![]() ![]() ![]() In the meantime, his near-contemporary headed out west and tumbled down a rabbit-hole that would often prove as strange, tawdry and tragic as anything he put on screen. To step inside is to become hopelessly, intoxicatingly lost.įrom what I can gather, Has seems to have balanced the wildness of his work with a quiet, low-key existence behind the iron curtain. The subconscious invades reality." The film is less an Agnès Varda-style beach, where the tide uncovers salvageable memory, as a cluttered old curiosity shop. "Things of the past, issues long gone, are overlaid onto current reality. "In the dream that is a film, one often has a singular time loop," he once explained. Has's style is playful, teasing and defiantly loopy. And guess what: if anything, The Hour-Glass Sanatorium is even better than The Saragossa Manuscript, and even more adept at driving you crazy. It is a surrealistic phantasmagoria that spirits us through a decaying mental institution where time collapses and historical waxworks come to life. The Hour-Glass Sanatorium, based on the stories of Bruno Schulz, won the Cannes jury prize back in 1973. The other night I sat down and watched my second Has picture. I casually filed it as a one-off – the sort of singular act of freeform creativity that could never be repeated the equivalent of catching lightning in a bottle. Has's story pivots around the discovery of a dusty book of enchantments that is (in the words of one character) "enough to drive you crazy" the film itself is so dense and wild that it carries with it a similar risk. ![]() My sheepish confession: I was barely even aware of the latter's existence until a few years back, when I happened upon his 1964 film The Saragossa Manuscript, a sweeping Napoleonic pageant that looked like The Seventh Seal as directed by Alexander Jodorowsky and was reputedly the favourite movie of both Luis Buñuel and Jerry Garcia. Has, in contrast, swung off towards obscurity and the grave (he died in 2000). Polanski was destined for fame, notoriety and (currently) a Zurich prison cell. Here we have two mercurial, ambitious film-makers, each raised in Krakow, each enjoying their creative heyday in the 60s and 70s, and each finally heading in opposite directions. One might think of Roman Polanski and Wojciech Has as the Cain and Abel of Polish cinema. There is something fitting about the fact that this week's Barbican retrospective of the work of one Polish director has been so comprehensively upstaged by the actions of another. ![]()
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