Having fought during the Napoleonic Wars, an officer takes refuge in a destroyed house. While there he finds a manuscript filled with images. One that is striking is that of two men hanging. Accompanying this are pictures of two women in bed, odd angles and strange signs. All beset by text in another language. The war he was engaged in passes him by and as an enemy officer appears to arrest him, he cant escape the book. So now both are left stranded in the building. Neither can stop reading. When the officer tells him that the story related in the work is that of his own relative, Alfonso van Worden, it bemuses him. Adventures, dreams, desires and strange stories abound. These relate to the same places and odd history. They also relate to ghosts, ghouls, death, hauntings and the very darkest of human actions.
Lodz located in the centre of Poland is interesting to me for two reasons. The first is that its name translates to mean ‘boat’. The second is that it was the hub for Poland’s greatest film school, The National Film School. Names like Roman Polanski, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieślowski and Zbigniew Rybczyński are but a few of the greats that walked through its hallowed doors. The director of The Saragossa Manuscript, Wojciech Has also traversed this place and took for his first inspiration a famous novel by a Polish count Jan Potocki. My former film school friend was astonished that I had read the work, as he said everyone in Poland did for school, I did for fun. This work is about as significant a piece as could be recorded for the nation and this would have been a gargantuan task to translate to the screen. Has achieves this feat with sublime use of the surreal, the supernatural and darkly comic. Think Terry Gilliam but with a clear European pallet. Performances are unbalanced intentionally to destabilise the viewer. Narrators are untrustworthy and unpredictable. What we see and hear are not always real. This is only one side of the playfulness. He also has the film shot in beautiful black and white (The Blu Ray does this justice and is a marvel to watch!). Great cinematography allows for the eye to capture detail and drink in the visual hues. Framing becomes intrinsic to the defining of the films force due to this, its space.
I love the use of the cave as an exotic world. It underlines the abstract and unbalanced nature of transition from place to place within the film. The use of the hanging men as a motif is absurdly funny and is so well framed and executed as to be worthy of homage (where is my camera!). When you see a film like this it makes you wonder why it is not easier to see such great things. This is truly worth time and contemplation. It also brings to the fore a question I have on the Auteur theory. The greatest portion of the whole work is the director. It seems that the tones and themes of the original text have worked in this. Intertextuality has been allowed to flow but also has been given a flare. The work has become anew thing from an older source. So should he alone be given this credit?
Now there are issues. The print is nice but suffers from white out in places. This is put simply, the white balance is of. Another problem is that some of the final scenes seem to have light bleed.
There are no extras….
If you love film, surreal or otherwise…. you know what to do…
