A large black telephone in the left foreground dominates the frame as we slowly discern a man – out of focus – in the right background. The phone’s circular dial and looping wire introduce an implacable enclosure that will be cinematically rhymed by subsequent images.
As her analysis unfolds, Insdorf further develops her reading of the looping image – closing in around the hero – in her discussion of the prevalence of the number eight, a significant digit throughout the plot. Through this reading, Insdorf offers readers a lens into Has’s formal brilliance. What, to the untrained eye, might appear a random series of images and happenings, in Insdorf’s succinct analysis is given great significances.
Such care for formal analysis continues throughout her discussion of the films and extends to an insightful suggestion that within Has’s oeuvre he created visual and tonal rhymes that extend across films. She notes not only the recurring symbols that might be familiar to fans of Has – windows and mirrors, clocks and hourglasses (and depictions of passing time more generally) – but also draws connections between aural cues, suggesting ‘the sound of crows towards the end links The Doll to Has’s Uneventful Story fifteen years later’. Though the analysis of each film is quite brief, the connections between them identified in the text offer a number of avenues for fruitful further thought. Whether a film scholar or casual viewer, Insdorf’s accessible introductions to the compositional complexities of Has’s films enriches their viewing.
As a scholar more broadly of Polish cinema, Insdorf also brings to her work a perspective on Has’s place within the larger national industry. A number of interesting conclusions stem from such comparisons, particularly in her reading of Has alongside his contemporary Andrzej Wajda. Tracing recurring images, character types, musical cues, and actors (Zbigniew Cybulski is a favourite of both directors), Insdorf offers novel readings on broader issues of Poland’s memory of WWII and the trope of the romantic hero.
Defiance and Escape
Though the work of Has is populated with different worlds and different times, his films are united both by their distance from and resonance with the director’s own time. Of his relationship with issues of the day, Insdorf quotes Has:
I reject matters, ideas, themes only significant for the present day. Art film dies in an atmosphere of fascination with the present.
Insdorf considers the significance of Has’s themes both as timeless and as linked to his circumstances. Has often returned to meditations on time, wasted lives, ‘ephemerality and loss’ – subjects that are as relevant today as they were when Has’s films were made or in the eras in which they are set.