The Saragossa Manuscript, directed by Wojciech Has: BFI Southbank
Contemporary Films/Mr. Bongo Films
What an extraordinary film! I was dragged along to this by my friend Amanda, who has a taste for strangeness in films - she was the one who persuaded me to go to the Smoking Cabinet last week. But this Polish marathon from 1965 outweirded any of those burlesque films by some margin. I didn't know what to expect, but what I got was three hours of winding, disgressing, meandering, ludicrous storytelling.
It begins in the middle of the Napoleonic wars, with a soldier finding an old book and becoming engrossed in it, so much so that he doesn't care when the enemy come to arrest him. But soon their captain is reading over his shoulder and is drawn in by the book, too. And the adventure begins. The book tells of Alfons (or Alfonso) van Worden, a Walloon Guard trying to find the quickest way to Madrid through the Sierra Morena. One night he stays at a strange inn, where through a secret passage he finds his way into a secret chamber in which are two young sisters, Moorish princesses who welcome in in the most unusual way. They've never seen a man in their lives, they say: he is the first. And they've lured him there deliberately, to marry them and carry on their line. All manner of delights await him, they tell him as they fall on him with kisses (at this moment I must admit to have thought of a similar scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) but first he must become a Muslim. This he seems to assent to; but a moment later he wakes, in the full glare of the sun, in the shadow of a gallows from which hang two men.
If I tried to summarise the rest of the story, this website would crash. But suffice it to say that his story repeats and folds back on itself, taking in other stories along the way as van Worden is told astonishing tales by Pancheco and Avedoro, whose tales were in turn told to him, as frame after frame of narration opens out like windows in a browser, or Russian dolls; at one point, a story told by one character collides with another told by someone else, punchlining both stories at once. The Spanish inquisition make an appearance, too, unexpectedly enough. So much for the plot. The film is based on a novel by Jan Potowski, written almost two hundred years ago, and the always digressing, picaresque road story nature reminded me of Fielding's English novels of half a century earlier, and of course of Don Quixote, a book Potowski must have had in mind and with which comparisons are inevitable.
Well, the film is great fun. But it also looks great, the black and white cinematography somehow pitching it further back than 1965 - it looks like a film from the forties, somehow - and it has the most extraordinary, building atmosphere. An esoteric atmosphere, I feel compelled to say. Day seems to become night, the past seems indefinite and place uncertain, goodness seems indistinguishable from innocence and an odd vague menace seems to seep into human commerce. In time, and especially during the tales involving the insistent, controlling presence of Busqueras, the atmosphere is almost suffocating. I thought once or twice of my failed attempts to read Huysmans's A Rebours, a quite different story but somehow generating a similar closed in, oppressive, decadent feeling. I didn't hear the Penderecki score (I'd like too, though: that'll be an excuse to see the film again), but a live electronic, mechanical and voice accompaniment by the Recording Angel Ensemble , whose backing made the most of the strange, haunted atmosphere.
Apparently Martin Scorsese has said this is one of his favourite films. I don't know about that, but it's certainly a film I'll remember. I can see why it's a cult.
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