![]() Yet while The Saragossa Manuscript is certainly disorienting, it isn't entirely disordered a dream-derived logic binds the strands together. Wojciech Has adapted the story from a novel by eighteenth century explorer and occultist Jan Potocki, and he preserves the book's puzzle format. (One can only speculate on what Jerry made of earlier, unauthorised edits of the film, which dispensed with up to an hour of the full 180 minute run time.) "You meant to say poetry," says his companion, but whether she's suggesting he's mistaken poetry for reality or fantasy for poetry is teasingly ambiguous. "I've lost the feeling of where reality ends and fantasy takes over," Van Worden amiably admits, and there may be those who sympathise with him. Then come the kinkily masked Inquisitors, duels, gypsies, ghosts, cabalists, arguments about magic and poetry and so many other cheerfully obscure digressions that eventually Van Worden himself tries to stop the story to figure out what's going on. This in turns brings Van Worden into contact with two seductive princesses who send him on a series of confounding adventures in order to prove his worth, after which he'll be allowed to marry them both. There he stumbles across a mysterious but hypnotically compelling manuscript which tells the story of his own grandfather. ![]() Opening with a series of Dali-esque illustrations uncannily suggestive of the Dead's own artwork, the film begins with Belgian officer Van Worden (Cybulski) fighting in rural Spain. Whatever else there is to be said about this epic exercise in tripped out storytelling, the film has friends in high places. Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, men who know a thing or two about the scope of visionary cinema, saw the restoration project through to its conclusion in 2001. Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia, a man who knew a thing or two about fractured realities and altered states, offered to pay for its restoration, only to die the day after the wrong version of the film arrived at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive in 1995. Polish director Wojciech Has's arcane curio languished in obscurity for years and has at various points existed in three different versions. There are flashbacks within flashbacks and dreams within dreams until it becomes impossible to trace your footsteps back through the narrative maze and remember how the hell you got there. Sure, it's long, puzzling and just plain wacky:īut what else would you expect from a movie whose most ardent fans included Luis Bunuel and Jerry Garcia? (In Polish, with English subtitles.David Lynch, with a perspicacity conspicuously absent from his own films, described The Saragossa Manuscript as a set of Russian dolls: what begins as one story opens up into another, and then another, and then another. Kryzystof Penderecki's bizarre score just adds to the general aura of weirdness. the tale-within-a-tale structure is ultimately quite dizzying, and involves everything from cabalists to demonic possession and the Spanish Inquisition. And on top of that, everyone Gomelez encounters has a story, and some of their stories involve stories that were told Him, except that he keeps awaking from their visits on the same rocky hillside, under the same makeshift gallows, near the same rotting corpses of a pair of bandit brothers. Ignores warnings not to stay in any deserted inns and therefore encounters all manner of supernatural spirits, notably a pair of seductive Muslim princesses (Iga Cembrzynska, Joanna Jedryka) who insist that he's their long-lost cousin and the man they're both going to marry. It recounts the escapades of an adventurer named Gomelez (Cybulski again) as he tries to navigate some haunted hills en route to Madrid. ![]() ![]() (Zbigniew Cybulski, often called the James Dean of Poland), who takes refuge from battle in an abandoned barn and finds a marvelous book. The framing story involves a Belgian soldier, Capt. There are eight million stories in the naked city, and almost as many folded into this elegant, gorgeous and slyly funny adaptation of the early 19th-century novel by Jan Potocki.
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