The Saragossa Manuscript

During the Napoleonic wars two officers find a book in an inn. What it describes belongs to one officer's grandfather: Alphonse van Worden, crossing the Sierra Morena in Spain, meets with strange events. He encounters two women in an abandoned inn, wakes in the morning under a gallows, meets inquisitors, and every new person tells him a story. Inside those stories other stories open. Wojciech Has directs. Zbigniew Cybulski plays Alphonse. The source is Jan Potocki's novel. The structure is made of narratives inside narratives; at one point there is a story within a story within a story, and the return between the layers is not always marked. It runs past three hours and circulated for years in shortened versions; the full length was restored later. Its international reputation came from outside cinema. Jerry Garcia, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola supported the restoration and distribution, which brought it to a wide audience. Zbigniew Cybulski was the best known face of Polish cinema and died in a railway accident a few years after this film. The narrative builds no chain of logic; repetitions, loops and contradictions are deliberately left in. Who it is for: viewers who like Eastern European cinema and nested narrative structures. Who it is not for: it is very long, hard to follow, and offers no resolution.