A VISUAL SENSE OF DISQUIET

This year (March 8-16, 2025), the Bergamo Film Meeting honors filmmaker Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925-2000), whose work, while significant, may not be the first to come to mind when Italians think of late 20th-century Polish cinema.

The tribute features seven films: The Noose (1957), Farewells (1958), Goodbye to the Past (1961), How to Be Loved (1962), The Saragossa Manuscript (1964), The Codes (1966), and The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973). Among these, The Saragossa Manuscript and The Hourglass Sanatorium are internationally acclaimed and have been praised by directors such as Buñuel and Scorsese.

Exploring more of Has’s work can deepen our understanding of his cinema and provide further insight into his vision. Several articles and books discuss his work; notably, Małgorzata Jakubowska’s Kryształy Czasu (2013), available online for free. In English, Annette Insdorf’s Intimations (2017) offers a helpful overview, while in French, Jessy Neau’s Le cinéma de Wojciech J. Has au miroir de la littérature (2023) analyzes literary adaptations in three of his films.

Here, I focus on the relationship between characters and disquiet in his films.

Marginal, Feckless, and Lost Characters

The Noose is a feature film that marks the debut of W. J. Has. In this work, we can already discern three characteristics that will come to define this filmmaker’s methodology: the literary inspiration that underpins many of his films; his predisposition toward a visually driven approach to staging, framing, and editing; and the considerable emphasis placed on the performances of his actors and actresses.

Moreover, The Noose offers an initial insight into the disquiet embedded in most of the characters of W. J. Has’s cinema, particularly in relation to their marginality. In this film, we observe the existential struggles of Kuba, a man wrestling with addiction to alcohol. Despite his efforts to address this issue with dignity, his actions result in a gradual detachment from his environment and loved ones, ultimately leading to his self-imposed isolation in his apartment.

In Farewells, the protagonist is, again, a marginal figure; yet his conduct primarily reflects ambition. The narrative centers on Pawel, a young bourgeois intellectual, whose life we examine in two phases—before and after World War II—through his intricate relationship with the dancer Lidka. This relationship initially shows his attempt to assert control, yet it ultimately exposes his apprehensions in response to personal and historical circumstances that challenge him.

When it comes to Goodbye to the Past, How to Be Loved, and The Codes, here the sense of disquiet can certainly be associated with an experience of existential loss, involving characters who exist in a liminal state between different realities. Consequently, they are more susceptible to suffering, whether it involves bidding farewell to their past (as in Goodbye to the Past), confronting it (as in How to Be Loved), or transcending it (as in The Codes), as illustrated by the father-son relationship.

In conclusion, based on the observations of numerous Polish critics, it can be asserted that the characters in these films, although not embodying W.J. Has’s politically committed perspective, nonetheless show that the filmmaker’s cinema should not be primarily regarded as escapism or a denial of the socio-political realities in socialist Poland of the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, this cinema offers a non-dialectical depiction of the cultural atmosphere of the period.

It essentially reflects subtle and universal aspects of the era, but without clear theses or conclusions, and it remains free from formal or symbolic self-imposed constraints.

Mise en abyme

The Saragossa Manuscript by Count Jan Potocki has a distinctive publishing history: it was created in the late 1700s, and then published intermittently in the early 1800s, written in French, but available in Polish only from 1847 to 1958. It was later rediscovered by Roger Caillois, becoming accessible in its most complete original form only in 2008.

W. J. Has’s decision to adapt this literary classic exemplifies his unique style. The novel’s Chinese-box-like structure—integrating coming-of-age, adventure, eroticism, and fantasy—allows the Polish filmmaker to demonstrate his eclectic cinematic approach by converting the narrative disorientation of Potocki’s masterpiece into a captivating visual experience.

The film introduces Alfonso Van Worden, the captain of the Walloon Guards, who is trying to reach Madrid via the Sierra Morena. However, this constitutes merely the initial phase of a journey marked by recurrent digressions, flashbacks within flashbacks, and appearances by various other characters engaged in the narrative.

But beyond the mechanics of the events, Potocki’s writing offers the Polish filmmaker an opportunity to create a comprehensive yet detailed portrait of human nature. In this context, the sense of disquiet no longer stems from a disruption in a person’s relationship with their world, but from a total relativization of that connection. This leaves humans susceptible to circumstances and suggests that the results of their efforts are often either determined by luck or appear illusory.

In The Hourglass Sanatorium, the viewer’s immersion into the narrative flow is greatly intensified. The film is a loose adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s collection of short stories, The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, and includes references to his other works, along with engravings and drawings. W. J. Has’s film depicts Jozef, who visits his father in a dilapidated sanatorium, and then becomes involved in a series of grotesque situations and encounters that exist outside any usual chronological order.

The protagonist’s journey weaves together fantasy and history, highlighting the rediscovery of his inner child and Jewish identity. Notably, Schulz—of Jewish heritage and the translator of Kafka’s The Trial into Polish—died in 1942, murdered on the street by a Gestapo officer. This tragedy, along with the Holocaust, seems to linger in the film’s heavy atmosphere of gloom, acting as a barrier that ultimately blocks any true escape.

Ultimately, this dead end suggests that humans cannot escape their anxieties unscathed unless they abandon self-awareness, reducing themselves to mere figures among figures.

This is a revised version of an article originally written in Italian and published in Alias, the weekly magazine of Il manifesto.