The Cinematheque

“I loved The Saragossa Manuscript … I saw the film three times, which, in my case, is saying something.”

Luis Buñuel

“Simultaneously horrific, erotic, and funny … This is one mother of a film,” rhapsodized David Lynch on Wojciech Jerzy Has’s delirious counterculture classic. The American surrealist wasn’t alone in his fandom—Luis Buñuel, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia all championed Saragossa and played a part in hoisting it to international attention. The hallucinatory epic, adapted from Polish nobleman Jan Potocki’s 19th-century novel, relates the adventures of one Alphonse van Worden, a Belgian officer making his way across battle-torn Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. Entranced by a magical manuscript and two beautiful Moorish princesses, he is caught up in a dreamy, supernatural, Arabian Nights-like chain of stories within stories. The film’s nesting-box digressions are rendered with sardonic humour, while the stunning anamorphic imagery draws on Spain’s Gothic, Baroque, Kabbalist, and Moorish traditions. Screen legend Zbigniew Cybulski, whose tragic death in 1967 made him the Polish equivalent to James Dean, stars.

In Polish with English subtitles

Introduction by Pierre Van Cutsem, a PhD candidate in literary studies whose research focuses on Central European weird fiction. 6:00 pm reception sponsored by the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, University of Alberta.

One of the Greatest Polish Films of All Time (#2)
2015 poll conducted by the Museum of Cinematography in Łódź

“One of the all-time cult classics … There’d be nothing quite like it in cinema until Peter Greenaway’s heyday decades later.”

Michael Brooke, BFI

“This three-hour swirl of Polish phantasmagoria is an epic piece of japery; it celebrates visions and magic by means of labyrinthine storytelling.”

Michael Sragow, The New Yorker