THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT

“Simultaneously horrific, erotic, and funny. This is one mother of a film,” rhapsodized David Lynch on Wojciech Has’s delirious counterculture classic. The American surrealist wasn’t alone in his fandom—Luis Buñuel, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia all championed THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT and played a part in hoisting it to international attention. 

The hallucinatory epic, adapted from Polish nobleman Jan Potocki’s 19th-century novel, relates the adventures of one Alphonse van Worden, a Belgian officer making his way across battle-torn Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. Entranced by a magical manuscript and two beautiful Moorish princesses, he is caught up in a dreamy, supernatural, Arabian Nights-like chain of stories within stories. The film’s nesting-box digressions are rendered with sardonic humor, while the stunning anamorphic imagery draws on Spain’s Gothic, Baroque, Kabbalist, and Moorish traditions. Grim and ecstatic, febrile and hypnotic, Has' Gothic fantasy is a heady affirmation of the power of the cinematic imagination to create and destroy entire worlds. Almost as legendary as the film itself is its haunting electroacoustic score by Polish master composer Krzysztof Penderecki.