We are like blind men lost in the streets of a big city.
Dir. Wojciech Has
Poland
Storytelling itself is inherently
beautiful even if the story being told has no end. My younger self, admittedly
only five or so years ago but a vast jump to now, didn’t understand this and
only got a lot from films which explained everything about themselves. With exceptions
that would eventually chop away at this mentality, most films that rejected or
subverted narrative fully were pretentious and dull in my eyes. I found The Saragossa Manuscript to be boring,
and as the dinglebat I was, got rid of the DVD version I viewed. Like the
ghosts that haunt Alfonse Van Worden (Zbigniew
Cybulski), an officer for the Walloon guard who travels to Spain and finds
himself unable to escape from a continuing loop, all the films (so far) I once
dismissed are creeping out the grave I put them in as some of the films I
praised the most turn rotten and feel pedestrian and lacking. The discarded
films prove to be more potent now I realised the virtues of dreaming, plotting
structure by itself and throwing yourself into something without any idea what
is exactly going on. Films like American
Beauty (1999) are vacuous and insignificant while The Saragossa Manuscript, seen again finally after all these years,
runs rings around it in content and presentation.
The film is a celebration of
storytelling, starting off with a framing beginning of the protagonist’s future
ancestor, and the members of the opposing army he’s fighting about to capture
him, becoming transfixed with the titular manuscript, a beautiful, giant tone
(presumed to be) written by Van Worden and with evocative illustrations. It goes
into the tale of Van Worden, unable to leave an inn and the area around it,
stuck in a labyrinth that circles back onto its beginning point, whether it is
two Tunisian princesses who want to marry him or the Inquisition after his hide
who drag him back to the starting point. He becomes a minor figure in his own
tale as everyone else speaks of their lives. The film becomes a story-within-a
story-within-a story as it juggles these characters’ tales of cuckooed
husbands, demonic possession, pranksterish attempts to marry two people and duelling
injuries with figures of the film interweaving and entering others’ stories. The
film even becomes a story-within-a story-within-a story-within-a story-within a
story, topping the one moment joke of Detention
(2011), a film I covered on this blog, by making this an extended,
multi-layered tales within tales narrative that humorously admits to the
absurdity of this structure at one point. Like dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams,
pockets open up in the film’s existence which develops pockets of their own.
The film is elaborate in tone,
with clear nods to Surrealist art but also with a dense visual look of
extensive sets and moving camera shots. From a source material that, from what
I’ve looked into, is even more dense and full of more pockets in its obsession
with tangents – a book I’m adding to my To-Read list at the top now – this layered
and vast film manages to breeze past despite being three hours long, but the
sense of joy to it all is fully felt and intoxicating. Despite its obsession
with death – piles of skulls, hanged men, fencing duel deaths, rotting flesh
and demons – it’s on the side of the macabre that is playful. The score by Krzysztof Penderecki, electronic noises
and layered demonic yabberings over the Napoleonic Era setting, is anachronistic
but adds to the unearthly nature of what’s onscreen. As the film progresses, it’s
clear Van Worden will never reach his destination, permanently in this loop
that, unless he is only dreaming it, will continue timelessly. Far from a bleak
end, it suggests the sense of the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tale
and keeps existing, that reality has always repeated itself, and in a place of
these stories-within-stories, of gypsies, princesses, pranksters and merchants,
Van Worden at least is somewhere which is vivid in its life and populous despite
the insanity that he may end up in. The story could have gone for six hours,
spiralling into further tangents and areas, and felt succinct with its long
length making sense to the material. Van Worden is a figure in the middle of a
storyteller going through their tale, the onlooker as it continues as long as
the narrator can muster it. This richness vastly outmatches other films I once
praised for their lack of this depth, like films like it I unfair have given premature
burials of. Such a controlled stream-of-consciousness, The Saragossa Manuscript is a welcomed self discovery for me. If my
reviews of films like this dangerous veer towards being identical in their
praises of the work, it is only because they end up intertwining together in
one form showing how movies can be both entertainment but open up one’s
perception of their creation and form. If there’s a virtue to my dismissive attitude
I once had, it means that now I’m rewatching these films with a new perception
it feels like each one is a first time viewing with new eyes. The revenge of The Saragossa Manuscript on me for
wanting to fall asleep in the middle of it once was justified but was good for
me too.
