The Noose (Wojciech Has, 1958).
The first scene in Wojciech Has’s filmography belongs to an accordion. The instrument is shown in a contracted state, dangling from the ceiling of an antique shop. Outside the shop, a little boy ogles it through the window; he dreams of playing it. Later in Has’s debut fiction short, Harmonia (1947), he dramatizes that dream. Has’s understanding of cinema as an oneiric canvas is apparent from the very beginning, and his sense that its narratives were meant to trip over themselves through elisions, reversals, and collapses reinforced itself throughout his career. His films are frequently in a state of mutation and his characters always on introspective journeys; objects are the only constant, as their material weight exhibits more solidity than his stories’ whims or his characters’ souls. All the while, Has’s camera acts like an accordion, playing in its own time, starting wide and pushing in to follow his characters’ reveries deep into the frame.
In a 1964 article for Film Quarterly, one of the earliest appraisals of Has’s work, the Polish critic Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz called Has “a ‘literary’ film director.” By this point, Has had directed six adaptations of novels and was in the midst of filming his adaptation of Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. But Toeplitz’s claim had nothing to do with Has’s fondness for adapting novels, “the narration of the plot,” or “the sort of literature with which he feels he has the most in common.” According to the film scholar Annette Insdorf in her critical study of Has, Intimations, his tendency to adapt novels was chiefly a means for him to elude censorship because it allowed him to set his films in the past and thus avoid blatant criticism of his own era. His literariness had to do with interpolation, which is to say, he understood cinema as a medium of interpretation rather than direct representation. In much the same way that any line of literature calls upon a reader to consider its other possible permutations, Has’s films possess a hypnotic instability, a shapeshifting quality that discloses the process of their creation.
Has’s films are so certain about their groundlessness that they almost all take place in liminal spaces: airplanes, patches of desert, run-down inns. In How to Be Loved (1963), Felicja (Barbara Krafftówna) falls into a mournful reverie aboard her first flight. The passenger sitting next to her, a former RAF pilot, tells her, “During our first flight, we tend to recall all our past.” Her time in the air is similar to that of astronauts in contemporary space films such as Gravity (2013), Ad Astra (2019), and Lucy in the Sky (2019), whose distance from the Earth hurls them into the deepest recesses of their minds. Sipping cognac in midair, Felicja slips into her past in anticipation of her future, coinciding with her point of departure (Warsaw) and destination (Paris), respectively. For Has, this in-between time in transit and this non-place of the airplane cabin become springboards for introspection.
How to Be Loved (Wojciech Has, 1963).
Has recycles his sets to suit the many stories embedded in The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), making each place a palimpsest. Briefly, The Saragossa Manuscript is a picaresque loosely centered around the Spanish officer Alfonse Van Worden’s (Zbigniew Cybulski) attempt to cross Spain’s Sierra Morena mountain range—a territory of ghouls—in order to get to Madrid. The inn he visits midway through his trip appears later in the film as a hermit-priest’s residence and the Spanish Inquisition’s headquarters, giving these new environments a disorientingly familiar backdrop. The set’s repeated use corresponds with the constant reordering of the film along multiple dimensions: its narrative’s structure, its characters’ psychologies, and the viewer’s apprehension of its continuity. The circuitous flow of dialogues on the subjects of poetry, reality, and infinity reflects the tortuous design of the film, in which characters’ confusion at a fantastic turn-of-events—encounters with princesses, demons, and death—yields sustained stretches of poetic imagery that inevitably fall apart due to the characters’ inability to suppress their disbelief and go with the flow. Whenever Alfonse Van Worden’s seemingly mundane surroundings become mystical, he either passes out or is forced to drink a potion that returns him to solid ground.
Has’s best-known film, The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973), engages time in the same way The Saragossa Manuscript deals with space. Has’s adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass follows Józef (Jan Nowicki), a man whose visit with his ailing father at a dilapidated sanatorium sends him on a journey into the “sidetracks of time,” as one of the characters in the film puts it. The sanatorium’s only clinician echoes this when he tells Józef that the sanatorium deals in “regurgitated time, secondhand time.” It’s a line that Insdorf traces back to Schulz, whose narrator speaks of “used-up time, worn out by other people, a shabby time full of holes, like a sieve.”
Both Schulz and Has were obsessed with time. According to Celina Wieniewska, the first to translate much of Schulz’s work into English, Schulz was preoccupied with “the encroachment on [time] of the reality of his daily drudgery as a teacher contrasting with his dreams of a limitless quota of uninterrupted time that would provide a tabula rasa of pure, virgin hours.” Has said that “operating on time,” “abbreviations of time,” “jumps in time,” and “sidetracks and various layers” are his cinema’s focus because “playing with time activates the imagination of film viewers.” This explains Józef’s meta-comment midway through the film, in which he dreams up a “story [that] will be interspersed with dashes, ellipses, and sighs.”
The Hourglass Sanatorium (Wojciech Has, 1973).
In an essay titled “The Sandglass: A Journey into the Underworld,” Steve Mobia argues that the film is “not only of a father’s death and a son’s remorse but of the death of a culture.” Has, who was a gentile, came of age during the German occupation of Poland and the Holocaust, and later immersed himself in Jewish culture. Shortly after the 1968 expulsion of approximately 30,000 Jews from Poland, he began to adapt Schulz, whose own life was tragically cut short by a Gestapo officer. By filming Schulz’s texts, Has was enacting a cultural retrieval of images that had been cast away from history. He believed that “in the dream that is a film one often has a singular time loop” where “things of the past, issues long gone, are overlaid onto current reality.” His films often deal with memories, regrets, and ghosts; he knew that cinema is inhabited by revenants. In Schulz’s novel, the clinician introduces the sanatorium: “Here, we reactivate time past, with all its possibilities, therefore, also including the possibility of a recovery.”
Ten years passed before Has was allowed to make another film after The Hourglass Sanatorium; according to Insdorf, “Communist authorities allegedly blocked his filmmaking efforts in retaliation for showing The Hourglass Sanatorium at the Cannes Film Festival without their approval.” His follow-up was An Uneventful Story (1983), an adaptation of the Anton Chekhov story of the same name. Its opening scene holds a sense of pause, perhaps derived from the inertia of a career brought to a halt at its zenith. A tracking shot that slowly makes its way from the stairwell at the entrance of a mansion into a neighboring study before seizing upon a clock. At this moment, the film’s narrator—a renowned professor played by Gustaw Holoubek—says, “If I were asked what constituted the fundamental feature of my existence now I should answer without hesitation—insomnia.” He continues, “I stay motionless for hours… and try not to think about anything, not to feel any desires. I look at familiar objects and unknowingly move into memories.”
Has put special emphasis on objects throughout his filmography. His first feature, The Noose (1958), owes its title to the object that opens the film and brings about its tragic end. In The Saragossa Manuscript, the eponymous manuscript is one of the few items that remains intact throughout, as are a pair of earrings of which the bearers change—or are they the same person? And, in The Hourglass Sanatorium, it’s a fireman’s hat that remains firmly planted on Józef’s head as he trades one setting for another. These objects stay the same while everything around them changes, becoming strange by virtue of their reliability in an unfamiliar world.
An Uneventful Story (Wojciech Has, 1983).
Throughout Has’s films, the presence of these objects cues a thematic fascination with infinity and looping structures. The Noose begins at 8 a.m. and ends at the same time the next day. Its first image belongs to a phone’s cord, and its end is brought about by that same cord in the form of a noose—an approximate eight. Flipped on its side, an eight indicates infinity. In The Saragossa Manuscript, the Spaniard with a penchant for philosophizing invokes the horizontal eight to explain how poetry has its roots in geometry. “Wanting to define an infinite number, I write a horizontal eight and divide it by one. If I want to express infinite smallness, I write a one and divide it by the horizontal eight,” he says. “All these signs give me no idea about what I want to express—greatness… infinity.”
Although these mathematical expressions feel cryptic to the Spaniard, he’s positive they relate to something ineffable—greatness, infinity, perhaps poetry. After all, Has thought about “the dream that is a film” as having “a singular time loop.” Even structurally, his stories suggest loops and circles—from the concentricity of The Saragossa Manuscript to the circular logic of The Hourglass Sanatorium. These symbols of eternal return and closure might find more reason in Kabbalah, which Has considered “both a deep science and a poetical vision of the world.” But their prevalence in his films gesture at a greater design, like signposts in a labyrinth. Has again: “Life is a labyrinth, we come back to the very same places, which are no longer the same because in the meantime, we have been through other experiences, through other stages in our life.” In his last film, The Tribulations of Balthazar Kober (1988), another wind-and-keyboard instrument is invoked: the organ. Near the end of the film, a young Venetian says the instrument “seems to have united the manual and the metaphysical.” The same can be said of Has’s cinema.