Happy Birthday, Wojciech Has! Born today in 1925 as Wojciech Jerzy Has, this Polish screenwriter, film producer and film director, from an early age, was inspired by surrealism.
He would read French writer, poet and anti-fascist André Breton’s famous 1924 Manifestoes of Surrealism, as well as the poetry of French poet Paul Éluard and French poet Louis Aragon, both notable founders of the surrealist movement.
Visually, the paintings of German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet Max Ernst and Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali became lifelong touchstones.
Has' interest in cinema led him to pursue a one year course in film; after which, he began making educational and documentary films at the Warsaw Documentary Film Studio.
Among his credits, Has is best known for directing the three-hour 1965 Polish black and white drama film 'Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie' ('The Saragossa Manuscript').
The film was based off of Polish nobleman, Polish Army Captain of Engineers, ethnologist, Egyptologist, linguist, traveler, adventurer, and popular author of the Enlightenment period Jan Potocki's 1815 frame-tale speculative fiction novel The Manuscript found in Saragossa.
Set during the raging Napoleonic Wars across Europe, the film tells of two officers from opposing armies who meet by chance in Saragossa, Spain, where they're mutually bewitched by a book they find.
It recounts the story of Alfonso Van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski), a Walloon Guard captain, trying to reach Madrid via the Sierra Moreno Mountains.
There, he is at every turn thwarted by concupiscent princesses Eminia (Iga Cembrzynska-Kondrati) and Zibelda (Joanna Jedryka), a cunning hermit (Kazimierz Opalinski) and an unrelenting Spanish Inquisition.
The film was a relative success in Poland and other parts of socialist eastern Europe upon its release.
It later also achieved a level of critical success in the United States, when filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola rediscovered it and encouraged its propagation.
It later also achieved a level of critical success in the United States, when filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola rediscovered it and encouraged its propagation.
In the 2015 poll conducted by Polish Museum of Cinematography in Łódź, 'The Saragossa Manuscript' came second on the list of the greatest Polish films of all time.
Has had been active from 1947–1988.
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