He stood out from other important Polish directors because he, among other
things, distanced himself from concrete situations and classical storytelling,
striving for a very personal form of art-film.

Great Polish director Wojciech Jerzy Has has, a bit unjustly, fell into
oblivion. Partly because a lot of time has passed since his golden era that
started with his debut film, The Noose (Petla, 1958), and lasted
to the Cannes award winner, The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (Sanatorium pod
Klepsydra, 1973). That was the time when his films regularly collected
international awards and were screened abroad (even in Croatia). His later
works, however, remained overshadowed by other Polish films, so much so that he
was most appreciated for his pedagogical work at the distinguished film academy
in Lodz. He stood out from other emminent Polish filmmakers mostly because he
distanced himself from concrete situations and classical storytelling, striving
for a very personal form of art-film with elements of surrealism, where the
events of film are generaly represented from the subjective point of view of the
protagonists, for which experience, dreams and hallucinations equally
participate in the formation of the story. Precisely for this reason, although
most of his films were adaptations of literary works of acclaimed Polish writers
of various styles and thematic interests, Has' works have a strong and unique
common authorship film procédé.

In The Noose, for example – shot after the novel of the then popular
young writer Marek Hlask – the hero, set out to commit suicide, spends his last
day in the company of a bottle of vodka and a noose hanging from the cieling,
while the viewer observes the story of his life and the world he lived in, all
from the hero's perspective. That same year, he made Farewells (Pozegnania,
1958), adapted from the work of emminent Polish writer Stanislaw Dygat, which
brought him the international jury of the critics' award in Locarno. Evocation
of insecurity and despair pervading Poland at the beginning of World War II
acquired an unexpectedly nostalgic note precisely due to Has's procédé. After
the story of an equally succesful writer of the same generation, Kazimierz
Brandys, he made The Art of Loving (Jak być kochana, 1963), in
which starred cult actor Zbigniew Cybulski. His partner was Barbara Krafftówna,
who gave an extraordinary performance, thought by many to be one of the best in
the history of Polish cinema. For the first time, Has introduced his favorite
subject, the intertwining of past and present (in this case, Nazi occupation and
the present). In The Codes (Szyfry, 1966), after Andrzej
Kijowski’s work about the destinies of the survivors of war, he added elements
of surrealism when presenting their feelings and physical deformations.

However, for The Saragossa Manuscript (Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie,
1965), his greatest film, adorned with many international awards (the most
important of them being the one from San Sebastian) and one of extremely
important works of not just Polish but European cinema of the 1960s (very
appreciated by, for example, Martin Scorsese), he used a text from the beginning
of the XIX century. It was not of Polish origin, by a rather unknown author, Jan
Potocki, an eccentric writer who played a significant role in the enlightenment
and the study of Kabala, but ended his life in a ritual suicide. In his work,
Has found room for a most complex mixing of various temporal planes,
interweaving of what the viewer perceives as reality with visions,
hallucinations and dreams, which eventually, owing to the director’s mastery,
melted into a unique creation belonging to the unique peaks of fantastic in
international terms. (Tomislav Kurelec)