Wojciech Jerzy Has is an anomaly among post-WWII Polish filmmakers. One of the so-called “Polish School” of filmmakers whose careers began in the 1950s, his work is distinctive for its high aesthetic values and yet lacks the engagement with Polish national political themes and issues that characterized the work of contemporaries like Andrzej Wajda, as well as the younger filmmakers who would subsequently become known for the 1970s Cinema of Moral Concern. At the same time, despite sharing a surrealist inflected aesthetics with younger filmmakers like Roman Polański, Jerzy Skolimowski, Walerian Borowczyk and others, Has's work never resulted in departure from Poland and a subsequent career in exile. Perhaps for this reason, Has remains one of the most critically neglected filmmakers in both Polish and world film criticism and scholarship, despite the cult success and recent circulation of two of his films, namely Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie (The Saragossa Manuscript, 1965) and Sanatorium pod Klepsydra (The Hourglass Sanatorium, 1973), which have had both recent DVD releases and cinematic revivals worldwide.

It is therefore welcome to see this volume in English by Annette Insdorf dedicated to his work. If one might have been anticipating a full critical assessment of his work in the context of Polish and world cinema, however, this is not what this slim volume sets out to provide. Essentially, it consists of a set of readings of his fourteen feature films in chronological order, followed by an epilogue on Has's pedagogical role in the Łódź Film School, and an appendix on his early short films. There is only a brief and largely anecdotal introduction, no conclusion and if there is an argument to be found in the book, it is only that, following the comments of a range of other critics, academics, and filmmakers that “Wojciech Has's career is ripe for rediscovery” (6). As she points out, the visual style of his films ranges from minimalist psychological portraits to works on a grand and epic scale and, perhaps more significantly, they are almost all based on literary adaptations, often of apparently unadaptable modernist works of literature. Yet there are discernible thematic tendencies across his body of work of psychological journeys across complex material and psychic landscapes. While it would be helpful to engage with the specific nature of Has's authorship more fully, what Insdorf does provide is a navigation across these different journeys in the chapters following the introduction, beginning with Has's first feature film, Petła (The Noose, 1957).

It is unusual to read a contemporary scholarly book on cinema that spends as much time on plot descriptions as Insdorf's book does, but in terms of his lesser-known later films this is indeed necessary, given the difficulties that remain for the reader to actually see the films; unfortunately in the case of some films the chapters go little beyond recounting key narrative events and dialogue, rather than doing any fresh analysis. In the better chapters of the book, however, Insdorf combines descriptions of the films with key analysis of their visual style, pointing in The Noose, for example to a repetition of circular motifs indicating the lack of any escape for the doomed suicidal protagonist, as well as other key aspects of the mise-en-scène including lighting and camera movements that reinforce this fatal foreshadowing. Insdorf also does a good job of contextualizing the film in relation to both critical assessments and other filmmakers, as well as engaging with the writing and career of Marek Hłasko, who wrote the story that the film is based on.

Other chapters follow a similar pattern—detailed descriptions both of narrative and (audio)visual style, followed by engagements with the literary sources of the films, and critical evaluations of them. In cases like The Saragossa Manuscript, there is a relatively rich field of interpretations to draw on, such as the film's complex relations with orientalism, Judaism, and Islam, as well as the issue of what it might have to say, if anything, about contemporary Poland in the 1960s. But here, as elsewhere, it is not always clear what Insdorf adds to these pre-existing accounts. Perhaps two things stand out, however; a formal interest in the repetition of a circular or perhaps helix-like structure in Has's work; the idea of a kind of labyrinth in which protagonists in very different narrative worlds are caught; and an emphasis on the importance of Judaism for Has, which not only inflect and orient the readings of key films, such as this one and The Hourglass Sanatorium, but also her more biographical engagements with Has's career. In the chapter on the latter film, Insdorf mentions rumors that Has himself had Jewish ancestry that her own research tends to disprove, yet also notes the considerable interest in Judaism, Jewish writers, and the Kabbalah throughout Has's work: “these records make it all the more intriguing that Has was so deeply and consistently drawn to Judaism” (80).

Despite its largely self-imposed limitations to brief textual engagements with Has's work, this book is a valuable contribution not only to Polish cinema studies but studies of world cinema more generally, and hopefully will serve as an impetus for other critics and scholars to add to and enrich this engagement with an unjustly neglected filmmaker.