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

The Saragossa Manuscript

The Saragossa Manuscript, now restored to its original three hour version, would seem like an unlikely candidate for the international cult interest it has sustained. Directed by Wojciech Has, a director little known outside Poland, the film adapts the Baroque novel of the same name  by the eccentric Polish writer, amateur ethnologist and traveler, Count Jan Potocki. It may seen surprising that such a film would engage the interest not only of Martin Scorcese but also of Jerry Garcia, the lead singer of The Grateful Dead, both of whom were instrumental in the restoration of the film to its original version. This essay will examine the surprising contemporaneity of both the film and the novel it is an adaptation of, to bring out some of the reasons for the film’s deserved status as a cult classic.

The distinguishing feature of both the film and the novel it is based on is the use of multiple levels of narration, by means of which they attain a labyrinth-like structure with several levels of stories within stories. While this kind of structure was not uncommon in Baroque literature, Potocki extended the practice to the point that at times it is impossible not to get lost within different levels of the narrative and the narrative becomes an infinite text stretching into the cosmos itself. The other key feature of the book was a novel treatment of the fantastic. While clearly inspired by such tales as 1001 Nights, The Manuscript Found at Saragossa sets out a unique tension between the telling of fantastic tales and the demystification of these same tales by the powers of reason. It can be said that the novel is characterised by the ‘supposed supernatural,’ or a hesitation between a rational or supernatural interpretation of events. The role of the repeated and interlinked stores is crucial here since they provide examples that either reinforce the supernatural or deflate it through examples of the ‘false supernatural’ in which apparently supernatural events are shown to have rational explanations. The supernatural is both suggested and thrown into doubt through the variation of related stories that makes up the novel as a whole.

Has’s cinematic adaptation of the novel maintains both the labyrinthine construction of the novel and its tension between the supernatural and the rational. However, while the film maintains a pragmatic fidelity to the original, it also makes considerable alterations to it. In the case of The Saragossa Manuscript, cinematic adaptation is more than just the presentation of the same story in a different medium but a reinvention of it that uses cinematic images to reconstruct the effects produced by the multiple embedded tales of Potocki’s novel. In particular, the film significantly increases the tension between the supernatural and the rational, already present in the novel, by being constructed of two halves, corresponding to the supernatural and its demystification respectively. However, this is complicated by the new ending Has gives to the story which folds the rational explanations back into the realm of the supernatural through a highly ambiguous final sequence. The division of the film into two parts, highlights their incompatibility; whereas in the first, the supernatural is presented by means of inexplicable experiences characterised by an extreme exoticism, in the second part numerous overlapping stories in urbane setting, serve to demystify the supernatural as the product of false perceptions and mistaken beliefs. However the embedding of the second part of the film as a series of stories that are told within the framework of the first part, makes these parts inseparable. The inclusion of both parts within the framing story of the discovery of a book of the fantastic by two rival solders, which at the end of the film is thrown onto a table by a now mad main protagonist also defies any straightforward rational explanation. To clarify this we will look at each of these three components of the film separately, to better understand how the film works as a whole.

Following the opening framing sequence of the discovery of the book, we first see Alphonse van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski), lying on the ground in the desolate environment of the Sierra Morena. His opening lines, in which he insists to his two servants that ‘honour dictates’ that he must cross the Sierra Morena by the most direct route and ignore their superstitious fears about doing so, immediately establish a strong vein of comic absurdity. Rather than an object of identification, Alphonse is distanced by being presented as being rash, foolish and much more prone to fear and superstition than he pretends himself to be. Rather than a heroic figure, he is rather an everyman who acts as a spectator to his own experiences, allowing the audience an experience the supernatural through his eyes.

The journey into the Sierra Morena is explicitly presented as a journey into both the supernatural and the unconscious, by means of a Baroque scenography of skulls, snakes and hanging bodies, as well as a series of rapid stages in which Alphonse finds himself abandoned by both his servants and forced to spend the night at a seemingly deserted inn, the Venta Quemada. However it is when he falls asleep at this inn that he full arrives in the realm of the fantastic; after being startled out of his sleep by a semi-naked Negress, he is informed that two foreign women request that he dine with them. He is led into a hidden and vast room in which he meets two ‘muslim’ sisters, Emina and Zibelda, who apart form informing him that he is their cousin and that they have an erotic relationship with each other, also indicate that they have been waiting for him as he is to be their husband on the condition that he renounce his Christianity. While this scene can partly be attributed to P0tocki’s fascination with the 1001 Nights, Has emphasises this scene of supernatural enchantment by cinematic means. First of all the room is shown as a seemingly infinite  and majestic space, despite its apparent location within the small and dilapidated inn; this gives this space a sense of a virtual space exceeding rational laws of physics, much like the interior of Dr. Who’s spaceship/telephone box. This sense of infinity is emphasised by a non-naturalistic soundtrack of echoing footsteps and synthesised music.  The overall effect is of a hypnotic induction into a realm in which rationality its suspended. Unlike the book in which everything is filtered through the narrator’s interpretations, the audience of the film is directly transported into this other space, undergoing a similar enchantment to Alphonse and thereby experiencing directly what the book can only describe. This is facilitated by Alphonse’s reactions which consist of becoming speechless and even more like a spectator than usual. This bypasses the questioning in  the book of the reality or falsity of the scene in favour of a direct surreal immersion within it. The culmination of this scene is of particular importance; the two sisters encourage Alphonse to drink form a goblet in the form of a human skull, after which he awakes under a gallows on which there are two hanged brothers. When Alphonse returns to the inn there is no sign of the two sisters and the enchanted room has now been transformed into a space of decay complete with rotting food and rats.

This sequence of events sets up a kind of blueprint for the first part of the film. A series of similar stories are told for example by Pasheco a one-eyed damaged creature who was similarly enchanted by two sisters at the same inn, in his case his father’s new wife and her sister. He also woke up under the gallows but was pursued back to the inn by the two brothers, who are shown as demons and  who gouge out one of his eyes. The final time Alphonse returns to the inn, he goes through the usual trajectory but this time wakes up next to a Jewish alchemist, whose presence he finds rather irritating. The effect of these repetitions and variations is a presentation of the supernatural as both strange and familiar, plausible and defying explanation. There is a dream logic at work here in which desire and death are erotically intertwined, as in the Freudian account of the unconscious. Much of the first part of the film can be seen as a progressive induction into this unconscious realm, and the attempts of Alphonse to master it. In this way the film shows the clear influence of psychoanalysis, even if this dimension was already anticipated in the novel. In summary then, the process of supernatural enchantment is presented as the opening of an other, utopian realm within the real, or a form of surrealism, in which it is more a question of how this unconscious desire operates, than whether the scenes depicted are true or false.

In the second part of the film the already complex overlapping of stories becomes so complicated that it would defy any attempt at a summary. All narrative development is suspended in this scene in favour of a scene of storytelling, taking place in the alchemist’s castle, in which there is a chines box effect of stories in which other stories are told, which contain yet other stories. It is as if the enchantment of the first half of the film has opened up a space of multiple interlocking stories which take the place of the suspended action. The nature of the stories is also markedly different to the first part of the film. In general the stories told in this part of the film are broadly comic tales of betrayed and betraying lovers, secret trysts, absurd conventions, romance and eroticism, generally taking place within an urban setting. From the mysterious atmosphere of the first half of the film, we are transported into an urbane comedy of manners, as well lit as a Hollywood historical romance. However, the seemingly more conventional visual style is accompanied by a dizzying complication of layers of narration, generating a strong sense of narrative instability; neither the narrator nor the audience can untangle these layers of narrative in which there are at times up to four or five levels of storytelling. At the same time, the overall tendency of these stories to unmask false perceptions and beliefs in the name of reason is a direct reversal of the enchantment of the first part of the film. Many of the elements of the first part of the film reappear in the second but in a new light. For example, there are effects of horror but these are revealed to be the results of scheming lovers rather than any supernatural forces. Nevertheless, there are several factors which undermine these effects of demystification; from the excess of layers of narration that are impossible to follow to the unreliablility of many of the narrators to the cuts back to the scene of storytelling in the castle that remind us that these are only stories. As Alphonse puts it at one point, when trying to disentangle various threads of the story, ‘but this could drive one mad,’ an experience likely to be shared by the audience!

This brings to the ending of the film, which is also the greatest departure from the novel. Alphonse, called away on business form the castle returns once more to the inn and again meets the two sisters, this time accompanied by their father. The latter gives him a book in which all his adventures have been inscribed, the same book that was in the alchemist’s library and then concealed by the latter. He is told that he can now finish writing the story. When he wakes up this time he is in the inn but sees himself leaving with the two sisters as if he has split into two people, one forever inside the manuscript and the other who is responsible for writing it. This turns Alphonse into a schizophrenic spectator of himself and it is not surprising to see him mad in the final images of the film. In a last repetition the scribbling Alphonse sees the two sisters once more, carrying a mirror and before leaving with them he throws the book against the wall before joining them. The book lands in its original position in the film thus fulfilling a circular structure in which Alphonse will be eternally living out his experiences within the book which has now become cosmic and infinite. In this ending, the film both remains faithful in spirit to the Baroque  structure of the novel, while also corresponding to a type of Surrealism, or more accurately a Baroque modernism as can be found in the work of Borges, as well as in Polish writers like Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz. This passage beaten the Baroque and the modern, the archaic and the inventive perhaps gives some explanation for the continued cult appeal of the film as a kind of time-machine capable of opening up for the viewer a complex and enchanted world.

Michael Goddard 2008