A renaissance man with a passion for travel, languages, ethnology and the occult, Count Jan Nepomucen Potocki was also a thrillseeker who once ascended over Warsaw in a hot air balloon alongside pioneer aviator Jean-Pierre Blanchard in 1790. Potocki was also intrigued by the existence of secret societies and may have himself been a Freemason. To give a framework to the countless folk tales he heard in his travels, Potocki leaned heavily on the example of Ann Radcliffe's Gothic romance The Mysteries of Udolpho. Count Potocki's employment of overlapping and interlocking story sequences was a natural for the instant transitions of cinema; the novel was adapted for the screen in 1965 by Polish filmmaker Wojciech Has, who had made a reputation for himself for art that eschewed politics in favor of psychology. Younger cinephiles for whom Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1993) is the alpha and omega of nonlinear storytelling may find themselves helplessly adrift upon the peregrinations of The Saragossa Manuscript, which interrupts its main narrative, stalls, doubles back and reconnoiters repeatedly to the point of origin (at one point telescoping five flashbacks) to tell thirty stories in one. Stylistically, Has and cinematographer Mieczyslaw Jahoda may have been influenced or at least encouraged by the then-escalating Gothic vibe in genre filmmaking; their employment of charnel imagery (memorably, a bit that finds the film's protagonist being fed wine from a goblet fashioned out of a human skull only to awaken hours later on a corpse-strewn battlefield) is reminiscent of Fernando Méndez and Mario Bava's use of the same in the Mexican The Vampire (El vampiro, 1957) and the Italian Black Sunday (La Maschera del Demonio, 1960) respectively.
The Saragossa Manuscript is also noteworthy for the participation of actors who had already achieved, or would achieve, a level of fame. Star Zbigniew Cybulski ("the Polish James Dean") is cast here in a bumbling about face from his stock-in-trade as an angry young man of the Polish cinema; Cybulski had played a cold-blooded guerilla gunman in Andrzej Wajda's Popiół i diament (Ashes and Diamonds, 1958) and could have attained international superstardom but for his untimely death in 1967. Cybulski's costar Elzbieta Czyzewska did make the jump to American films. When her then-husband, American journalist David Halberstam, criticized the Polish Communist Party, the pair were compelled to flee the country; the Warsaw-born actress made her US film debut in Robert Downey's Putney Swope (1969) and was later seen in Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty (1988) and Costa-Gavras' Music Box (1989). (The film Anna [1987], starring Sally Kirkland, is based on Czyzewska's experiences as a classically trained European actress pecking out a career amid the cattle calls of New York.) Leon Niemczyk had already starred in Roman Polanski's Nóz w wodzie (Knife in the Water, 1962); he turned up among the cast of David Lynch's Inland Empire (2006) shortly before his death from lung cancer at the age of 82.
A brainy inclusion in the Sixties school of "head" movies, The Saragossa Manuscript made a lasting impression on such disparate Americans as Martin Scorsese, Jerry Garcia and David Lynch at the time of its US release in January of 1966, for which its three-plus hour running time was shortened by approximately thirty minutes. (Elsewhere on the globe, the film found another devotee in expatriate Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel.) The film was re-released in April of 1972, again minus half an hour, and after that lapsed into something like obscurity after the negative was lost. However respected he may have been in Poland, Wojciech Has never received the same international accolades that went to his countrymen Roman Polanski (who made his first English language film, Repulsion, the same year), Andrzej Wajda or Krzysztof Kieslowski. The Saragossa Manuscript was not seen in its entirety in America until 1997, at which time the New York Film Festival exhibited a restored version (the result of a collective effort by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia prior to his death in 1995), which enjoyed a subsequent, limited theatrical run. Wojciech Has died in 2000 at the age of 75. Pressed to DVD in 2002 by Image Entertainment (in cooperation with Jeck Film and Cowboy Pictures) as a region 1 disc, the film's licensing has since been picked up by the United Kingdom's Mr. Bongo Films. This all-region disc preserves the film's original not-quite-scope aspect ratio of 2:1 (anamorphic) and goes the earlier disc better with additional digital clean-up of the source (a print of the film owned by Has) and improved English language subtitles (which are, of course, optional). Although there is at times noticeable grain within the frame, the black-and-white image is never less than impressive, with strong contrasts and an ocean of inky shadows. The extras are not as bountiful on this new disc; acutely missed from the Image Entertainment release is an isolated soundtrack for the score by Krzysztof Penderecki, whose bone-chilling orchestrations can be heard in such landmark horror films as The Exorcist (1973) and The Shining (1980). (Penderecki's use of electronica and whispers suggests a kinship to the Italian prog-rock band Goblin's score for Dario Argento's Suspiria [1977].) The only supplement here (despite box art claims to the contrary) is a limited still gallery and the images are disappointingly small. The packaging makes the same use as did the earlier disc of the Fillmore East style poster art, with a dedicated to the memory of Jerry Garcia.
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by Richard Harland Smith
