Manuscript from Saragossa

(This post is part of a much longer one on Dark Romanticism that I will finish ONE OF THESE DAYS.)

Wojciech Has’ Saragossa Manuscript (1965) is easily on my top ten all-time favorite movies.

Jerry Garcia instigated the restoration of the movie through the Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley. It took them two years to find a complete copy, and Jerry died just a few days before they could inspect it. Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola took up the project, funded it, and saw it through to completion, dedicating the restoration to Garcia.

The movie is a collection of vignettes that loop back on themselves and involve all manner of supernatural, demonic, erotic, Surrealism. The manuscript tells the ostensible life-story of the grandfather of a man seen only briefly at the beginning. By the end of the movie, the final loop-back drives the protagonist (his grandfather?) mad; on the other hand, maybe it just sets in motion the next loop. (This ending was created by Has who has taken Potocki’s book and turned it into a modern, Surrealist masterpiece.)

In Alan Trist’s (head of Ice Nine Publishing, the Greatful Dead’s publishing arm) memoir on Jerry Garica and The Saragossa Manuscript, he notes that Garcia spoke throughout his life of the The Saragossa Manuscript as a favorite movie, and influence.

Scenes like where the guy keeps moving his bed around so that death cannot stand at the foot of it, and dialog like:
– “Captain, the enemy is surrounding us. What shall I do? Close the door fool, it’s drafty. Can’t you see I’m admiring these drawings?” and;
– “Woe to him in his pernicious obduracy refuses to confess his sins …” and;
– “I understand your mind is rebelling against improbable phenomena …”

“Jerry couldn’t get enough of such a take on life. It held some pivotal meaning for him, perhaps its tone and attitude in the face of the dramatic absurdities of life. […] as a work of art its [the movie] texture and structure informed him in ways recognizable in his music. The movement of the film is like the mellifulent line of his guitar playing, always seeking the opening of new doors. Certain modes of Krzysztoí Penderecki’s [musical score] in the most dreamlike visual sequences are identical in feeling and arrangement with the musical “space” to which Jerry always returned with the Grateful Dead.”

(Adapted from DVD liner notes of the Cowboy Pictures release of The Saragossa Manuscript.)

There are fairly extensive liner notes in this release of the DVD that attempt to unravel the story. I do not suggest reading them first – just immerse yourself in the movie and enjoy its surrealistic impact. Then ,if you are so motivated, go back to the plot deconstruction in the liner notes.

By the way, from Martin Scorese’s point of view, this film is part of his ” masterpieces of Polish cinema” project. (See http://www.mspresents.com/ and http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/16/martin-scorsese-passion-polish-cinema )

Jan Potocki was an 18th c. Polish count, polymath, and adventurer, and dark romantic (he made a silver bullet from melted down household items, had it blessed by a priest and then committed suicide by shooting himself in the head using the bullet). Potocki ‘s book Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie (The manuscript found in Srargossa) is the basis of movie The Saragossa Manuscript, a dark romantic, Surrealist movie by the Polish director Wojciech. This movie has influenced Luis Buñuel, Jerry Garcia, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Neil Gaiman.

As the movie opens, there is a war in progress and an officer of one side enters a building to capture an officer of the other side. However, the two become so interested in a old book that is in the building that they forget the war and start going through the book.

His grandfather, a Captain, is on some sort of a quest.

At that time the mentioned area was populated with robbers and gypsies, of whom it was said would eat the corpses of killed wanderers.

Here the movie jumps into the scene in the book …. (The story is told from the point-of-view of his grandfather as a young officer.)

Their destination is an Inn that shows up several times in the loops of the story.

But he is not really prepared for the worst ….

Toward the end of the movie, after a mysterious dinner where the Captain is fed a potion, he sees his double leaving with the two foreign (Islamic / Moorish) beauties that he has met several times (and had an orgy with) in earlier “loops” in the story.

At the end of the movie, he is again / still / for the (altered) first time trying to make the mountain crossing … This time armed with the manuscript thinking that he can make sense of what is going on …