![]() The Saragossa Manuscript is in many ways a parody of Wajda’s entire oeuvre to that date, and in particular his most celebrated film, Popiol i diament ( Ashes and Diamonds,1958). But surely The Saragossa Manuscript engages directly with this overwhelming father figure (a deliberate metaphor – the main theme of both Potocki and Has is the influence of oppressive or unreasonable fathers on their sons (3). Michael Goddard suggests Has’ work diverges from that of Wajda (2). Whereas Has’ films are – it is alleged – playful, erotic, fantastic, baroque, Surrealist, freed from the bore of local bother and rooted in a cosmopolitan, world culture (1). Wajda positioned himself as the cultural conscience of the nation, exploring and agonising over Polish identity in his films, its past and present, in a sombre, Romantic-nationalist style, where every bit player and prop was made to speak as part of a vast national allegory. The dominant figure in both these movements was Andrzej Wajda in order to define the qualities of Has, his growing band of admirers has needed to denigrate the “earlier” director. The Saragossa Manuscript was long forgotten by film history because it apparently didn’t fit into the two dominant historical moments of its national cinema: the Polish Film School of the late 1950s, and the “Cinema of Moral Anxiety” (c. Even with the framework of a two-part, three-hour film, director Wojciech Has and his screenwriter Tadeusz Kwiatkowski needed to compress and corral this narrative exuberance – Potocki’s 36 tales told over 66 days are reduced to a more manageable half dozen in three days. They range in space and time from the Middle East to Mexico, from the era of Christ to the “present” of the main characters. These stories are not told straightforwardly or in sequence – events, duties and physical circumstances interrupt the storytellers stories branch into subsidiary stories. Most of these characters have stories to tell, the narrating of which takes up the bulk of the novel. The manuscript is his diary of the two months during which he was diverted from this journey – by supernatural occurrences and hallucinations, beautiful Arab princesses and cabbalists, hermits and one-eyed madmen, bandits and the Spanish Inquisition, geometers and gypsies. Alphonse was a military officer in 1739, about to take up his first post in Madrid. ![]() In a war-ravaged tavern around 1780, a French soldier and his gaoler read a volume left behind by one Alphonse de Worden. ![]() Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1805-1814) is a celebration of storytelling. – Busquerosin Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie ( The Saragossa Manuscript, 1965) “There should be a ladder under every window.
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