The Saragossa Manuscript Review & Ratings

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The Saragossa Manuscript Review

I adore this film. It is made by a Polish director with Polish actors based on a Polish novel but the look of the film is decidedly Spanish surrealism. Its a film best watched late at night when one is most receptive to surrealisms night time agenda which speaks to and from the subconscious illogic of dreams. Each storyline vanishes into another storyline until characters from separate storylines begin to appear together as the various storylines wind around each other like snakes round the limb of a tree--an oft repeated visual in the film. The opening sequence follows a soldier during the Napoleanic Wars as he takes refuge in a house where he finds the Saragossa Manuscript full of surreal drawings and stories. This book fascinates its reader so much the deafening sounds of the surrounding battle disappear as he begins to read...A Spanish Count with two escorts rides through deserted foothills towards a mysterious Inn. All around the Count are clues, pieces of stories that will later be told. He leaves his two escorts beside a gallows where two men hang dead and rides to the Inn. The Inn is built into the face of a cliff and within its recesses is a cave to rival Ali Babas. In the cave are two lovely Muslim sisters who seduce the Count and feed him wine from a skull...the textual games get more and more complicated. Each new character met tells his tale to the Count and though the Counts goal is to return home he is sidetracked time and again by ever more elaborate tales and locations. The characters met are all archetypal Spaniards and all fabulists. They are intoxicating characters all of them and intoxicating storytellers. It is an absolute pleasure to surrender to the heady spell of being told tale after tale by such characters. Its a world one never wants to leave--sophisticated and complex and mysterious, sometimes funny, sometimes haunting. If you already like Polish cinema you will recognize all of its stars from the 1960's here including Zbigniew Cybulski(Ashes and Diamonds)who plays the Count. And if you like surrealism and classic as well as modern literature you will thoroughly enjoy the way this story blends the classic and the ultra modern and the way it is illustrated like a book with the most amazing etchings and engravings. A real book and art and film lovers masterpiece.

The Saragossa Manuscript Overview

During Napoleon's invasion of Spain, two soldiers discover a strange manuscript at an Inn. The book chronicles the adventures of Alfonso van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski - Ashes and Diamonds). Alfonso's passage through the dangerous Sierra Morena Mountains is repeatedly interrupted by seemingly random encounters with an assortment of larger than life figures. Tunisian princesses inform Alfonso that he is their cousin and their betrothed; an occult scholar ensnares Alfonso with confounding stories about feuds between Merchants and hardships faced by gypsies. And of course, Alfonso never did expect the Spanish Inquisition. Adapted from explorer Jan Potocki's magnum opus, Wojciech Has' The Saragossa Manuscript is a major cult film of the 1960s. Its admirers include film-makers Luis Buñuel and David Lynch as well as musician Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead. Its approach to storytelling, admiringly described by comics artist Neil Gaiman as 'a labyrinth inside a maze', features stories within stories; alternatively frightening and comical in its mind-bending exploration of human nature.

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