![]() There, in the middle of the night, he is seduced by a pair of man-hungry Moorish sisters (Iga Cembrzynska, Joanna Jedryka) who claim he is their cousin through his mother, and who both offer to marry him if he will convert to their Muslim faith. After a brief (and soon forgotten) narrative frame in which a Napoleonic officer and his captor become enthralled by a manuscript they discover in the middle of a Spanish war-zone, we are transported into the middle of a story said to be about the grandfather of one of the two readers.īound for Madrid, Alfonse van Worden seeks a route through Sierra Morena, despite warnings that the area is haunted, and stops for a rest at the deserted Venta Quemada inn. Indeed, getting lost is what The Saragossa Manuscript is all about. It goes without saying that this wonderful new edition, though some 60 minutes longer, is hardly clearer – rather it offers the viewer an even larger and more complex labyrinth of stories in which to become lost. When Garcia died in 1995, none other than Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola stepped in to complete the project, and the restored film had its premiere in 1997. Its more outspoken champions have included the surrealist filmmakers Luis Buñuel and David Lynch, as well as rock star Jerry Garcia. So great was Garcia’s love for the film that he began to finance its full restoration in the Nineties, including the reinstatement of an hour of extra material that had been mercilessly cut from the only version of the film previously available to English-language viewers. ![]() For here was a film so cosmically all-encompassing, so utterly confounding, so mystical and mental, that it could induce a trip-like state in even the most sober-minded of cinemagoers. No wonder, then, that Wojciech Has’ film, adapted from Count Jan Potocki’s fabulistic 1813 novel, would become such a cult favourite amongst the drug-addled hipsters of the 1960s. The viewer may not be as foolish as van Worden, but anyone who tries to discern a unifying pattern in the film’s dizzying narrative will find themselves, too, courting madness. In fact, as Alfonse van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski) – Captain of the Walloon Guard and hero of The Saragossa Manuscript – tries to get his head round the perplexing chain of nested narratives offered as instructive entertainment by the Gypsy king Avadoro (Leon Niemczyk), he hardly comes close to a full account of what he has just heard or how he himself fits into it. “Frasquita told her story to Busqueros, he told it to Lopez Suarez, who in turn told it to Señor Avadoro.
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