The Saragossa Manuscript Players

While The Saragossa Manuscript boasts some of Poland’s most respected ‘serious’ actors/actresses, it also contains numerous of Poland’s finest ‘comedy’ players making its cast list really second to none. Even in cameo supporting roles are actors of the quality of Wieslaw Golas (Kapitan Sowa/Dzieciol), making the film so rich and amusing wherever you look.

Zbigniew Cybulski – Alphonse Van Worden

Originally, a one-time famous theatre actor Zbigniew Wójcik was penned to play the role of Aphonse Van Worden, but his tragic suicide shortly before production began prevented this. Next a French actor was found to play the main role, but after 3 days of shooting it became obvious that he was neither French nor a professional actor. Over this time, Zbigniew Cybulski was increasingly hanging around set supposedly as a casual observer. Finally when it was proposed to Cybulski to take over the lead role, the decision turned out to be inspired as he transformed the role from that of a romantic into bungling, doubting, and much more modern lead. While he is often compared to James Dean because of his role as Maciek in Andrzej Wajda’s Diamonds and Ashes that pigeonholed him as a young, rebellious romantic, Cybulski had a hard time destroying that image to prove that he in fact had a much wider range. He was a method actor who mentioned Brando or Olivier as his models. With Cybulski the idea of a Polish movie star was born as he became a heartthrob for many young female viewers. His mature roles had a touch of self-irony to them, making him a true modern actor but at the same time frustrating the expectations of viewers. Cybulski appears in The Saragossa Manuscript without his characteristic dark glasses which needed due to poor eyesight caused considerable trouble when shooting the riding scenes. He was also known for his unpunctuality, inability to get up early, and a habit of jumping on moving trains. He died tragically when falling from a moving train that he was unsuccessfully attempting to jump onto. Andrzej Wajda’s most avant-garde movie All for Sale is a tribute metafilm to Cybulski.

Iga Cembrzynska – Princess Emina

Iga Cembrzynska was in the last year of her acting school when approached to play the role of Princess Emina. Many years later, Has admitted that he had no doubt she was meant for this part when he saw her try on her costume and it was only later that he was also pleasantly surprised to find her as talented as she was pretty. Cembrzynska has admitted that at the time the dress and the lesbian kissing scene were extremely risqué and challenging for her. Before going to the acting school, Cembrzynska trained in playing the piano. She always said that singing was her first love before acting, the best proof of this being the flamboyant credits to Hydrozagatka (Polish cult film, a mock sociorealism Superman) by her husband director Andrzej Kondratiuk, in which she sings and shouts the opening credits direct into the camera. Cembrzynska and Kondratiuk now live in the country where they have plenty of cats and dogs and where they make films that are arguably one of the most significant contribution to contemporary Polish counter-cinema.

Gustaw Holoubek – Pedro Velasquez

Another Krakow man in the film born and bred, most famous for his beautiful and gentle voice that had a tendency to hypnotise viewers into complete submission. His recent death was a day of national mourning all over Poland. Holoubek was the Polish Olivier and although he could never have Sir in front of his name, many have often referred to him as a true gentleman both on and off the screen and stage. He was one of Has’ favourite actors appearing in his Noose (Petla), Farewells (Pozegnania), Goodbye to the Past (Rozstanie), One Room Tenants (Wspolny Pokoj), How to be Loved (Jak byc kochana), The Codes (Szyfry), The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (Sanatorium pod Klepsydra), The Doll (Lalka).

Leon Niemczyk – Avadoro

Before appearing in Saragossa, he won the general acclaim of the public and critics in Polanski’s Knife in the Water (Noz w wodzie). This was not the only good movie he made. Niemczyk played in over 500 movies in Poland and abroad (mostly the former Soviet block). He was also a war veteran and a real hero awarded for his involvement in the opposition front. He fought under general George Patton in the 444 Battalion of the USA army during WWII. He lived in Lodz for most of his career where he also played one of his last roles in David Lynch’s Inland Empire. He was said to like women and Japanese cars.

Bogumil Kobiela – Toledo

Studied acting together with his best friend Cybuski. They worked in the famous Gdansk theatre Bim-Bom, whose sharp satire was mostly aimed at the absurd of the then current political system. One of the greatest comedy actors of Polish post-war cinema, his experimental humour can only be compared to the likes of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. In one of his self-directed semi-documentaries entitled Kobiela on the Beach, he parades on the beach in his skiing gear in the biggest Polish seaside resort – Sopot, to the wonder and amazement of holidaymakers and beachcombers. On the Saragossa set, he is interestingly yet another Krakow guy born and bred. Just like Cybulski, he died tragically in the 60s in a car crash. He remains a cult figure and inspiration for many young comedy actors in Poland.

Zdzislaw Maklakiewicz – Roque Busqueros

Another war hero on the set actively involved in Warsaw uprising and in the right wing army in WWII. After the Warsaw uprising, he was taken captive and sent to a German work camp from which he returned to Poland in 1945. He studied both acting and directing. He was one of the most famous character actors whose face will always be associated with the absurd and the grotesque of Polish comedies of the 70s. He died tragically beaten up to death near Europe Hotel in Warsaw after a hard drinking session in 1977. He often co-acted with his best friend and drinking buddy, Jan Himilsbach, for example in a Polish cult comedy Cruise (Rejs) where most of the humour was actually improvised on the set in the heat of Polish summer and under the influence of a couple of beers, and in many Kondratiuk’s movies (Cembrzynska’s husband). In one of them, Wniebowzieci (1972), they play two simple guys who win a lottery and decide to spend all their money on flying from one town to the next. Still, this is a bitter-sweet comedy without a happy-end, as was Maklakiewicz’s life.

Beata Tyszkiewicz – Rebeca

Once married to one of the most famous Polish directors and Oscar winners, Andrzej Wajda, Tyszkiewicz is now a member of the jury in Celebrity Dancing, reflecting the changes that have taken place in the Polish reality. She is often called the First Lady of Polish cinema due to her impressive credentials but also to her very aristocratic beauty and behaviour. She is therefore mostly known for playing the parts of beautiful yet aloof ladies of noble birth (including that of the title role in Has’ other movie The Doll). So, she did not get her part in Saragossa only thanks to her impressive bust. In fact, most of the Polish actresses on the set proved in their later careers that there was more to them than beauty.

Agnieszka Rasmus 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

Discover Wojchiech Has’s Long Lost Masterpiece

‘Rekopis Znaleziony w Saragossie’ for the ultimate challenge in underground surrealist cult Polish Film from 1965.