Where to begin with Wojciech Has

Although Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925 to 2000) made 14 features, you’d never know it from what made it into British commercial distribution – just three theatrically (How to Be Loved, The Saragossa Manuscript, The Doll), and two subsequently on video (Saragossa, The Hourglass Sanatorium). Until the recent release of an expensive Blu-ray box set, distribution was similarly patchy in his native Poland, with only the French making comprehensive efforts at keeping the Has flame burning after his death.

But it’s a substantial flame, burning as brightly as that of any of his Polish contemporaries, and his work echoes them all: Andrzej Wajda for the recurring obsession with the past, Jerzy Kawalerowicz for the range of subjects that he tackled, Andrzej Munk for the sardonic sense of humour, and Walerian Borowczyk for the left-field eroticism and close affinity with full-blown surrealism. His best-known film, The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), counted Luis Buñuel, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia among its celebrity fans – and all four were actively involved with its distribution and/or subsequent restoration. 

Has’s own creative career spanned four decades (1947 to 1988), comprising four distinct periods: the short films (1947 to 1955), the first six features (1957 to 1962), small-scale black-and-white chamber pieces mostly about memory and loss, a more expansive middle period (1964 to 1973) in which his films became longer and much more ambitious, and a brief return to still highly characteristic features (1983 to 1988) after a decade spent teaching at the famous Łódź Film School, which he continued to do until his death. 

As likely to be encountered on the US midnight circuit as in a European arthouse or a mainstream Polish cinema, this is one of the all-time cult classics. Based on Count Jan Potocki’s sprawlingly picaresque novel, it concerns a large bound manuscript discovered in Saragossa during the Napoleonic Wars that’s so engrossing that the soldiers who find it momentarily forget their differences.

The film then darts off in multiple directions, its narrative strands often dramatising stories told by its characters, some of whose own characters tell similarly elaborate fables, along similar lines to the dreams within dreams of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) – possibly not coincidentally, given that Buñuel adored Has’s film.

The first half concentrates on the increasingly baffled Alfonse van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski), while the second is dominated by the interlocking stories of nobleman-turned-beggar Don Avadoro (Leon Niemczyk). The constant recourse to visual parallels and thematic echoes (particularly doubles of various kinds) keeps things remarkably coherent even at points when we, like poor van Worden, have no idea what’s going on. Shot in anamorphic widescreen, its images stuffed to the gunwales with candelabra, gibbets, swords, snakes, human skulls and other trappings of the decadent past, there’d be nothing quite like it in cinema until Peter Greenaway’s heyday decades later.

Three more Has films are out on a similarly fantastical limb, the best known being The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973). Adapted from the same Bruno Schulz novella that fuelled the Quay brothers’ new feature, it’s about a man visiting his father in a sanatorium that’s also a portal into a strange netherworld amalgamating past and present, dream and reality, Polish and Jewish Poland, the latter element particularly striking for being made at a time when Polish cinema rarely tackled Jewish themes. 

Memoirs of a Sinner (1985) adapts James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner into a typically phantasmagorical extravaganza that imaginatively revives the earlier film’s recurring doppelgänger theme, while Has’s last film, The Tribulations of Balthazar Kober (1988), is set in 16th-century Germany, its eponymous hero an aspiring alchemist surrounded by plague-riddled corpses.

But Has was just as adept with smaller-scale films, and The Noose (1958) may be the strongest Polish feature debut between World War II and Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962). A pitiless study of an alcoholic (a riveting performance by Gustaw Holoubek) trying to stay on the wagon until a clinic appointment, it showed Has’s baroque visual style emerging fully-formed. 

This early film-per-year period concluded with How to Be Loved (1962), another masterpiece, in which a star-struck young Felicja (Barbara Krafftówna) shelters fellow actor Wiktor (Zbigniew Cybulski) from the Nazis, only to pay a lasting psychological price in terms of both what they do to her and Wiktor’s indifference; he only cares about playing to a crowd. Has’s early films often featured unusually complex female leads, other standouts being Farewells (1958, with Maria Wachowiak) and Goodbye to the Past (1960, with Lidia Wysocka).

The Codes (1966) charts a man’s search for his son, assumed to have been murdered by Nazis 20 years earlier. The Doll (1968) adapts Bolesław Prus’s novel about a 19th-century Warsaw entrepreneur into a ravishingly coloured but basilisk-eyed view of a society dominated by rigid hierarchical convention that anticipates Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). 

The ironically titled Chekhov adaptation An Uneventful Story (1983) echoes The Noose in that it’s also about a self-perceived failure played by Gustaw Holoubek, this time an elderly university professor. And his third and fourth-last features are studies in claustrophobia; in the 1930s social satire One Room Tenants (1959) students and self-styled intellectuals share a large single room, while their counterparts in the WWI-era Write and Fight (1984) share a prison cell. Holoubek plays supporting roles in both, stealing every scene he’s in with the kind of mischievous élan that explains why Has cast him in nine of his films.

Of the features, Gold Dreams (1961) feels most like treading water. Although a perfectly engrossing film in its own right, if watched as part of a chronological sequence it’s the one Has film that seems overly indebted to the others, with Władysław Kowalski essentially reviving his character from Goodbye to the Past. And most of the short films were documentaries made during the Stalinist Socialist Realism era, which means that for all their occasional quirky touches (the 35-minute Our Ensemble, Has’s first colour film, being a particular delight), they’re very much at the service of a particular ideological message, delivered in stentorian voiceover. 

A Wojciech Has retrospective plays at BFI Southbank and ICA as part of this year’s Kinoketa Film Festival.