Has studied in Kraków at the city's Business School during the German occupation of Poland. He went on to study at the School of Art Industry, essentially the underground facility of the Academy of Fine Arts, until it was closed down in 1943. After the war he went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. In 1946, he also completed a one-year course in film, and began producing educational and documentary films at the Documentary Film Studio in Warsaw before moving on, in the '50s, to the Educational Film Studio in Łódź.
In 1947, he made his debut with a medium-length feature titled Harmonia (Harmony). In 1957, he began making full-length feature films. In 1974, Has became a lecturer in the directing department of the Leon Schiller Polish National Film, Television and Theater School in Łódź. Between 1987-1989, he was artistic director of the Rondo Film Studio and a member of the Komitet Kinematografii (State Cinema Committee). Between1989-1990, he served as dean of the directing department at the Łódź Film School. In 1990, he became the school's provost and remained in this position for six years. He was the managing director and chief professional advisor at the school's Indeks Studio. In 2000 the Polish National Film, Television and Theater School in Łódź bestowed an honorary doctorate on the filmmaker.
Has avoided political or commercial overtones in his work, which often alienated him from the propaganda-driven industry. Although he produced his most important films at the height of the famed Polish School, his films were stylistically different and manifested a unique poetic vision. Fellow director Aleksander Jackiewicz said of Has that if he had become a painter, 'he would surely have been a Surrealist. He would have redrawn antique objects with all their real accoutrements and juxtaposed them in unexpected ways'.
In remembering Has, documentary film director Henryk Kluba stated that he was a director who 'resolved compositions' while filming, treating each shot as a painted canvas. Has has said of his cinema that its
point of departure is always literature. Operating on time. Abbreviations of time. Jumps in time. Sidetracks and various layers. Space is the domain of painting; time is the domain of literature and film. Playing with time activates the imagination of film viewers (...) the fundamental topic of cinema to me is that of the journey.
This is evident in Has's best-known films such as the swashbuckling Spanish adventure The Saragossa Manuscript, The Hourglass Sanatorium, and in later works like The Memoirs of a Sinner and The Tribulations of Balthazar Kober.
Has's oeuvre has been associated with Surrealist painting. This is reinforced by the director's poetics of dream and his use of seemingly random objects, which is also characteristic of the Surrealist aesthetic. Film scholar, Mirosław Przylipiak, less obviously describes Has's style as Painterly Cubism. Przylipiak writes of the director's formula of alternative time in The Hourglass Sanatorium. The singularity of Has's films lies in his juxtaposition of several time dimensions in a sort of 'temporal cubism'. In 2009 when London's Barbican hosted screenings of two remastered versions of the film - together with The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - The Guardian's Xan Brooks wrote 'The Hourglass 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'.