12/7/2023 0 Comments Saragossa manuscript![]() Although rare is the film which outshines its parental novel, The Saragossa Manuscript did something, meant something significant to the Grateful Dead's late lead guitarist. And one person who eagerly sought out the film when it played in his hometown of San Francisco was Jerry Garcia, who had also read Potocki's book. Believing this length to be unduly taxing upon the American attention span, stateside distributors cut the film by a whopping one-third, although by the mid-Sixties the film had earned a reputation at campus and art film houses. Like the book upon which it is based, Saragossa is long, clocking in at three hours. The quirky filmmaker had the mettle/audacity to translate the chimerical novel to celluloid, and with the help of an extremely talented crew, did so in 1965. One of those who read Manuscrit Trouvé ô Saragosse was Polish filmmaker Wojciech Has, graduate of the Cracow Film Institute and director of The Sandglass (1973). Not bad for a 200-year-old book.Īnd then, like the matryushka with all her many layers, another story opens up. Surprisingly, the book is still in print, with English translations available. In a nutshell, the book deals with the fantastic mental and physical voyage of a soldier traveling through Spain, on the way encountering a mess of spirits, trials, beautiful women, and frights. The tome, written in French and entitled Manuscrit Trouvé à Saragosse, was published between 1797 and the year Potocki died, 1815. Polish blue-blood travel writer and occultist Count Jan Potocki pens his magnum opus, an ambitious multi-dimensional novel about, of all things, a book. This story-of-the-story begins at the dawn of the 19th century in France. But in addition to its influence (direct or indirect) on nearly every subsequent multiple-plot film, what makes The Saragossa Manuscript so compelling is the story behind its journey to the Alamo Drafthouse this Saturday and Sunday - a unique example of art imitating life imitating art. In their ingenious designs, matryushka neatly symbolize the multifarious plot line of The Saragossa Manuscript, one of Poland's best-known films and a cult favorite in America since it was released 35 years ago. Since this largest piece figuratively gives birth to the smaller pieces, in Russian they're called matryushka - mother. The figurines are graduated in size so that each fits into the next larger one, with the largest piece containing all the other smaller ones. What are they? They're dolls, specifically hand-painted figurines that always come in a set. ![]() Originating from Eastern Europe and Western Asia, their general shape resembles a bowling pin. Add to this a uniformly skillful cast (special recognition goes to Slawomir Lindner as the elder Van Worden) and you have a movie that I can't recommend strongly enough.Most people have seen them, but few know their name. In keeping with this shift of emphasis, the adaptation contributes a new ending to the story, which is entirely appropriate it comes from a distinctly twentieth-century sensibility. I think especially of one shot where the tumbled white rocks look just like bleached bones - an effect that wouldn't have worked so well if the movie had been in color. The images of the haunted Sierra Morena are consistently touched with strangeness but not overburdened. The atmosphere that he creates, and the visual style that supports it, are another major asset of the movie. Has, however, strongly emphasized the phantasmagorical elements in the novel. As vividly brought to the screen by Wojcech Has, this Spain is a place that a viewer will want to return to repeatedly. One of the main strengths of the movie is also mainly Potocki's, the creation of a Spain of dreams, full of romance, mystery, lively humor, and eroticism (the novel found difficulty in being published originally, and the author was criticised for his libertinism). ![]() This theme is the contribution of the novelist Jan Potocki, a Pole living in France when he wrote "The Manuscript Found in Saragossa" at the beginning of the 19th century. The stories of a crowd of distinctive characters intermesh into a unity that is not obvious at first, but slowly grows clearer - one of the ideas that can be gathered from the movie is precisely that of the interdependence of people who would seem to have little in common, whether Christian, Jew or Moslem. Its unusually long running time does not get tiring because it is so full of variety and unfailing inventiveness. "The Saragossa Manuscript" is a brilliant work, by turns (or simultaneously) mysteriously spooky and wildly funny.
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