Film

The Saragossa Manuscript (1964)

Director: Wojciech Has

Movie review

From Time Out New York

You can call Polish director Wojciech Has’s adaptation of Count Jan Potocki’s novel the cinema’s greatest Russian doll, the ne plus ultra of ’60s art-house head flicks or simply plumb loco; each description fits this mammoth movie like a velvet glove. Regardless, Has’s supernatural tales of bourgeois muckymucks and black-magic women are an experience that will permanently rewire your circuitry. Once a military officer (Cybulski) cracks the spine of the titular book, all attempt at a linear narrative or frontal-lobe logic go out the window. Any given story features characters suddenly recounting bawdy anecdotes that vividly come to life, which digress into family histories that morph into brown-acid fever dreams; viewers may need a compass and a scorecard to keep up.

That The Saragossa Manuscript’s surreal, stream-of-consciousness style resonated with Haight-Ashbury luminaries like Jerry Garcia isn’t surprising. Anyone who thinks that a noggin full of hallucinogens is necessary to appreciate the film, however, is off the mark. The director’s eye for baroque black-and-white imagery puts him behind only Bava and Welles, while the film’s sharp social satire gives heft to its ambition. The jabs at a soul-sick Europe bring the heavy; the rest provides a more-than-ample amount of the far-out.