Die Handschrift von Saragossa (1965)
39KDie Handschrift von Saragossa: Directed by Wojciech Has. With Zbigniew Cybulski, Iga Cembrzynska, Elzbieta Czyzewska, Gustaw Holoubek. Upon finding a book that relates his grandfather’s story, an officer ventures through Spain meeting a wide array of characters, most of whom have a story of their own to tell.
“The comments on this film seem evenly distributed between favor and disfavor. At this date, I canu0026#39;t understand why anyone would not like it, but thatu0026#39;s me. I first saw it in 1967, while I was in college. I loved it, and went so far as to locate and purchase the book(s) from which it was adapted. And that was before the internet, and Amazon, and Bookfinder. One of the books I didnu0026#39;t manage to get until I got to London. Reading it, I was amazed to realize that the film actually includes remnants of every story in the book(s): when, for example, Alphonso opens a door to find a bewigged scholar interrupted while declaiming u0026quot;…Then the first skeleton tore out his own arm-bone and began hitting me with it…u0026quot;-the whole story is there in the book, i.e., what the skeletons were doing there in the first place. The books, Manuscript Found At Saragossa and the New Decameron, are rightly considered Literary Treasures of Poland, along the lines of Notre-Dame á Paris in France, War and Peace in Russia, or Moby-Dick here. Itu0026#39;s about stories and storytelling.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eBy the end of the film, to say the least, the viewer has been presented with a convincing picture of sixteenth-century Europe from different angles, and itu0026#39;s safe to say that no other film, before or since, in color or Black-and-white, has done it better.”
