“The Codes”

Marcin Maron

Abstract

Maron examines The Codes (1966), one of the most interesting albeit forgotten films by Wojciech J. Has. The film bears a witness to the time in which it was made and at the same time a poem-film which carries a profound and universal message about human (personal, social and national) ties. Has uses the story of the father seeking to discover traces of the son lost during the war to thoroughly diagnose both the moral condition of Poles and nature of post-war reality; its false picture is revised, and he asks questions of the sense of common - war and postwar - experiences and the possibility of uniting them in contemporary context. The film's polyphonic structure - composed of “vision scenes” and passages from Juliusz Słowacki's Anhelli - abounds with symbolic meanings. Therefore, the viewer is forced to interpret the story “hermeneutically”, the interpretation is supposed to allow the viewer to have an insight into the complex truth about people and time; the truth is hidden under the surface of even most tragic facts.