FilmFlaneur Influenced perhaps by such works as The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, and The Arabian Nights, 'The Manuscript Found In Saragossa' is seen as one of the monuments of 19th century European literary culture. In recent years arguably it has influenced such writers as John Barth and Robert Irwin (The Arabian Nightmare for instance). A baroque work, full of stories, of stories within stories, and again stories within stories within stories, featuring gypsies, Moors, scientists, occultists, lesbian princesses, the spirits of hanged men, the Wandering Jew and etc, with characters interchanging and reappearing in different guises, Potocki's book was never going to be an easy translation to screen.The task was taken up in 1965 by director Wojciech Has and writer Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, and the results in his original cut ran to over three hours. Seen today, and belatedly issued in the UK, The Saragossa Manuscript is a remarkable discovery, one that any serious cinephile should experience at least once.The story concerns one Alphonse von Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski - an actor more familiar to some perhaps from Wadja's films like Ashes And Diamonds) and his attempts to travel through the Sierra Morena to Madrid in the 18th century: a milieu redolent, at first, of the dashing bawdry of Tom Jones but which soon blazes a complex metaphysical path of its own. His story is found by a Belgian officer in the embattled Spanish town of Saragossa, in the form of a manuscript with alluring pictures, left in an abandoned house. Von Worden, it turns out was this discoverer's grandfather, it's his thwarted attempts at making progress, and the confusing diversions which interrupt the way, as well as their final effects upon him, that make up the protracted story which follows.The Saragossa Manuscript falls into to two parts, set over five days, both of which include von Worden (the second half less so) who is frequently just as disorientated as the viewer as the narrative unfolds. The first part centres largely around a haunted inn, where von Worden is seduced by a pair of alluring Moorish princesses, confronted by the demonic ghosts of hanged men, lectured by a hermit and his Igor-like assistant, captured outside by the Inquisition and so on... usually incidents concluding with our unlucky hero disappointed, left to awake next morning chastened but still unlearned at the foot of the gallows.One of the most interesting things about the film is that, although days are shown passing in regular fashion, von Worden's experiences blur and conflate time into one disorientating experience, so that the passing of hours eventually has no meaning. Instead the audience is confronted with a circular narrative and narratives therein, unfolding like a series of repeatedly opened Russian dolls. How transient life and ambition can be we realise; and how little we really understand about the world we are in, ultimately presented here as a mirror of deception, rather than a veil of truth.Action in the slightly longer part two settles down a suspiciously cabalistic manor and a vaguely Faustian sanctum, which shortly accommodates story telling gypsies, perhaps those after all to whom the incompetent Inquisition seen earlier ought be better directed. The events told here are more related to love and honour than before, being largely recollections of events in Madrid, but which reach new convolutions as each new character in a yarn has a further account to add to the already swelling narrative flow. Clearly to be seen in the light of the themes of sic transit gloria of the first part, the semi-farcical love trysts of part two seem less weighty and morally significant, although by the end of the film its clear that the effects upon the individual of a final connectiveness cannot be avoided.As suggested above, The Saragossa Manuscript suggests a lot and at length about what's real and which is a dream, and then of taking life as a necessary mixture of both. The transience of human concerns, and an ultimate, underlying interconnnectedness calls into account the foundations of human reason. Whether or not such topics are given justice, even in the full three hours of screen time, and in a narrative some have seen as more confusing than deeply profound is another matter. As some critics have noticed, there's a sardonic air to Has' movie which detracts from the seriousness of it all, and which allows the film's creators a detachment from their subject matter.Such a wholly modern interjection of tone is distinct from the original. Cybulski's hero is a man who rarely, if ever, learns the lessons he is so grievously taught, even while they are repeated to him in different ways. This while the semi-farcical, if complicated, love interests of the second part generally reflect a bawdy ignorance of greater matters, rather than insisting upon their inevitable presence. (Interestingly, having said that, this adaptation actually finishes on a darker note than the novel, where von Worden is rewarded at the end, presumably having been successfully initiated into life's mysteries).But one can see why the film continues to attract admirers; shot in widescreen black and white, frequently making use of a memorably stone-broken, skull-littered, undulating landscape (the uncertain geographies of which echo the manifest internal confusions of von Worden) with bleached bone-coloured rocks, claustrophobic inns and the litter of the charnel house, the first half in particular is especially striking. The director also favours slow tracking movements through his cluttered landscapes. Perhaps these suggest the journey of an objective observer, who eventually hopes to cut through complexity to a revelation, just as the camera crawls through visual confusion to find its final, explicable, subject.

kill_me_killroy This could have been one of the all time great films, and maybe the best adaptation ever, but for me it failed, and because the idea of the book would work so well in film its failure, for me, makes it even more disappointing. For the book was not perfect, though great, the book suffered from using a technique which does not hold very well with the written word, the coarse editing and stop start endless descriptions of time and place disrupt any sense of poetry/flow and thus dull its overall purpose, making it very clinical in tone. However, these techniques, which fail with words, are exactly what make films flow and turn them into poetry, and this film flowed beautifully and effortlessly between scenes, leaving the core of the story unblemished and indeed enhanced by the sudden changes. Where as the book was heavy this film was light. But unfortunately instead of continuing the string of stories into a deep maze (like the book) it merely took a handful of the best bits, reworked the narrative and completely changed the ending, leaving a very weak and simple film behind (completely unlike the book).If this had the guts to be several hours longer, take a lot more of the book and follow its narrative then it would of completely solved the flaws of the book and out done it in every respect. So on the one hand you have a book which technically fails but in ambition succeeds and on the other hand a film which technically could of succeeded but fails in ambition. This book, for me, was a film before film, but its film version lacked guts: jan potocki asked his readers to devote many evenings to reading his book, unfortunately the makers of this film didn't have the confidence to demand more than a few hours from its viewers. Such a shame.on a side note the score is excellent, and very humorous, but like the film, and maybe because of the film, wasn't taken to any great depths. i would of loved to of seen the Velasquez story followed and heard Penderecki's scoring to the Saraband scene 'forget science and reason all you need do my son is learn to dance the Saraband'. ohwell.

rserrano Perhaps more than any other film, Saragossa Manuscript begs for multiple viewings. A fascinating way to watch this movie is to simply see it as space unfolding. At the highest level the structure is a set of interconnected stories which loop back on one another. Each story is a separate, nested world with a narrator who serves as a portal. This is not unlike current theories in physics about the multiverse, with separate worlds that wormhole into and out of one another, connected by black holes.Also, the frame by frame construction of the film is deeply spacial. The setting of the Sierra Morena seems to have not a single flat surface and the camera is often askew to accentuate this. Elaborately constructed sets are filled with boundaries and connections. Characters interact thru barred windows and seem to constantly flow into and out of doorways and windows. There are many long narrow corridors and alley ways. The camera captures ascending and descending stairways and shots are wide angle to create a feeling of great depth. Often action is focused on a figure in the foreground while another character secretly slips into or out of the room thru a doorway in some distant corner.This unsettling and masterful manipulation of space is in large part what propel the story so convincingly, since the many boundaries and connections determine which relationships are consummated and which things remain forever out of reach.

birck 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.