![]() ![]() ![]() Every nubile maiden in Poland would seem to have been recruited to play the various unholy vixens and mortal temptresses met along the way, and their coquettish games remind us of the narrative tricks the author is pulling on Alfons - and us. Using about 4x the running time of Simon of the Desert, The Sargossa Manuscript creates a Spain where the doings of ghosts and devils are as real as the beautifully-recreated town squares and villas. A rake leeches off the son of Jewish merchant, but appearances are deceptive, and both he and a vagabond Gypsy prove to be honorable souls. Soldiers mingle with priests who are really sheiks in disguise, and officers of El Santo Oficio indeed appear when no-one expects them (nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!). It eventually coalesces into a humorous portrait of a culture united by its prejudicial differences. Luis Buñuel likes to play with flashbacks hidden within flashbacks, a literary device employed in The Sargossa Manuscript to create a Spain of interlocking destinies and endless complexity. ![]() A passing gypsy tells a tale of the son of a Jewish Merchant, which becomes a Chinese box of overlapping stories inside stories. Fleeing this dilemma, he's captured by the inquisition but rescued by some noblemen who invite him to a castle, where for awhile it looks as if his ordeal was all a planned conspiracy. Yet every morning, he wakes up back out in the pass, under the gallows and its two corpses. In cyclical waking dreams, he's seduced by a pair of Arabian princesses in a palace hidden under the decrepit Quemada (trans: burned) Inn. Adapted from an early 19th century book, the show is part Luis Borges, part Canterbury Tales, and part Playboy's Girls of Warsaw.Ī pair of soldiers reads a book found in a house in the embattled town of Saragossa, which one of them thinks is about his Grandfather: In the story, Captain Alfons van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski) is trying to get to Madrid but is delayed in the Sierra Morena by what seem to be the ghost demons of two hanged men. Yet another example of an obscure masterpiece unearthed by DVD, The Sargossa Manuscript is a 1965 Polish fantasy epic physically set in Spain but actually happening in the mind of its imaginative author. Written by Tadeusz Kwiatkowski from the novel by Jan Potocki Production Designer Tadeusz Myszorek, Jerzy Skarzynski Joanna Jedryka, Aleksander Fogiel, Barbara Krafftówna, Pola Raksa Starring Zbigniew Cybulski, Kazimierz Opalinski, Iga Cembrzynska-Kondratiuk, 1965 / B&W / 2:1 enhanced widescreen / 180 min. ![]()
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