Wojciech Has

Wojciech Jerzy Has was born on April 1, 1925 in Krakow, Poland. He would die in Lodz in 2000, although he did not make movies after 1988, dedicated more to the world of education, where he had moved years before. During World War II he studied at the School of Commerce and the School of Industrial Arts in Krakow, although the latter was a cover for the School of Fine Arts, closed in those years, and where he completed his studies after the war. In addition, Has studied film for a year at the Film Institute in his hometown. Between 1947 and 1955 he will make a dozen educational films and documentaries for the Wytwornia Filmow Dokumentalnych. Although he is interested above all in telling fictional stories, and already in 1947 he directs a medium-length film, Harmonia . But it is not until 1957, when he filmed Petla, which achieves a certain impact, in its dramatic look at alcoholism.

Although Has works in the years of the heyday of the prestigious Polish School, his cinema is apart from that of his contemporaries, he “wages war on his own”, so to speak. He directs films heavily charged with psychological drama, although the films for which he is best known are those with a surreal and buñuelesque air, particularly the three hours ofThe manuscript found in Zaragoza (1965), a very personal adaptation of the novel by Jan Potocki . Story set in Spain invaded by Napoleonic troops, the manuscript of the title found by Alfonse Van Worden gives rise to an authentic game of Russian dolls, of stories that open up within the story, a display of curious baroque style, with seductive women, strange monks, and predictors of the future, which captivates and tires in equal parts, but which cannot leave anyone indifferent. This scheme would also be adopted by Has in the title that closes his filmography,The tribulations of Balthasar Kober (1988). Sanatorium pod klepsydra (1973), by the Polish “Kafka” Bruno Schulz, a different reflection on the Holocaust, awarded in Cannes,is also very singular

“The fundamental topic of cinema for me is the trip”, assures the filmmaker, and of course in these two films it is without a doubt the artifice that supports the story. But there is also his visual imagery and his literary sources, which he masterfully handles by applying them to the Seventh Art: “The starting point is always literature,” he explains. “Operate in time. Abbreviate time. Temporary jumps. Collateral lines and several layers. Space is the domain of painting; time is the domain of literature and cinema. Playing with time activates the imagination of the spectators.”

Notwithstanding the aforementioned films, the director also tackles more accessible stories, of a psychological nature. Nostalgia dominates in films like Los adioses (1958), Common room (1960),Goodbye, Youth (1961), The Gold of My Dreams (1962) andThe art of being loved (1963). The question of self-esteem the underlined point in Lalka (1968), adapted from a novel by Boleslaw Prus . He also visits Anton Chekhov in A Banal Story (1982), a sad story about the loneliness of a life without incentives.

Has said that “things from the past, issues left behind a long time ago, overlap the current reality. The subconscious invades reality. Dreams like this allow a revelation, they show us the future”. Comment that surely applies to his two categories of films.