Review by John Adams

The Saragossa Manuscript is being pitched as a cult film once championed by Jerry Garcia. Why that would validate it as a great film (which it is) is not clear. Also on the fan list is Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese whose cinematic opinions do carry more weight.

It is a better film than its obscurity warrants, and I wonder why it is so relatively unknown. Perhaps when it was filmed in Poland in 1965 it was already 10 years out of fashion.

Saragossa Manuscript is taken from a Polish novel of approximately the same name written in 1815 and both are built around the literary device of a "frame narrative," a story that serves to introduce another story. The sense I got was that the characters are themselves simply frames for their stories like the story-tellers in Canterbury Tales. And that story often leads to yet another one... a tale within a tale within a tale like a Russian nested doll. The joy in watching this film comes in the flow of one story opening up within another. Trying to keep all the plots in order or in relation to each other may be futile. But then I've only seen the film once and this is a film that begs to be seen again and again.

The film becomes a sort of X-Files meets Barry Lyndon with its satin and powdered wigs, dueling aristocrats, supernatural secret agents, hidden agendas, and mystic societies. More stories are told... and stories within stories. Curiously the deeper we go into the nested narratives, the more un-supernatural they become. It is the uppermost narrative that has all the ghosts and is most bizarre.

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