A scene from The Saragossa Manuscript, directed by Wojciech Has. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
There is something fitting about the reality that this week’s Barbican retrospective of the work of one Polish director has been so comprehensively upstaged by the actions of another. One might think of Roman Polanski and Wojciech Has as the Cain and Abel of Polish cinema. Here we have two mercurial, eager for superiority film-makers, each raised in Krakow, each enjoying their creative heyday in the 60s and 70s, and each finally heading in opposite directions. Polanski was destined for fame, notoriety and (currently) a Zurich prison cell. Has, in opposition, swung off towards obscurity and the grave (he died in 2000).
My leer confession: I was barely even sensible of the latter’s existence until a scarcely any years back, when I happened concerning his 1964 film The Saragossa Manuscript, a sweeping Napoleonic pageant that looked analogous The Seventh Seal as directed by Alexander Jodorowsky and was reputedly the favourite movie of both Luis Buñuel and Jerry Garcia. Has’sitting story pivots on every side of the revelation of a dusty book of enchantments that is (in the words of one character) “enough to drive you deranged”; the film itself is so dense and heedless that it carries with it a similar risk. I casually filed it as a one-off – the sort of singular act of freeform creativity that could never be repeated; the equivalent of attractive lightning in a bottle.
The other night I sat down and watched my second Has picture. The Hour-Glass Sanatorium, based on the stories of Bruno Schulz, won the Cannes jury prize back in 1973. It is a surrealistic phantasmagoria that spirits us through a decaying intellectual institution where time collapses and historical waxworks come to life. And guess what: if anything, The Hour-Glass Sanatorium is even bettor than The Saragossa Manuscript, and even more adept at driving you out of one’s head. Has’s style is playful, teasing and defiantly loopy.
“In the dream that is a film, one often has a singular time loop,” he once explained. “Things of the past, issues long gone, are overlaid onto current reality. The subconscious invades reality.” The film is less an Agnès Varda-style beach, in what place the tide uncovers salvageable memory, as a cluttered intelligent spectacle shop. To step inside is to become hopelessly, intoxicatingly lost.
From what I have power to hoard, Has seems to have balanced the wildness of his work through a quiet, low-key existence behind the iron curtain. In the in the interim, his near-contemporary headed out west and tumbled down a rabbit-hole that would often prove as strange, tawdry and tragic like anything he put on screen. At the time of Polanski’s 1977 arrest for unlawful sex with a unimportant, Has was holding from a thin to a dense state a day job as a professor at the National Film School in Lodz (the same place, incidentally, where Polanski learned his craft).
If we now know Polanski (the man and his movies) far better than we know Wojciech Has, the Barbican “directorspective” (fingers crossed this label doesn’t stick) at least provides some kind of improving. Having sat through two of his films, I am now eager to behold added. But I am lost in the curiosity shop, fogged by illiteracy and unsure just where to turn. Can anyone accommodate with a hand? Please come and find me together these weird, dusty artefacts (waxworks, manuscripts and all) and point the way ahead.
• The Wojciech Has ‘directorspective’ is at the Barbican until 25 October
