The Saragossa Manuscript is a surrealist film made on an epic scale, which is already quite a unique and memorable effort. Based on a novel by Jan Potocki, the film is divided into two parts. The first follows the misadventures of a nobleman (Zbigniew Cybulski) in 18^th century Spain, which is still terrorized by the Inquisition and haunted by the ghosts of the Moors. The second part is a wonderful recreation of leisurely evenings of story-telling from the past: a nobleman sits down at the dinner table and listens to a series of nested stories told by an old gypsy, with no one in a hurry- not even to complete his own story. Wojciech Has (1925-2000) came to the Łódż film school after spending some years at the Academy of Fine Arts of Krakow and working for a documentary studio in Warsaw. As a feature film director his output has been versatile, but he is best remembered for his two ventures into the surrealist arena: Saragossa and The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (1974), a gloomy, hallucinatory color film with a cult following, at least in the visual arts circuits. These films combine Has’ background as both documentarist and pictorial artist: the razor-sharp pictures collide with imaginative and surprising combinations of situations and visual compositions as if they were living and breathing. On the basis of these two achievements the director could be well described as a cinematic equivalent to Salvador Dalí. From this point of view it is not surprising that The Saragossa Manuscript was one of Luis Buñuel’s favorite films; it seems to have had quite an effect on his production. Many of his later films (especially The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) try in one way or another to recreate Has’ sensual flow of multi-layered storytelling techniques. But surpassing the original Polish vision was impossible even for the master of surrealism himself: Has’ seven (or so) inner stories that link with other stories form one of the most joyous cinematic journeys ever seen – a journey inside a world of dreams where in the end everything makes perfect sense both in logical terms and as an absurd joke.

Petteri Kalliomäki