The Saragossa Manuscript (1965)

People have loved storytelling since the beginning of time. Stories that captivate us, stories that give us chills, stories that excite us, and stories that make us think are all great, but some stories do all of these such as The Saragossa Manuscript (Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie). The Saragossa Manuscript is quite possibly one of the best Polish films ever made and is one of my favorites. Based on the novel written by Jan Potocki, this classic Polish movie directed by Wojciech Has is not straightforward, but rather resembles a complicated tapestry.During the Napoleonic wars in Spain, two soldiers from opposing sides become fascinated by the same object. A French officer finds a manuscript on the second floor of a tavern, but the town is soon captured by the Spanish. The Spaniard, seeing the importance of the tome, translates it to the Frenchman who is unable to read the book as it is written in Spanish. The book describes the adventures of one of the Spaniard's ancestors, Alfonse Van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski). Humorously, when the Spanish troops tell their commander "we are being surrounded" he only tells them "close the door, you are letting in a draft." Alfonse Van Worden is trying to pass the Sierra Morena Mountains of Spain in the 18th century on his way to Madrid. But his passage is no simple task, as ghosts, gypsies and inquisitors complicate his voyage. On the hillside is an inn that is cared for by people who too afraid to spend the night there themselves. Van Worden disregards the superstitious people, only to be taken to a basement of the inn by a mysterious woman. In the basement, he meets two beautiful Moorish princesses that want him to be their husband, but quickly make him drink from a chalice made from a human skull. He wakes up on the hillside some distance from the inn near two hanging men with many skulls strewn about the ground.When Van Worden wakes up, he makes his best effort to continue to Madrid, but ends up meeting a number of people and is always delayed. The people he meets tell him their story, and the people in the story tell their story also. Like a nesting egg, the movie becomes a story in a story in a story. The stories interlink and overlap, each filling us in with details the others where not aware of. While it nearly resembles a horror with creepy ghosts and ghouls, the story is also amusing and funny with curious tales of exploits and adventures. The Saragossa Manuscript also has en erotic side with gorgeous women at every turn. While parts of the story resemble a horror, the rest is like a romance or even a comedy. The Saragossa Manuscript is a sophisticated film brimming with mystical and occult elements.

Wojciech Has' movie of The Hourglass Sanatorium introduced me to a new world of cinema in which the camera digresses from plot and characterisation to revel in images filled with wonder, horror, strangeness and mystery, that speak about human existence in symbolic instead of literal ways. Since watching it, I've immersed myself in this type of cinema and discovered masters like Jan Svankmajer, the Brothers Quay, and Jean Cocteau, people who bring cinema closer to poetry. So I watched the The Saragossa Manuscript with great anticipation.Based on a Polish novel by Jan Potocki, the movie shares many of the novel's splendours but also many of its flaws. Potocki tried to revive the tradition of Cervantes and Rabelais and The Arabian Nights in making his novel a collection of adventures, of stories that digressed into other stories, more concerned with telling action than description or psychology. Every imaginable genre exists within the covers of the novel, and the ending is unimportant. In fact it's the type of book that, by its nature, couldn't have one.Has has the task of translating the sixty-six days of the novel into a series of days, leaving much out of the story. I'm especially sorry that one of my favourite characters, the Wandering Jew, with his stories about ancient times and meeting Christ, were cut out. So what we're left are the bare bones, the skeleton of the novel. We follow Alfonse van Worden as he travels through Sierra Morena, a sinister deserted place, to Madrid to take up a post as Captain of the Walloon guard. In this place of magic and hanged men and piles of skulls and vultures feeding on carrion, Alfonse meets several people who trade stories: Muslim princesses who want to marry him; a Cabalist and his sister; a Geometer; a Gypsy chief; a possessed man and the priest trying to exorcise him. They're tales about honor and courage, and love stories. Some are eerily similar, like everyone's telling the same story with variations, and slowly we realise something's fishy. In the novel what follows is the ultimate conspiracy, to put hacks like Dan Brown to shame. Alas, the movie cannot indulge in the details of the long novel and tries its best to give a glimpse of the conspiracy that surrounds Alfonse and this cast of strange characters delaying his arrival in Madrid.Although the movie is never as conclusive as the novel, it does share its sense of adventure, since some of the best stories were picked for the movie. So we witness duels, romance, murders, family feuds: the stuff that we no longer find in modern novels.Also Wojciech Has possesses an eye for great visuals, and paints Sierra Morena as a creepy place full of mystery and menace; you never know when the ghosts of hanged men or the inquisition will shows up to kill you. Its cliffs and rocks compete with the opening shots of The Seventh Seal in desolation. And yet he manages to never lose a sense of humor and fun about the movie.Although not as mind-blowing as The Hourglass Sanatorium, I'd say that The Saragossa Manuscript is at least more exciting and watchable. It'll leave the viewer nostalgic for a time when literature was still the proper place of bigger-than-life adventure.

The comments on this film seem evenly distributed between favor and disfavor. At this date, I can't understand why anyone would not like it, but that's me. I first saw it in 1967, while I was in college. I loved it, and went so far as to locate and purchase the book(s) from which it was adapted. And that was before the internet, and Amazon, and Bookfinder. One of the books I didn't manage to get until I got to London. Reading it, I was amazed to realize that the film actually includes remnants of every story in the book(s): when, for example, Alphonso opens a door to find a bewigged scholar interrupted while declaiming "...Then the first skeleton tore out his own arm-bone and began hitting me with it..."-the whole story is there in the book, i.e., what the skeletons were doing there in the first place. The books, Manuscript Found At Saragossa and the New Decameron, are rightly considered Literary Treasures of Poland, along the lines of Notre-Dame á Paris in France, War and Peace in Russia, or Moby-Dick here. It's about stories and storytelling.By the end of the film, to say the least, the viewer has been presented with a convincing picture of sixteenth-century Europe from different angles, and it's safe to say that no other film, before or since, in color or Black-and-white, has done it better.

i have a really low threshold for boredom, and while i saw this on the bigscreen, in a real theatre, i was spellbound. i didnt know what to expect, but it was mesmerising. i didnt try intellectualise it, but it was impossible to pick apart. just see it. put your head into the time period that the story is trying to convey. caveat: i think apocalypse now is an amazing film. redux was great. when i walked out of the theatre after seeing saragossa, i couldnt speak for hours. do yourself a favor and at least give this one a shot. try and see it on the big screen if you can.