The Saragossa Manuscript

Dir: Wojciech Jerzy Has

1965

*****

When Luis Buñuel, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola (among many top directors) suggest the same film is their favorite, then you really have to sit up and take notice. Wojciech Has’s 1965 classic The Saragossa Manuscript was loved by Greatful Dead front-man Jerry Garcia so much, that that he purchased a print and donated it to Pacific Film Archive, stipulating only that he could screen it there any time he liked. Based on the 1815 novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki, the story collects intertwining stories, all of them set in whole or in part in Spain, with a large and colorful cast of Romani, thieves, inquisitors, a cabbalist, a geometer, the cabbalist's beautiful sister, two Moorish princesses (Emina and Zubeida) and others that the brave, perhaps foolhardy, Walloon Guard Alphonse van Worden meets, imagines or reads about in the Sierra Morena mountains of 18th-century Spain while en route to Madrid. Recounted to the narrator over the course of sixty-six days, the film's stories quickly overshadow van Worden's frame story. The bulk of the stories revolve around the Gypsy chief Avadoro, whose story becomes a frame story itself. Eventually the narrative focus moves again toward van Worden's frame story and a conspiracy involving an underground - or perhaps entirely hallucinated - Muslim society, revealing the connections and correspondences between the hundred or so stories told over the film's sixty-six days. The stories cover a wide range of genres and subjects, including the gothic, the picaresque, the erotic, the historical, the moral and the philosophic; and as a whole, the film reflects Potocki's far-ranging interests, especially his deep fascination with secret societies, the supernatural and oriental cultures. The film's stories-within-stories sometimes reach several levels of depth, and characters and themes - a few prominent themes being honor, disguise, metamorphosis and conspiracy - recur and change shape throughout. Because of its rich and varied interlocking structure, the story echoes favorable comparison to many celebrated literary antecedents such as the ancient BCE Jatakas and Panchatantra as well as the medieval Arabian Nights and Decameron. The film begins beautifully in a deserted house during the Napoleonic Wars. Two officers from opposing sides find a manuscript, which tells the tale of the Spanish officer's grandfather, Alphonso van Worden. Van Worden traveled in the region many years before, being plagued by evil spirits, and meeting such figures as a Qabalist, a sultan and a gypsy, who tell him further stories, and so the story begins. It’s a fantasy heaped in history but with a dream-like surrealism about it. It’s no surprising that the kids of the 1960s were into, as it can be quite trippy at times. It has a dizzying beauty to it that makes you question every aspect of what you are actually watching, like Alejandro Jodorowsky directing an adaptation of a M. C. Escher picture. I mention Jodorowsky and Escher – not just because of their methods of surrealism and repetition, but because of their broad uses of humour. The Saragossa Manuscript is a broad comedy, by the hundredth time the story begins again, the audience knows its part of a subtle joke. It’s a sprawling epic with smaller interlocking mini-narratives, something of a contradiction that somehow works perfectly. It plays on itself brilliantly, it’s aware of its conceit and playful absurdity and it amplifies this more and more as the film goes and to great effect. The direction is superb and the film is always rich in it visuals. The editing too is superb. Zbigniew Cybulski is brilliant as Alfonse Van Worden and he carries much of the film on his shoulders, and it’s probably the only time you’ll ever see the actor without his trademark dark sunglasses. It’s a fascinating surrealist epic that has always been a cult favorite and has enjoyed waves of populism throughout the decades. I would say it is one of the best Polish films ever made which is saying something, as the Polish makes superb films, many that I would consider classics. Like I said though, if the favorite film of Luis Buñuel, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Jerry Garcia sounds good to you, you will not be disappointed.