Wojciech J. Has on DVD
As the Barbican Centre in London gears up for a long overdue part retrospective of the career of the man I recently described in Sight & Sound as Polish cinema’s only authentic surrealist, I thought I’d post another DVD overview for the benefit of those who can’t get there - or indeed those who can, and who’d like to explore further. The good news is that virtually all of Has’s features are available somewhere, but the downside is that many are currently restricted to Polish-language French-subtitled editions. But there are rumours that those masters will be released on Polish DVDs in due course, and if precedent is any guide they should have English subtitles.
The main labels responsible are Malavida Films (France), Mr Bongo Films (UK), Best Film Co and TVP (Poland). Image Entertainment’s The Saragossa Manuscript is now out of print, but copies are still floating around eBay, Amazon and elsewhere.
In chronological order, including shorts:
1947 - Brzozowa Street (Ulica Brzozowa, IMDB)
- Included in TVP’s The Noose (Pętla), Region 0 PAL. No subtitles, though my review should fill in a few gaps.
1947 - Harmony (Harmonia, IMDB)
- Included in TVP’s One-Room Tenants (Wspólny pokój), Region 0 PAL. No subtitles, but no spoken content.
1950 - My City (Moje miasto, IMDB)
- Included in TVP’s The Noose (Pętla), Region 0 PAL. No subtitles.
1957 - The Noose (Pętla, IMDB)
- TVP, Region 0 PAL. Optional English subtitles on main feature. Extras include unsubtitled shorts Brzozowa Street and My Town (see above).
- Included in the fourth volume of Best Film Co’s 50 Years of the Polish Film School (50-lecie Polskiej Szkoły Filmowej, Region 0 PAL. Optional English, French, German, Russian and Polish HOH subtitles on main feature, though not brief accompanying featurette. Extensive, fully bilingual booklet in Polish and English.
- Le Noeud coulant, Malavida, Region 0 PAL. French subtitles only.
1958 - Farewells (Pożegnania, IMDB)
- Les Adieux, Malavida, Region 0 PAL. French subtitles only.
1959 - One-Room Tenants (Wspólny pokój, IMDB)
- TVP, Region 0 PAL. Optional English subtitles on main feature. Extras include the dialogue-free short Harmony (see above).
- Chambre commune, Malavida, Region 0 PAL. French subtitles only.
1960 - Goodbye to the Past (Rozstanie, IMDB)
- Adieu jeunesse, Malavida, Region 0 PAL. French subtitles only.
1961 - Gold Dreams (Złoto, IMDB)
- L’or de mes rêves, Malavida, Region 0 PAL. French subtitles only.
1962 - How To Be Loved (Jak być kochaną, IMDB)
- Included in the fourth volume of Best Film Co’s 50 Years of the Polish Film School (50-lecie Polskiej Szkoły Filmowej, Region 0 PAL. Optional English, French, German, Russian and Polish HOH subtitles on main feature, though not brief accompanying featurette. Extensive, fully bilingual booklet in Polish and English.
- L’art d’être aimée, Malavida, Region 0 PAL. French subtitles only.
1965 - The Saragossa Manuscript (Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie, IMDB)
- Mr Bongo Films, Region 0 PAL. English subtitles.
- Image Entertainment, Region 0 NTSC. English subtitles.
- Le manuscrit trouvé a saragosse, Malavida, Region 0 PAL. French subtitles only.
1966 - The Codes (Szyfry, IMDB)
- Les codes, Malavida, Region 0 PAL. French subtitles only.
1968 - The Doll (Lalka, IMDB)
- La poupée, Malavida, Region 0 PAL. French subtitles only.
1973 - The Hourglass Sanatorium (Sanatorium pod klepsydrą, IMDB)
- Mr Bongo Films, Region 0 PAL. English subtitles.
- La Clepsydre, Malavida, Region 0 PAL. French subtitles only.
1983 - An Uneventful Story (Nieciekawa historia, IMDB)
- Une Histoire banale, Malavida, Region 0 PAL. French subtitles only.
1985 - Write and Fight (Pismak, IMDB)
- L’Écrivain, Malavida, Region 0 PAL. French subtitles only.
1986 - The Memoirs of a Sinner (Osobisty pamiętnik grzesznika przez niego samego spisany , IMDB)
- Journal intime d’un pêcheur , Malavida, Region 0 PAL. French subtitles only.
1988 - The Tribulations of Balthazar Kober (Niezwykła podróż Baltazara Kobera, IMDB)
- Les Tribulations de Balthazar Kober, Malavida, Region 0 PAL. French subtitles only.
As ever, additions and corrections are most appreciated.
Posted on 28th September 2009
Under: Poland, DVD Surveys, Wojciech Jerzy Has | 1 Comment »
Now 
Büntetőexpedició 
Hungary, 1969, colour, 16 mins
We briefly see one of them being constructed by snowball-throwing children, but the origin of most of the snowmen is a complete mystery. Some sport antlers, others candelabra, they’re decked out in military or religious accoutrements, hold portraits or musical instruments. A whole semicircle of snowmen forms a brass band, while a top-hatted colleague is waited upon by semi-nude women dressed as angels. One lies on a funeral bier, surrounded by candles, another in a hospital bed that’s been set up on an ice sheet. Another has a real human skull where its heart would normally be. Yet another has its entire chest region occupied by a wire cage full of living birds, while another has perspex-encased beetles for eyes, to make a change from the usual carrots and corn-cobs standing in for facial features.
Tízezer nap
One of the most impressive Hungarian directorial debuts, Ten Thousand Suns offers clinching proof that Miklós Jancsó wasn’t the only mid-1960s master offering breathtaking widescreen compositions featuring hundreds of men and horses. Shot by Sándor Sára, then well on his way to cementing his reputation as one of Hungarian cinematography’s greatest visual artists, the film routinely throws up stunning shots: mass wheat scything, dozens of horses crossing a bridge to market (followed shortly afterwards by train wagons crossing the same bridge heading in the opposite direction, a neat visual gag on technological progress), prisoners doing hard labour on a rocky hillside, numerous public festivities crammed with local colour. The aesthetic impact alone makes it’s easy to see why this once had a considerable international reputation, even achieving a commercial release in Britain.
Another reason for its acclaim outside Hungary may be that while it tackles similar material to Zoltán Fábri’s 
Kósa parallels this central narrative with a vivid portrait of the lot of workers over this period. Before the war, István, Juli, Bánó and their peasant cohorts live in extreme poverty, effectively slaves to the local landowners and all their actions are shown to have moral consequences above and beyond their notional illegality - for instance, stealing straw from the pigs to use as fuel on New Year’s Eve means that the piglets will be found frozen to death the following morning (in one of many quirky touches that separate this film from one of Jancsó’s more earnest parables, the miscreants are ordered to apologise to the surviving pigs). The potato is the staple diet, and not just as food - Bánó manages to get one to power a radio. A strike leads to a confrontation between those seeking higher wages and those who point out that they’ll starve without work, though the latter end up ritually humiliated by being tied to upended wheelbarrows and having dirt thrown in their faces.
Following the war, whose passage and outcome is efficiently conveyed by newsreels and shots of black-shrouded women in mourning laying candles on tombstones, a new government decrees that the land belongs to those who need it. This leads to scenes that echo one of the flashbacks in Twenty Hours, as over-excited peasants pre-emptively raid a grain store, a politician pleading with them to stop and wait as the grain will soon be theirs anyway. A massed celebration includes a speed-eating contest reminiscent of the ones in György Pálfi’s grotesque 
But the euphoria quickly gives way to disgruntlement: Bánó asserts that the more one gives, the happier one is, but when he seeks to put this notion into practice by requisitioning some of István’s grain for the benefit of poorer community members, István is unimpressed by the argument that it properly belongs to the people and resolves to steal it back, an action that leads to the death of his man-mountain accomplice Mihály (previously seen as a champion speed-eater and wrestler) and hard labour for István himself. When he returns, he finds his son grown up (and now played by András Kozák, a regular lead in Jancsó’s films) and evidence of the encroachment of progress - Juli tells him that the women wear nylon now, and the peasant houses are now dwarfed by much more modern buildings. This sequence of the film delights in juxtaposing the ancient and the modern: a lovely lyrical sequence sees a session of ploughing accompanied by the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, a forest is mysteriously populated with riderless bicycles, and a trip to the beach reveals a bizarre juxtaposition of costume styles from modern bathing costumes to traditional Hungarian male headgear.
The film’s final sequences reveal Kósa’s ultimate thesis, as father and son are explicitly contrasted despite sharing the same name. István senior is a traditionalist, raised as part of a hierarchy, and consequently his notion of ambition is to rise up to the top - or at least to a level where he can ensure a life of comfort and plenty. He’s paralleled with King Lear, whose decision to give up his land resulted in his decline and death. But István junior is a child of the postwar era, raised in a very different environment where the physical and social needs of the community come before individual desires - and therefore, Kósa implies, a model citizen of a new socialist Hungary where theory and practice can finally become one. 
Hideg napok
It’s hard to fault the title: virtually every scene in András Kovács’ powerful film is either set outdoors in snow that audibly crunches underfoot, or in a white-walled prison cell where central heating clearly isn’t a top priority. The latter is occupied by four former members of the Hungarian army, awaiting trial in connection with various atrocities committed four years earlier, in 1942, when over three thousand Serbs and Jews from the town of Novi Sad (recently annexed to Hungary) were massacred in legally dubious circumstances. The chill is further accentuated by the occasional use of the spare, almost skeletal third movement of Béla Bartók’s ‘Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta’ (some fourteen years in advance of Stanley Kubrick co-opting it for The Shining) and an early shot of a hole being blasted in the iced-over Danube. Kovács is too discreet to show exactly what it’s being used for, but the sight of civilians shivering on the bank, planks being laid to to the edge of the hold, a pile of discarded clothes and armed guards being given their orders leaves us in little doubt.
Naturally, the cell’s inmates are anxious to minimise or deny their involvement in the above (as Tarpataki puts it “nobody is better or worse, just more or less fortunate”), but as they argue amongst themselves, a much clearer picture emerges, aided by Rashomon-style flashbacks from their multiple viewpoints). The most senior prisoner, Major Büky (Zoltán Latinovits), considers himself more of a victim than a participant, since his wife Rózsa was caught up in the round-ups of prisoners and subsequently vanished. Throughout Büky’s testimony, he is at pains to stress his essential decency, and that of his wife - brought up to be anti-Semitic, she nonetheless became friends with her Jewish landlady Edit. He is convinced that Rózsa is still alive, unconvincingly explaining that women have a good sense of danger and know when to take evasive action. He also cites the disappearance of her suitcase as evidence that she pre-emptively fled: despite increasing indications to the contrary, he refuses to believe that Hungarian soldiers could ever be guilty of looting.
Not to be outdone, Lieutenant Tarpataki (Iván Darvas) tells an anecdote about an arbitrary arrest and detention procedure in which market sellers were rounded up, vetted by one of their customers, and the ones she didn’t recognise were taken away and presumably killed: he claims he regrets his passivity in the face of clear breaches of military convention. He also plays down the explosions on the ice, claiming that there are plenty of legitimate reasons for making holes. Ensign Pozdor (Tibor Szlyági) is obsessed with where the death statistics came from - 3,309 alleged victims, but who counted them? And how could they accurately say that 299 were “of advanced age”? At one point, when confronted with increasingly clear evidence of his own guilt, Pozdor seeks to play it down by saying that it’s wrong for him to have been singled out, since everyone in his unit was just as guilty of committing atrocities. By reducing the victims to mere numbers, he’s cynically (or possibly unconsciously) diminishing their status as human beings.
Throughout their testimonies, blame is firmly placed on General Feketehalmy-Czeydner and Colonel Grassy, the former given to patriotic rabble-rousing (”I shall not abide cowardice! More zeal! More fighting spirit!”), the latter favouring largely indiscriminate slaughter: at one point, Grassy orders an entire group of suspects to be killed because the forty partisans he’s after are presumably among them. To sidestep justified suspicions that they’re crudely opting for the (concurrent) Nuremberg defence that only the people giving the orders were to blame, the conveniently dead Corporal Dorner (István Avar) becomes the primary scapegoat, being shown drunkenly killing an innocent (Jewish) electrician and his son. Grassi allegedly refuses to take any action, telling Büky that when Germans are invading, concern for individual Jews is misplaced, and that punishing men for trivial infractions would demoralise them.
It’s the fourth and most militarily junior cellmate, Corporal Szabó, who is the most honest, presumably because he lacks either the authority or the political nous to transfer blame. Also, as an underling, he was compelled to participate in the massacre because the alternative would have been near-certain death for himself. While he also uses the “only obeying orders” defence, he knows that it has much more justification in his case, and can therefore go into the kind of detail that his colleagues have been deliberately shying away from - in the process revealing information about the near-certain fate of Büky’s wife that causes Büky’s previously controlled, quasi-aristocratic demeanour to suddenly vanish. This explosion of violent rage is doubly revealing, simultaneously exposing Büky’s total selfishness (having previously regarded the fate of thousands with something close to equanimity) and demonstrating how even someone as outwardly quiet, bookish and ‘civilised’ as him can be goaded into committing atrocities given a convincing enough excuse.
Unlike Zoltán Fábri’s near-contemporaneous Twenty Hours (Húsz óra, 1965), where the portrait gradually assembled by the flashbacks indicated a community of sharply divergent views and opinions, here Kovács uses four very different testimonies to paint what is ultimately a wholly coherent picture of the same event, with each man bearing equal moral guilt for what happened - if they weren’t actual participants, like Szabó, they could have taken some kind of action to stop or minimise it. The film’s dominant message (expressed unusually bluntly by the elliptical standards of mid-1960s Hungarian cinema), that for evil to triumph it is necessary for good men to do nothing, could just as easily be transferred to any number of contentious political and military situations. Kovács was clearly challenging his Hungarian audience to think about this and similar events, many of which would have happened well within the lifetimes of a mid-1960s audience.
Húsz óra
The investigative narrative and flashback structure of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane has been used more than once to frame a central European political subject. The best-known example is Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru), written in 1963 but not filmed until 1976, but Zoltán Fábri’s Twenty Hours is in many ways its Hungarian equivalent. Here, an unnamed young journalist (Emil Keres) decides to disinter the story of a village murder that happened nine years previously (i.e. in 1956, a detail never stressed but which few contemporary viewers would have missed), by going to the scene of the crime and spending twenty hours interviewing anyone who’ll speak to him about what happened. He ends up with a vast array of personal anecdotes stretching back to World War II, with much stress placed on the upheavals of the early years of collectivisation and Stalinism.
But his disillusion gradually grows when he realises that the co-op officials lack any feeling for poetry, or the primal thrill that comes with the first bloom in spring: they’re only interested in productivity and targets. Kiskovács (Lajos Őze) resents the fact that he helped give his comrades a leg-up, only to end up with no qualifications himself, while Anti Balogh (János Görbe) is unofficially declared “the people’s enemy” for having the temerity to break with the party after being accused of hoarding food - first, he announces that he no longer wishes to be addressed as ‘comrade’, and then confronts a policeman, baring his chest and daring him to shoot.
Strand
Slow dissolves and extreme close-ups heighten the sense of intimacy as we eavesdrop on conversations (or try to, though the camera is usually trained on the auditor rather than the speaker) or watch a couple lying together on the beach in a shot that could almost be a still photograph were it not for the almost imperceptible movement of a single caressing hand. There is no spoken content: the music segues from a stately choral affair to sparse woodwind, organ and solo female vocal. A bell is rung, heralding a change of pace. Crowds of people mass in a large swimming pool complete with wave machine, their movement heightened by the use of repeated panning shots, or zooms in and out. Whereas the film previously focused on one or two people at a time, here any sense of individuality is subsumed by becoming a tiny part of a gigantic mass movement of bodies, the effect heightened by the resumption of the earlier choral music and repeated camera pullbacks.
Despite the evident talent displayed in this short, director/cinematographer István Ventilla’s career doesn’t seem to have amounted to much: his best-known film seems to be a 1978 US-made effort known variously as Nicole, Crazed or A Woman’s Revenge (1978), which an IMDB commenter characterised as “A very odd film with lots of fast editing shifts and loaded with non-sequiturs” and which is mainly notable for what is apparently the only nude scene featuring Catherine Bach of The Dukes of Hazzard. One assumes this wasn’t treated quite as elegantly and respectfully as the many bodies in Ventilla’s earlier film.
Sodrásban
Also known as In the Current, this was the debut feature by the 30-year-old István Gaál, and has subsequently been recognised as one of the earliest films of an authentic Hungarian ‘new wave’. Gaál had spent two years (1959-61) studying film at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome, and Current shows the clear influence both of Italian neo-realism and its more modernist offshoots. It’s probably safe to assume that Gaál would have seen Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), to which Current occasionally bears a strong resemblance in its depiction of a group of friends whose lives are permanently altered when one of them mysteriously disappears during a riverside excursion. The crucial difference here is that the various characters are much younger, some not yet out of their teens, and consequently forced to grow up faster than intended. 
The film begins in sunny, upbeat fashion, with lithe and energetic young men and women leaving their small village to spend a day frolicking on the sands beside the river and picnicking in the woods. Six of them are old friends, with the seventh, Zoli (Zsofi’s new neighbour) fitting right in almost from the start. They’re a very familiar bunch, right down to the petty squabbles - though the latter will later be replayed and agonised over, as though they offered some kind of clue as to the meaning of what later happened. They even pose for a photograph, largely stripped to their underwear, a couple streaked with warpaint-like mud, an image of carefree innocence (albeit with ‘Lord of the Flies’ overtones) that will also be repeatedly shown in increasingly ironic circumstances. Gabi’s disappearance changes everything, including the film’s pace and tone. Finding his clothes still present on the shoreline, they run along the shoreline calling his name before doing the sensible thing and hand the matter over to the police - but that’s when the recriminations and internal soul-searching begin, which will dominate the rest of the film. 
Coming from different backgrounds and with different interests suggesting divergent temperaments (when medical student Zoli is introduced to the rest of the group, we learn that it contains a student, a biologist, a physicist and a sculptor) each has their own individual reaction to Gabi’s disappearance. Zoli struggles to recall his face, Zsofi wonders whether they were truly in love, Laci asks his solipsistic parents what they’d have done if he’d drowned (and is given the less than helpful response “clever boys don’t do such stupid things”) and worries whether Gabi has left anything aside from fading memories, Luja finds solace in his art (he’s training to be a sculptor) and Böbe realises that she feels nothing for Kari, whose love for her is superficial compared with Gabi’s for Zsofi’s (though this is now, of course, an untestable proposition, and implicitly challenged by the memory of her slapping him on the beach). 
All recognise that Gabi’s disappearance has changed them in some way, but they can’t articulate precisely what - one attempt at rationalising whether they have a moral responsibility for what happened because they were effectively a community is dismissed with a curt “this isn’t a maths problem”. Böbe claims that Gabi was effectively a ‘father confessor’ to all of them, and he seems to retain this role even in death, his memory triggering numerous revealing reminiscences (notably Zsofi’s monologue about an erotic but strangely chaste encounter with Gabi in an otherwise abandoned boathouse).
Weaving a much more definite path through all these questions and arguments is the figure of Gabi’s grandmother, largely silent (except for the keening song she sings at the funeral), shawled in black and clutching a symbolic loaf of bread and an unlit candle, at one point drifting down the fatal river in a boat as if to get as close as possible to her grandson’s spirit at the moment it left his body, after which she affixes the candle to the bread and lets it drift away. There’s a sense of ancient ritual coming into play here, something that the young people can’t begin to grasp.
Bookending the narrative elements and threading through them is the powerful symbolic device of the fast-flowing river, first seen in the opening credits accompanied by Vivaldi’s stately Concerto Grosso in D minor, as suggesting something largely impervious to the passage of time. Gaál and cinematographer Sándor Sára (swapping the roles they performed on their previous collaboration, the short documentary 
The film has a very strong sense of place: the opening shots establish the small, close-knit village community, with haymakers and barges frequently glimpsed in the background - the police, too, perform their work unobtrusively and efficiently. The performances throughout ring entirely true, with much of the younger cast being drawn from a local acting school - though one of them, András Kozák, would soon become a familiar face in the work of Miklós Jancsó and other major Hungarian filmmakers of the 1960s.
Cigányok