A Slice, a Poke and a Stab of Humour

“Illusion is the first of all pleasures” Oscar Wilde.

The Saragossa Manuscript, a majestic roller-coaster of a movie, is perhaps best described as a tale within a tale. Or in fact several tales within tales within tales. The structure of the film, as well as the book: Count Jan Potocki’s marvellously multilayered masterpiece Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie in Polish translation), is mind-bogglingly complex.

The atypical, even surreal, frame-tale structuring of Jan Potocki’s epic was perfect for the genius of director Wojciech Has. The director’s ability to layer and blend, weave complex dream sequences and blur the boundaries of fact and fantasy make for a sensual, gothic, horrific, surreal, dreamy, comic classic.

The Saragossa Manuscript defies categorisation. It can be alternately described as art-house, fantasy or super-production but none of these labels do it any kind of justice. It is all these things. And more. However, one of the joys of this film, despite its three-hour running time, is its freshness, vitality and, above all, its brilliant humour.

Polish humour is often characterised, by Poles themselves, as oscillating around the sublime and the ridiculous, but more often the ridiculous. We have to bear in mind the fact that when Count Jan Potocki wrote his epic, Poland had gone from being one of the chief European powers of the 17th century to nil. Poland was wiped off the European map in 1795 for 123 years. The Poland of Potocki’s day was a non-existent state subsumed by the Prussian, Austrian and Russian Empires. Poland had, quite literally, gone from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Polish humour reflects (and perhaps even maps) Polish history. The Poland of Wojciech Has was a state which had re-gained independence, fought two World Wars and come out triumphant only to find the victory a hollow one with Poland firmly, yet tragically, within the iron grip of Stalinism. Again, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Although Wojciech Has is without doubt in a league of his own, parallels can be drawn with other Polish directors and films. There are comic, almost farcical, moments in The Saragossa Manuscript that might even be compared to the buffoonery of Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) or the eerie sense of humour that seems to pervade Rosemary’s Baby (1968). The surreal adventures and tales of The Saragossa Manuscript are neither out of place or too engaging for Polish audiences as demonstrated by the later cult status of the surreal black and white comedy Rejs (1970).

The Saragossa Manuscript is most certainly a one-off but its tone, especially its at times odd-ball humour, is very Polish. The humour permeates all aspects of the film. The film even makes light-hearted references to its own Chinese box, yarn-within-yarn, structure. The characters laconically signal the beginning of further stories with “That reminds me of a tale I once heard…” in “here we go again” fashion. In the same vein, one of the characters comments, meta-text-like, on the absurdity of these yarns-within-yarns with a “It’s enough to drive you absolutely crazy”. Although macabre and grotesque at times, The Saragossa Manuscript is never pretentious and enjoys making fun of itself, its characters and even the structure of the film itself.

Wojciech Has combines various types of comic, absurd, experiences within The Saragossa Manuscript. At the beginning of the film the character Alfonse is courted by two sensual Sapphic sirens. Things start to hot up. They explain to Alfonse that they are sisters who have never known the pleasure of a man and have only been intimate with each other. Things are now bubbling and getting very steamy. Alfonse (which by happy coincidence means “Pimp” in Polish) is told by the Princess sisters that he is in fact their distant cousin and must marry them both to provide them with heirs to the Gomelez line. Alfonse is more than happy to do his duty. At this point Wojciech Has whips the carpet from under our frustrated feet and Alfonse awakens to find not the sensual Sapphic sirens but two corpses instead.

In another scene the father of Alfonse is depicted challenging another man to a duel. The absurd politeness of the whole affair reaches its apex when his father is stabbed through the chest and the other man kindly asks Alfonse’ father if he can now have his blade back. “Of course, Señor,” remarks Alfonse’ father. The man removes his blade, cleans it after which Alfonse’ father collapses.

Wojciech Has combines bawdy humour with morbid humour, the erotic with the macabre. Modern audiences may find the sensuality (including nakedness and lesbian overtones) uncontroversial but in ‘60s Poland the outright eroticism of the film would have been extremely risqué. Likewise, the macabre elements (including the scene when a man’s eye is gouged out) would not have gone unnoticed without a stir and a squirm. However, the juxtaposition of the sensual with the grotesque perfectly encapsulates the very Polish “sublime to the ridiculous” sense of humour.

The Saragossa Manuscript is not only a monochromatic masterpiece but is also a comic cult classic which should not be classed as either simply a comedy or a cult film in the stereotypical sense of the word. Has uses both the imagination and illusion as focal points for a cinematographic chef-d’oeuvre which has attracted admirers from all over the world. Universal though it may be, in many aspects the film reflects the very best of Polish culture and Polish humour.

Raf Uzar 2008

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence