"It is a surrealist film whose surrealism resides not merely in the bizarre parched landscape of the Sierra Morena mountain range with its bleached skulls, hanged bandits, crows and mysterious inns in which seductive encounters are to be had, but also simply in the bewildering juxtaposition of individual tales and anecdotes, stories which grow out of each other. The surrealist effect (and the comedy) is in the jolt from one micro-narrative to the other, and the realisation that the overall story is thwarted and undermined."
"The premise is that in the Spanish town of Saragossa during the Napoleonic wars, one officer tries to arrest another, who is apparently reading an old book but is then distracted by the fact that this book is about his own grandfather, the nobleman Alfonse Van Worden. (Later we discover that the passages about this grandfather have been added by hand, in pen-and-ink, hence Saragossa Manuscript.) Then we flash back to the this preening aristocrat-soldier himself, played by prominent Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski."
"While travelling on horseback through the wilderness in the blazing heat, Alfonse encounters a grim gallows with two dead men, and has an erotic interlude with two Muslim princesses who require him to convert. Is it a dream? We get another flashback showing the life of Alfonse's father, a proud blueblood and insatiable duellist, Alfonse is later arrested by the Spanish Inquisition which he didn't expect and encounters a hermit, a scholar of the occult and a mathematician, tale-tellers and raconteurs all,"
The Saragossa Manuscript is an epic picaresque comedy set in 18th-century Spain directed by Wojciech Has. Surrealism emerges from the Sierra Morena's bleached skulls, hanged bandits, crows and mysterious inns and from bewildering juxtapositions of interlocking tales and anecdotes. A frame narrative finds an officer reading a book about his grandfather, Alfonse Van Worden, leading to layered flashbacks. Alfonse's episodic adventures include erotic encounters with Muslim princesses, duels, arrest by the Spanish Inquisition, and encounters with a hermit, occult scholar, mathematician and a garrulous Gypsy. Narrative chaos and abrupt micro-narrative shifts continually subvert resolution.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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