Has made his debut with
Harmony (
Harmonia, 1948), a medium-length feature, and began making full-length feature films in 1957. In 1974, he was appointed as professor in the directing department at the National Film School in Łódź. Throughout his long and prolific career, he directed such notable films as
The Saragossa Manuscript,
The Doll and
The Hourglass Sanatorium (also known as
The Sandglass). Early on in his career, Has gained a reputation as an individualist who avoided political overtones in his art. He produced his most important films throughout the period when the
Polish Film School was at its most prominent; however, his work possessed its own stylistic feeling that was independent of the overt political themes that dominated the prevailing Polish School. In practically all of his films, Has sought to create hermetic environments, in which the problems and storylines of his protagonists were always of secondary importance to the particular world he had created, characterized by an accumulation of random objects that formed a unique visual universe. "If Wojciech Has had become a painter, he would surely have been a
Surrealist," wrote the Polish critic
Aleksander Jackiewicz. "He would have redrawn antique objects with all their real accoutrements and juxtaposed them in unexpected ways." Has's oeuvre is commonly associated with Surrealist painting in Polish criticism. This is reinforced by the director's dream poetic and his use of objects, which are also characteristic of many canvasses by the Surrealists. Has also created a number of intimate psychological dramas during his career, such as
How to Be Loved and
Farewells, focusing on damaged individuals who have difficulty settling into life. In his work, he was fascinated by outsiders and people incapable of finding their place in reality. Two themes remain evident in Has's output: one being his cinema of psychological analysis, the other his films of visionary form, in which he most often used the motif of a journey. Polish writer
Stanisław Lem, generally harshly critical of Polish cinema, singled out Has (his films
The Saragossa Manuscript and
How to Be Loved) and even talked with him about filming Lem's
Star Diaries. ==Later life==