dividing
infinity
by Douglas Messerli
Tadeusz
Kwiatkowski (screenplay, based on the novel by Jan Potocki), Wojciech Has
(director) Rękopis znaleziony w
Saragossie (The Saragossa Manuscript)
/ 1965, restored edition, 2001
Potocki’s grand Borgesian-like book from
1815 tells stories within stories within stories, creating a kind of puzzle
book of interlocking and often contradictory tales centering on a Spanish
officer’s ancestor. The audacity of Has’ adaptation of that fiction is obvious
from its earliest scenes, as an officer stumbles into Saragossa, gunshots and
charges of dynamite surrounding him. Seeking refuge in a small inn he discovers
a fascinating book with drawings. So entranced with the book is he that when
enemy soldiers come to arrest him, he refuses to look up, soon after
encouraging the Spanish enemy to translate the work for him.
The Spaniard’s ancestor, Alphonse Von Worden, is played by one of the
most notable of Polish actors, Zbigniew Cybulski, who only a few years earlier,
in 1958, had starred in Andrej Wajda’s great film, Ashes and Diamonds—after which he was described as the Polish James
Dean. Although still somewhat handsome, the star of Has’ film has lost he
youthful looks and is slightly overweight. His character, Alphonse, moreover,
is a fool, a stubbornly clumsy captain of the Walloon Guards, who with two
unwilling servants is seeking the shortest route through the Sierra Morena
Mountains on his way to Madrid.
Suddenly he wakes to discover himself back in the countryside from which
he has escaped, lying next to piles of skulls and two gallows, from which, we
later learn, the Zoto brothers have been hung. Voyaging forward he encounters a
hermit priest whose major activity seems to be his attempt to cure a possessed
man, who eyes has been gouged out and who cries from the torments of his past.
After giving Von Worden goat’s milk to drink—nearly all the film’s dozens of
episodes involve food or drink—the priest insists that his charge tell his own
life story, which in some respects parallels Von Worden’s meeting with the two
princesses. In the possessed man’s tale, a younger woman marries his father
while he longs to marry—but is forbidden by the father—his mother’s sister.
Plotting so that her son-in-law might make love to her sister, the mother looks
on as the sibling and son in bed.
Alfonse awakens once more at the gallows, this time encountering a
cabalist who speaks in the abstract concepts of numbers and their linguistic
significance. They soon meet up with a rationalist, a mathematician, who a
short while before had been almost arrested by the Spanish Inquisition,
mistaking him for Alphonse. Not knowing which direction to take—a situation
that occurs throughout Alphonse’s travels—the cabalist suggests they take
refuge in his nearby castle.
The mathematician best summarizes, perhaps, the first part of this
incredible movie: “The human mind is willing to accept anything, if it is used
knowingly.”
At the castle, Part II, we discover a secret plot being undertaken by
the cabalist and his sister, Donna Rebecca Uzeda. In the castle library,
Alphonse uncovers the same book which has begun his series of misadventures,
but the book is quickly removed from his sight, the plotters afraid that he
might read ahead of where his life has so far reached. When a group of gypsies
arrives, their leader begins a series of new stories, each nested in the other,
all involving, vaguely, love, deceit and honor. As Donna Rebecca summarizes
about the tales—in some of which appear characters we have encountered
previously, others of which containing figures that will be important in later
stories: “All these adventures begin simply. The listener thinks it’ll soon be
over, but one story creates another, and then another.” To which the
mathematician answers: “Something like quotients which can be divided
infinitely.”
Waking once more under the gallows, Alphonse discovers his original
servants to be still with him, as if all the previous adventures had been a
dream only. At a small inn in Saragossa, we observe him writing in the large
book the tales, presumably, we have just encountered— until he is told two
princesses are awaiting him. Tossing the book aside, he exits, the book landing
on the table precisely in the same spot where his descendant’s enemy had first
discovered it.
While many have described Has’ film as “surrealist,” and Buñuel,
himself, expressed admiration for the work, I would characterize it as having
more in common with Sergei Paradjanov’s staged tableaux vivants, like the illuminated manuscript at the center of
this work. And, although Has’ film was not without success in Eastern Europe,
winning the Golden Wolf award in the 1965 Bucharest Film Festival, its
greatness was obscured, in part, because it did not fit into the realist
concerns of the Polish Film School with which Has was first connected, while
the moral angst of later films by Wajda and other Polish directors did not
resonate with the more theatrical and static images represented in this
movie—just as Russian realism found no sympathy for the cinema of Paradjanov
and Tarkovsky. Fortunately, due to the labors of musician Jerry Garcia, and
filmmakers Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola, we can now watch a restored
version of this masterpiece.
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