Surrealism in the shade of grey?

“If Wojciech Has had become a painter, he would surely have been a Surrealist. ” (Alexander Jankiewicz)

Surrealism in the cinema usually comes in two distinctive shades: white or black or in other words bright or dark. Its dark side is represented by such directors as Polanski, Lynch, and Cronenberg. Explorers of the dark side of human psyche, sexuality, and generally our subconscious drives, create nightmarish, disintegrated worlds that fall into pieces as their protagonists’ psyche crumbles in Repulsion, Spider, or the recent Inland Empire.

At the other end of the spectrum are film directors who place familiar objects in unexpected places, whose heroes’ nightmares are often an Idiot’s Guide to Freud, who in a light way mock anything that’s holy, be it religion or family values. This is not to say that the likes of Coen brothers or Monty Python are for laughs only. By means of comedy of the absurd, they disclose our deepest fears, desires and suggest that despite all, we should ‘Always look on the bright side of life’ as sometimes ‘The bear will eat you, sometimes you will eat the bear.’

Now, what’s Wojciech Has’s Saragossa Manuscript got to do with this? Its importance seems to lie in providing the bridge between the two. The world of Saragossa is frightening in its disarray, chaos, labyrinth-like structure, gallows, ghosts, and skulls that seem to haunt the main hero almost causing his madness at the end of the film. At the same time, however, Alfonso van Worden tries to resist the irrational element in the narrative and cares much more for a leg of a grilled chicken than for the legs of a young busty Muslim Princess appearing out of nowhere and trying to seduce him into changing his faith, perhaps even trying to damn him. As he repeatedly wakes up under the gallows each time he has met the mysterious lady (one of two), his reactions are more like those of the hero from Groundhog Day – not a philosopher dwelling on the human condition but a regular guy who is trying to make heads or tails of it all and eventually always deciding to get up and get moving. In a simple attempt to keep his sanity intact, he even accepts that reality and illusion are not always clearly separated.

Has’s film is thus surrealism in grey, which is emphasised not only in its themes and mixture of the tragic and the comic, but also in its form. Although the film was shot in black and white, its scenery and costumes lack the sharp contrast of bright and dark. They are grainy and devoid of clear definition and, just like the events in the film oscillating between illusion/reality and dream/reality leaving the viewer in the state of permanent confusion, the film’s texture subverts the simplistic divide between black and white.

Agnieszka Rasmus 2008

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