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Wojciech Has

Wojciech Has

Directing

Biography

Wojciech Jerzy Has was a Polish film director, screenwriter and film producer. Wojciech Jerzy Has was born in Kraków, with Jewish origin on his father's side, and Roman Catholic on his mother's. During the wartime German occupation of Poland, Has studied at the Kraków Business and Commerce College and later clandestine underground classes at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts - until it was disbanded in 1943. When the war ended, he went on to study at the reconstituted Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. In 1946, Has completed a one-year course in film and began producing educational and documentary films at the Warsaw Documentary Film Studio, and in the 1950s moved on to work at Poland's premier filmmaking academy, the National Film Studio, in Łódź. Has made his debut with Harmony (Harmonia, 1948), a medium-length feature, and began making full-length feature films in 1957. In 1974, he was appointed as professor in the directing department at the National Film School in Łódź. Throughout his long and prolific career, he directed such notable films as The Saragossa Manuscript, The Doll and The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (also known as The Sandglass). Early on in his career, Has gained a reputation as an individualist who avoided political overtones in his art. He produced his most important films throughout the period when the Polish Film School was at its most prominent; however, his work possessed its own stylistic feeling that was independent of the over policial themes that dominated the prevailing Polish School. In practically every film, Has sought to create hermetic environments, in which the problems and storylines of his protagonists were always of secondary importance to the particular world he had created, characterized by an accumulation of random objects that formed unique visual universe. Has's oeuvre is commonly associated with Surrealist painting in Polish criticism. This is reinforced by the director's dream poetic and his use of objects, which are also characteristic of many canvasses by the Surrealists. Has also created a number of intimate psychological dramas during his career, such as How to Be Loved and Farewells, focusing on damaged individuals who have difficulty settling into life. In his work, he was fascinated by outsiders and people incapable of finding their place in reality. Two currents remain evident in Has's output: one was his cinema of psychological analysis, the other his films of visionary form, in which he most often used the motif of a journey. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Known For

The Hourglass Sanatorium
7.5

Jozef visits a dilapidated Sanatorium to see his father. Jozef undertakes a strange journey through the many rooms of the sanatorium, each which conjures worlds composed of his memories, dreams and nightmares.

The Hourglass Sanatorium

1973
The Tribulations of Balthazar Kober
6.6

Story about the young Balthazar thrown from one remarkable event to the other. On his way through a plague hit the landscape, he meets the Kabbalists, priests - and himself.

The Tribulations of Balthazar Kober

1988
The Saragossa Manuscript
7.8

During the Napoleonic wars, a Spanish officer and an opposing officer find a book written by the former's grandfather.

The Saragossa Manuscript

1966
November
5.0

Medical student Sara has visions; she notices telekinesis abilities in herself. She is afraid to admit to anyone that after each loss of consciousness she finds traces of the murders and mutilations she has committed....

November

1992
The Doll
6.5

Set in the 19th century Warsaw. The indolence of aristocrats who, secure with their pensions, are too lazy to undertake new business risks, frustrates Wokulski. His ability to make money is respected but his lack of family and social rank is condescended to. Because of his "help" (in secret) to "the doll's" impecunious but influential father, the girl becomes aware of his affection.

The Doll

1968
Write and Fight
6.7

A young journalist is arrested for freethinking ideas and placed in a cell with a famous safe-breaker and a former cleric, who murdered his mistress' husband.

Write and Fight

1985
How to Be Loved
7.5

An actress travels from Warsaw to Paris and during the trip reflects on the last few years of her life. It goes back to the German occupation and her hiding of a fellow actor who has supposedly killed a collaborator.

How to Be Loved

1963
The Noose
7.0

A day in the life of an alcoholic. With the help of his girlfriend Krysia, Kuba attempts to regain control of his life.

The Noose

1958
No image
5.8

Charles sits for hours in a wardrobe in a rented room on the attic, looking back on his whole life. He was brought up by a single mother who loved his only child with a sick desperate feeling and limited all his world to her own person. Charles' tragedy began with his adolescence. It made his mother aware of her feminity that resulted in her new marriage. Together with a new husband she decided to send the boy to a school for retarded children. Upon leaving the school Charles starts to seek his longing mother who moved out, in a meanwhile, not giving any address.

Conversation with a Cupboard Man

1994
The Codes
6.9

An elderly man returns to Poland to find his long-lost son, missing since World War II. In his quest the man is forced to contemplate the elusive and coded nature of truth itself.

The Codes

1966
Listy miłosne
7.0

Thirty-year-old nurse Teresa spends her days caring for elderly, dying people. Janusz, a young man she met at an amusement park, enters the life of this bitter and disillusioned woman. Teresa doesn't have the courage to tell him how she feels, and he also has trouble expressing his emotions. They are helped by Julka, a girl from the neighborhood who likes Teresa. She finds a pile of love letters from the beginning of the century in the trash. By forging Teresa and Janusz's handwriting, she starts a love correspondence between them, rewriting fragments of other people's confessions.

Listy miłosne

2001
Farewells
5.6

The story takes place before World War II and centers on Pawel, a member of a conservative, middle-class family, and his love for Lidka, a taxi dancer. Social conventions and the lovers' inability to defy those forces Pawel and Lidka benefit. Times change, war breaks out, leading to Pawel sent to Auschwitz while Lidka marry his cousin. Their love has survived and conventions are no longer the issue.

Farewells

1958
An Uneventful Story
6.1

A well-known professor of medicine finding himself at the threshold of autumn of his life, takes stock of his achievements and experiences. "In the end it ends with what has been known for a long time: that conscious life without a fixed worldview is not life, but torment, horror. - wrote Anton Chekhov in one of his letters summarizing "An Uninteresting Story". The protagonist, Professor Nikolai Stepanovich, is a character characteristic of Chekhov's entire oeuvre - a Russian intellectual from the late nineteenth century, depressed by boredom and a sense of his own uselessness and the meaninglessness of his existence.

An Uneventful Story

1983
Two Hours
7.3

Follows the lives of people shortly after World War 2 as they try to adjust to their new lives. Completed in 1946, it was banned from release by the communist government of Poland until 1957 in edited form.

Two Hours

1957
One Room Tenants
6.1

A subjective adaptation of a well-known autobiographical novel by Zbigniew Unilowski (screenplay by Wojciech Jerzy Has with dialogues by Stanislaw Dygat). The adventures of the tenants of a sublet room in a Warsaw townhouse inhabited mostly by students and novice writers, presented against the social context of the 1930s.

One Room Tenants

1960
Brzozowa Street
5.8

Battered Warsaw is getting back to life after the WW2 destruction. The ruins of the Old Town become homes once again.

Brzozowa Street

1947
Goodbye to the Past
6.7

An actress visits her hometown to attend the funeral of her grandfather. She realizes that the places and people from her past differ from her cherished memories.

Goodbye to the Past

1961
Memoirs of a Sinner
7.0

A recently resurrected corpse recounts his life story, focusing on his strange relationship with a murderous alter-ego.

Memoirs of a Sinner

1986
Gold Dreams
5.8

The inability of a truck driver to relate to normal life after an accident for which he feels himself responsible.

Gold Dreams

1962
No image
8.0

Three vignettes showing a marriage crisis and a subsequent divorce.

On, ona, oni

1983