Stories-within-the-stories or Wojciech-Has-within-David-Lynch

Wojciech Has and David Lynch have surprisingly a lot in common and it’s not only their artistic background – both studied painting before becoming filmmakers, both show affinities with the school of surrealism, both are the poets of the screen, both are not an easy but a very bumpy ride that may leave you with a splitting headache. Their films will not provide you with the Hollywood feel-good factor where at the end we leave the film returning home secure in the knowledge that we successfully decoded its message.

The Saragossa Manuscript is just such a movie. Although made in the 1960s, it is just as Lynch-like as Lynch is Has-like. First, when we look at the composition, we find that it goes back to the tradition of meta-narratives of Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Calderon’s Life is a Dream which explored the levels of reality and dream and blurred the division between what is real and what is imagined. Has, just like Lynch, never operates within a single-track story line. Like Russian dolls, his films are stories-within-the-stories that seem to multiply almost ad infinitum confusing both the viewer and the protagonist of the film –Aflonso van Worder, our rational alter ego, at one point observes with amazement that the story is “enough to make you crazy”.

Indeed, The Saragossa Manuscript has left many reviewers frustrated as they to look for answers. In this respect Has and Lynch show another striking similarity. Has, an extremely quiet, modest, soft-spoken and reticent man, always gave evasive answers or simply smiled like a Cheshire cat. When asked what his films are about, Lynch usually asks back, “What do you think they are about?” Not many filmmakers give their viewers such complete freedom of interpretation.

But perhaps the similarity between the two becomes most pronounced when we watch The Saragossa Manuscript and Inland Empire as a double bill. Both are more journeys of the mind than cause-and-effect driven plots. Both meander somewhere between the realms of fantasy and reality. Both are quests for identity. Both were shot in Poland.

At the beginning of Lynch’s Inland Empire the two main stars of a film-within-the-film On High in Blue Tomorrows learn a secret. As the director played by Jeremy Irons reveals, the movie they are about to shoot is a remake of an old Polish film based on an old Gypsy tale. The second part of Saragossa is a long tale made up of stories-within-stories told by an old Gypsy, played by Leon Niemczyk. Leon Niemczyk’s last film before he died was Lynch’s Inland Empire. Coincidence perhaps, but it seems that there is more Has to Lynch than meets the eye.

Agnieszka Rasmus 2008