Cast

Jan Nowicki, Tadeusz Kondrat, Irena Orska, Halina Kowalska, Gustaw Holoubek, Mieczysław Voit, Bożena Adamek, Ludwik Benoit, Henryk Boukołowski, Seweryn Dalecki, Julian Jabczyński, Jerzy Przybylski, Wiktor Sadecki, Janina Sokołowska, Wojciech Standełło, Tadeusz Schmidt, Szymon Szurmiej, Jan Szurmiej, Michał Szwejlich, Paweł Unrug, Filip Zylber

awards

IFF Cannes 1973 - Jury Prize, IFF Triest 1974 - Golden Asteroid Prize, PFF Gdańsk 1974 - Best Set Design

Film description

Certainly, the most important work in the artistic output of Wojciech Has is the adaptation of prose by Bruno Schulz. Has’s adaptation is not illustrative, but it attempts to expose those aspects of Schulz’s prose which are the most important for the director himself: the motives of passing, disease and death. Only distant echoes of some stories from The Street of Crocodiles can be found in the film. Allusions to Spring or Shops are present in the film as memories which haunt Józef during his stay in the sanatorium.The shift in time by an interval, a hallmark of this space, is also a signal for the film’s audience. A meaningful signal, which explains all the surreal deformations of time and space in the film. The composition is framed by scenes of Józef travelling by train. At the beginning, the journey is a prefiguration of the palimpsest-like structure of the film’s mixture of childhood times of play and the vigil awaiting the death of the father and his world. In the final scenes it marks the character’s accepting of the role of conductor, boatman, symbolising in turn a guide through the land of shadows, the land of the dead. Thus, Has visualises Schulz’s descent to the roots, to the place where all stories are born, universal in their repetition.

Iwona Grodź

Special screening of the digital reconstruction of the film in collaboration with Kino RP