that follow. There is a necessity for the clashing juxtaposition of ideas in the portrayal of humanity at its most vulnerable and at its most wretched, as despite the opinion of the Nazi oppressors they were cut from the same genetic cloth as those that they oppressed.

Our voyeuristic curiosity places our hands on the saw that severs the wings of angels…

Neither oppressor nor oppressed are given a real world representative in The Game of Angels, as the use of unseen tormentors implicates us all for the irreversible misdeeds of humanity at its most despicable. Our voyeuristic curiosity places our hands on the saw that severs the wings of angels and we are not afforded a similar association with the victims of these crimes as they are represented by angels, the incorruptible avatar for purity and innocence.

It is through the clashing of the real and surreal that The Games of Angels gains the power to transport the viewer into uncomfortable territories. We are robbed of the ability to empathize through the alienating imagery and use of non-human victims, and instead are implicated for our own ineffectual curiosity. The film haunts us with sounds and images pulled from our own world but juxtapose those with the surreal to create anxiety and sensory confusion. The Games of Angels is a passionate film of atmospheric experimentation that both reminds and transports us back into events that should not be so easily forgotten.

Matthew Blevins

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Senior Editor/Film Critic & OFCS Member. Behind me you see the empty bookshelves that my obsession with film has caused. Film teaches me most of the important concepts of life, such as cynicism, beauty, ugliness, subversion of societal norms, and what it is to be a tortured member of humanity. My passion for the medium is an important part of who I am as I stumble through existence in a desperate and frantic search for objective truths.