The Saragossa Manuscrip

The Saragossa Manuscrip (1965 – Wokciech Has) is a Polish film adapted from an idiosyncratic narrative of uncertain origin much-beloved by the Surrealists. The totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe were the last refuge of Parisian-style surrealism – apparently, certain things that needed to be said could only be communicated in a format offering the plausible deniability of any subversive intent inherent in Surrealism. The film is very long and, due to its source materials, redundant. A certain Walloon officer, Van Worden, apparently engaged in some squalid war finds himself crossing the barren Sierra Moreno mountains in Spain – the Polish film seems set atop some desolate mountain summit where scattered teeth of limestone poke through the treeless heights. Over and over again, he finds himself conveyed, sometimes willingly other times against his wishes, to a small Inn half-devoured by an overhanging rock cliff. There the man encounters two Moorish princesses who seduce him into a ménage a trois. But just as things become truly interesting, a sleeping potion knocks him out and he awakes under the dangling corpses of two bandits on a gibbet. This happens with dreamlike regularity three or four times in the first half of the three hour film. The second part of the film, which takes place in various Alhambra-like sets and medieval castles, purports to give an explanation, at great length for the uncanny events of the film’s first ninety minutes. This all sounds interesting but, unfortunately, it is not. The film’s actors are stolid and unmemorable. The mise-en-scene is suitably lavish in the few sets employed but, generally, feels impoverished – the movie keeps reverting, as it must, to the same locations. The director has staged many shots in depth – that is, using a tableaux-style that features action occurring in various parts of the receding picture plane; something like the theatrical way that Brueghel organizes his big paintings. But the background action doesn’t really add anything to the events in the foreground and the film’s length, and superfluity, soon enough undercuts its effective elements. Truth to say, the picture is dull and the lengthy second act doesn’t make any sense – a defect that this part of the film shares with the 1815 novel on which it is faithfully based. (The movie features a score by the famous Krysztof Penderecki – mostly dibs and dabs of electronic noise that sound like the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet.)