Revered as a visionary of Polish cinema and active during one of its most productive eras, Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925 - 2000) made films in which the poetic visual environment transcends the complex story lines. With an aesthetic similar to Surrealist painting, Has uses seemingly random objects and creates singular dreamlike visions. The distinction of Has's films lies in his juxtaposition of time dimensions in a sort of "temporal cubism". Of his cinematic style, the director said, "In the dream that is a film one often has a singular time loop. Things of the past, issues long gone, are overlaid onto current reality. The subconscious invades reality. Dreams thus allow us to reveal, to show the future".
Has tells his viewers, through the character of the priest in In Sanatorium pod klepsydrą / The Hour-Glass Sanatorium, how to understand his cinema: 'One thing you have to beware of in these matters: pettiness, pedantry and word-for-wordness. Have you ever noticed that between the lines of certain books, swallows proudly fly by, whole verses of swallows. You should read from the flight of those birds' [editor's translation]. His films are full of "swallows that fly by", inconspicuous scenes, always ambiguous, never explicit, that seduce with their poetry and vision.
In The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (1973), Has' adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s story collection Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, a young man named Joseph (Jan Nowicki) visits a dilapidated sanatorium to see his father, Jakob (Tadeusz Konrad). Upon his arrival, a sinister doctor informs him that his father stopped breathing but hasn’t died yet, perhaps due to Joseph’s arrival, which may have halted time in the sanatorium. Joseph undertakes a strange journey through the sanatorium's many rooms, each of which conjures worlds composed of his memories, dreams and nightmares. The narrative follows a thin line between reality and fantasy, with ornate sets and byzantine imagery full of strange and macabre characters.
Has adapted the tales of Schulz, one of the great Polish-Jewish artists of the 20th century, in the aftermath of Poland's 1968 anti-Semitic campaigns that forced most remaining Polish Jews into exile. He smuggled the film out of Poland and brought it to the Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the jury prize. On his return to Poland, Has wasn't allowed to make another film for almost a decade. The Hour-Glass Sanatorium was remastered and returned to Polish and international screens in 2009 due to efforts by the directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and the musician Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead, all longtime admirers of Has' art.
For Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie / The Saragossa Manuscript, the director adapted Count Jan Potocki’s astonishing frame-tale novel, set during Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. Two soldiers discover a strange manuscript at an war-ravaged inn, which chronicles the adventures of Alphonse van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski) of the Walloon Guards. Van Worden’s crossing of the dangerous Sierra Morena mountains is repeatedly interrupted by seemingly random encounters with an assortment of larger-than-life figures. The film's comic digressions weave together fantastic tales of Moorish princesses, picaresque adventurers and the Spanish Inquisition.
Major international filmmakers have cited The Saragossa Manuscript as one of their favourites. Luis Buñuel called it "exceptional" and David Lynch called it "one mother of a film". Comic artist Neil Gaiman described it as "a labyrinth inside a maze" that is both frightening and comical in its mind-bending exploration of human nature. Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese helped to get the film remastered in 1998, and brought it back to the screens and into distribution in the U.S. The DVD became available in American stores four years later, as part of the series "Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola Present". When the Barbican in London hosted the remastered versions of The Hour-Glass Sanatorium and The Saragossa Manuscript, in 2009, The Guardian's Xan Brooks wrote
The Hour-Glass Sanatorium is even better than The Saragossa Manuscript, and even more adept at driving you crazy. Has's style is playful, teasing and defiantly loopy.
The Hour-Glass Sanatorium and The Saragossa Manuscript are Has's best-known films, and he has influenced several generations of Polish filmmakers. The DVD box, released by Telewizja Kino Polska, includes two documentaries about the director: Adam Kuczyński's Ze snu w sen / A Dream From a Dream and Robert Glinski's Ślady / Traces [editor's translation]. In the documentaries, from the testimonies of his co-workers and students, Has appears like a perfectionist who drew every camera angle on graph paper before shooting. Commentary from film-world figures including Małgorzata Szumowska, Robert Gliński, Jan Nowicki, Juliusz Machulski, Borys Lankosz and Piotr Trzaskalski help form a fuller picture of Has. "I would like to have a father like him," the actor Jan Nowicki says about Has. "I like a rough, hidden heart full of secrets. I don't like a heart that beats for show [...] I felt safe around him [...] even though he never praised me."
The DVD box set includes:
- The Hour-Glass Sanatorium, 1973, directed by Wojciech Jerzy Has, running time 119 minutes
- The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, 1965, directed by Wojciech Jerzy Has, running time 174 minutes
- A Dream from a Dream, 1998, a documentary film about Wojciech Jerzy Has by Adam Kuczyński, running time 40 minutes
- Traces, 2012, a documentary film about Wojciech Jerzy Has by Robert Gliński, running time 53 minutes
Sources: based on the article by Bartek Staszczyszyn for culture.pl, culture.pl
Editor: Marta Jazowska