Wojciech Has Retrospective

Commentary and film descriptions courtesy of the New York Film Festival.

The Fantastic Journeys of Wojciech Has is presented in collaboration with the State Committee of Polish Cinematography and Film Polski, with the generous support of the Kosciuszko Foundation. Air transportation for Mr. Has was provided through the courtesy of LOT Polish Airlines. Special thanks to Maria Kornatowska (whose evocative phrases "logic of dreams, logic of labyrinths" have been appropriated as part of our program's title), Tadeusz Scibor-Rylski, Iwona Lukijaniuk, Kent Jones, and Madame Koukou Chanska.

Film history is most often written as a kind of subset of political and social history; films are categorized by the larger historical divisions and moments (pre-war, post-war, Depression era, etc.), rather than by the ebb and flow of their own internal dynamics. In the case of the cinemas of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, these film-historical attitudes often affected the criticism of individual films and filmmakers; a work or a given artist was defined as either for or against a given regime or system, and then judged accordingly. (The fact that so many recent Chinese and Iranian works seem to willfully avoid this kind of "binary opposition" might account for some of the critical difficulties they have faced.)

In a sense, the work of extraordinary Polish director Wojciech Has has fallen victim to this kind of critical strait-jacket. Has emerged in Poland at the same moment as directors such as Andrzej Wajda and Andrzej Munk--great artists who would establish the international reputation of the modern Polish cinema as an oppositional, politically engaged cinema. Yet the films of Wojciech Has do not so readily answer to this notion of "engaged cinema," as they focus instead on more metaphysical issues pertaining to identity and experience.

At the heart of almost every Has film is the notion of the journey--sometimes physical, as in THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT or CODES, sometimes spiritual as in THE HOUR-GLASS SANATORIUM. In the course of their journeys, Has's protagonists enter strange, vaguely threatening worlds that seem as much to be projections of the characters' inner fears and desires as they do actual places; indeed, several of Has's works are justifiably famous for the remarkable art direction that serves to conjure up these worlds. Emerging from these strange worlds into something more familiar, the Has protagonist is definitively changed, incapable of believing the old certainties that had previously governed his life.

One might compare Has's narrative style to that of the medieval romance, which also is often built around a journey; indeed, Has's penchant for period settings always gives his films a certain antique flavor. But perhaps it would be more proper to think of him in the tradition of the great European "doubters"--Kafka of course, but also Polish writers such as Bruno Schultz and Stanislaw Lem--artists who throw into question any vision of the world that marginalizes or denies the spiritual, the metaphysical or the irrational. In this, perhaps, one can arrive at some sense of the political dimension of Has's work.

The Film Society is proud to present this first U.S. retrospective of the work of Wojciech Has, an artist whose work is currently being rediscovered and celebrated by a new generation of Polish filmgoers. We hope that through this series the work of this unique artist will attain the recognition it so richly deserves outside Poland as well. --Richard Peña

Note: All films are subtitled in English.

How To Be Loved
AKA The Art Of Loving /
Jak Byc Kochana
(1963; 100 minutes)
On a plane bound for Paris, a successful radio actress (Bara Krafftówna) recalls the night in 1939 when she was to debut as Ophelia, with the man she loved playing Hamlet (Zbigniew Cybulski). WWII intervenes, and Felicja takes a job as a waitress to avoid acting on a German stage, giving her lover sanctuary when he's accused of killing a collaborator. After the war, Wiktor can't get away fast enough, hot on the trail of fame and applause, and the woman who saved him is herself wrongly accused of collaboration. Years later, Wiktor and Felicja meet again, and the tables have turned.... A drama about the emotional casualties of war, but also a personal tragedy of egoism and cowardice versus devotion and courage.
Saturday, September 27: 4 pm
Wednesday, October 1: 2 and 6:15 pm
Thursday, October 2: 4 and 8 pm

The Saragossa Manuscript /
Rekopis Znaleziony W Saragossie
(1965; 180 minutes)
RARE SCREENING OF A CULT MASTERPIECE
THE DIRECTOR'S CUT
Toward the end of the Napoleonic era, an officer in the Belgian Royal Guard (Zbigniew Cybulski) is sent on a fantastic journey by two beautiful princesses as a test of his worthiness to woo them. His adventures--the stories collected in the Saragossa Manuscript, itself a document of rather mysterious provenance--elide one into the next in an extended, charming jape, with images and variants recurring in apparently unrelated episodes. Adapted from Jan Potocki's 1813 novel, this elegant widescreen superproduction faithfully reproduces the Chinese-box narrative structure of the book. Potocki, a Polish aristocrat who chose to write in French, was an eccentric world-traveler who viewed fiction as an opportunity for witty, intellectual gamesmanship. Imported to the U.S., the film became one of the most cherished arthouse cult items of the counterculture era.
Saturday, September 27: 11:30 am at Alice Tully hall
(tickets available at Alice Tully Hall box office)

The Hour-Glass Sanatorium /
Sanatorium Pod Klepsydra
(1973; 124 minutes)
Jozef, visiting his father in a sanatorium, finds himself plunging through the portals of fantasy and the unconscious. In something like a mythic pilgrim's progress through memories, childhood experiences, and the complex turns of his own mind, the young Jew slides back through time to confront the heroes and bad guys who made him. Derek Elley claims that Has "is a romantic at heart, as his visual opulence testifies, but his films do not present an easy passage for his characters: THE HOUR-GLASS is a baffling, exotic hymn to man's durability and capacity for adjustment--splendidly crowned by a final image of Jozef's 'resurrection' from the bowels of the earth." (Special Jury Award, Cannes 1973)
Saturday, September 27: 6:30 pm
Friday, October 3: 2 and 7:30 pm
Sunday, October 5: 2 and 7:30 pm

Codes / Szyfry
(1966; 84 minutes)
A WWII vet (Zbigniew Cybulski) who has lived in London for the past 20 years returns to Poland to face the wife and son he left behind--and to investigate another son's disappearance. During Maciek's journey into the mysteries of the past, questions of collaboration with the Gestapo and Resistance retribution arise. Has pictures the mystical lost boy abroad in a dark fairytale forest, full of white horses and wholesale executions. The hypnotic quality of these excursions foreshadows the mesmerizing passages of THE HOUR-GLASS SANATORIUM.
Saturday, September 27: 9:15 pm
Wednesday, October 1: 4 and 8:15 pm
Thursday, October 2: 2 and 6:15 pm

The Doll/ Lalka
(1969; 159 minutes)
Adapted from Boleslaw Prus's 1899 novel, regarded as the Polish equivalent of Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, THE DOLL is love story as poetic spectacle on the grand scale. Has's first film in color follows a nouveau riche merchant through a series of trials and tribulations occasioned by his obsessive passion for an aristocratic beauty, who toys with him cruelly. Critic Derek Alley describes "the opening credits over a ghostly tracking shot [showing] all the bric-a-brac of a decadent age: here, with Matyjaszkiewicz's rich, crystal clear photography, Has becomes visually reminiscent of Bosch, a painter similarly obsessed with the unworldly and all the medieval terrors of hell."
Sunday, September 28: 2 pm
Friday, October 3: 4:30 pm
Sunday, October 5: 4:30 pm
Monday, October 6: 7 pm

THE NOOSE / PETLA
(1958; 105 minutes)
The visualization of a day in the life of an alcoholic, teeming with images of anxiety and Kafkaesque paranoia. Adapted from Marek Hlasko's novel The First Step in the Clouds, THE NOOSE is movie as delirium tremens, as a young man escapes his cramped flat to wander from bar to bar, unable to escape the trap of isolation. THE NOOSE tightens as Kuba, nearly saved by the love of a good woman, dives deeper into hallucinatory intoxication.
Sunday, September 28: 5:15 pm
Monday, September 29: 2 and 6:15 pm
Tuesday, September 30: 4 and 8:15 pm

Farewells / Pozegnania
(1958; 105 minutes)
Pawel, a youthful, rebellious student, falls in love with a thoroughly jaded taxi-dancer--and the mismatched pair finds momentary happiness during an idyll in the country. Separated by class and WWII, the two re-discover each other years later--much changed but perhaps lovers still? Has infuses the soft, shadowy world of FAREWELLS with nostalgia for a lost way of life and the lyricism of love's long journey.
Sunday, September 28: 7:30 pm
Monday, September 29: 4 and 8:15 pm
Tuesday, September 30: 2 and 6:15 pm

An Uneventful Story /
Nieciekawa Historia
(1982; 113 minutes)
A professor of medicine, now in his 50s, comes face to face with the monotony and emptiness of his existence. As he sums up his life and his moral resources, he begins to weigh the existential questions of why and how to live. Has treats this philosophical crise with caustic wit, while the professor tries to find hope and meaning in a love affair with his young student Katarzyna.
Monday, October 6: 2 pm
Tuesday, October 7: 2 and 7:10 pm

Write and Fight / Pismak
(1985; 153 minutes) In a small Polish town under Russian control, a young author is jailed at the start of WWI, convicted of writing "blasphemous" articles. During his imprisonment, Rafal begins to consider his life, to work on the book he has long dreamed of writing, and to battle a case of typhus--all of which transports him deeply into Has's favorite territory: the deliriously cathartic world of memory and imagination.
Monday, October 6: 4:15 pm
Tuesday, October 7: 4:15 and 9:20 pm

The Memoirs Of a Sinner /
Osobisty Pamietnik Grzesznika
(1986; 125 minutes)
In 18th-century Scotland, a recently deceased young man is exhumed by a gravedigger, suddenly revives, and then launches into the story of his highly eventful life. Brought up in a puritanical household, Robert is seduced by a mysterious stranger into killing his wine-, woman- and song-loving brother. What follows is a descent into a hallucinatory hell, where reality and illusion merge, as Robert's evil doppelganger sins with terrible abandon--and Robert stands accused!
Thursday, October 9: 2 pm
Friday, October 10: 4:15 and 9 pm

The Tribulations of Balthazar Kober /
Niezwykla Podroz Balthazara Kobera
(1988; 113 minutes)
Another fabulous odyssey, this time through 16th-century Germany, through plague and the deadly wake of the Inquisition. In another Has pilgrimage, young Balthazar searches for a master cabalist and alchemist who might guide him to ultimate truth....
Thursday, October 9: 4:30 pm
Friday, October 10: 2 and 6:45 pm