Cosponsored by The Consulate General of Poland, Los Angeles; The Polish Arts and Culture Foundation, San Francisco; and Film Polski. Wojciech Jerzy Has, born in 1925, is one of the founders of the postwar Polish School of cinema, yet he remains a maverick artist who has consistently gone his own way. There is no school of filmmaking that encompasses such baroque works as The Saragossa Manuscript, based on an eighteenth-century literary text; and the surreal The Sandglass, an adaptation of the writings of the doomed Jewish writer Bruno Schulz. What links these works, apart from their cult status, is the director's own pleasure in the text and the adept way he translates this to the pleasures of the screen. During October, PFA audiences can enjoy not only our first retrospective of Wojciech J. Has, featuring eleven of his over fourteen films, but a visit from the eminent Polish film director himself. He will introduce the newly restored director's cut of Saragossa Manuscript on October 2, and on October 3, two of his early works. From his debut feature in 1957, Has's films were distinguished by an odyssey motif, in which the characters' journey of self discovery takes them both forward and back, in terms of emotional time. Whether working on an epic scale, as in The Saragossa Manuscript, The Doll, or The Fabulous Journey of Balthazar Kober; or in intimate dramas such as The Noose, Farewells, and How to Be Loved, Has's works are permeated by a special approach to history, and the hopes and longings attendant on it-not the regret typical of the Polish School, but rather a nostalgia, as critic Derek Elley has noted, "for the mysteries of the passage of time itself." We especially thank Mr. Wojciech Has; Mr. Pawel Potoroczyn, Consul for Cultural Affairs, Polish Consulate, L.A.; Mr. Tadeusz Scibor-Rylski, Vice-Minister of Culture, Poland; Mrs. Iwona Lukijaniuk, Deputy Director, Film Polski; Mrs. Koukou Chanska, Jeck Film; Mrs. Wanda Tomczykowska, Founder and President, The Polish Arts and Culture Foundation; and Mr. Richard Peña, The Film Society of Lincoln Center, N.Y., for their generous support and assistance. All prints are courtesy Film Polski with the exception of The Saragossa Manuscript, which is courtesy Jeck Film. Thursday October 2, 1997Newly Restored, Director's Cut: