09 Dec The Saragossa Manuscript (1965)

Geometric Cosmology

By now, you already know that this is a collection of stories and what makes it novel is the relationship among those stories. Many stories have stories within them. Many stories are mirrored. Characters and sets in one story appear in another, sometimes in different roles. Most stories are about storytelling or truth in some form. Symmetries abound. Snakes and skulls are constant, as is the gallows.

Another constant thread is the nature of of the character, whether he is ‘real’ or a character from some further nesting. (This is a common theme in other films as well.) The metaphor of ’birth’ is used. Everything relates to the manuscript, which here is primarily composed of images, and which is written in at several levels.

Superficially, it appears to be a cleverly constructed ramble, and its arbitrariness is part of the charm. That’s why dopes like Jerry Garcia like it. But the story is far better than that.

The writer of the book (which is both the book on which this is based and the book within the film) was a serious cabalist, student of the Jewish cabala as created in Spain and moved to Poland when the Jews were kicked out. There, at the end of the 18th century, it became christianized and simultaneously in France linked with Tarot. The core notion was that the world was a story told within a story with an story and so on for ten or eleven layers until you had nothing as the origin. A very specific geometric symbol related these storyworlds, primarily emphasising various internal dualities.

Scholars of this geometric cosmology recognise this as the first book to explore what was to become a common theme: a curious soul starting at the bottom of this `Tree of Life’ and moving up in a specific way through the generators of each storyworld, ultimately reaching enlightenment. The stories presented in the book and rewritten here are not a random ramble, but highly structured based on this purportedly ancient geometric cosmology.

This book and film have tremendous historical significance. It is a template used previously by Bulwer-Lytton (‘Ernest Maltravers’ and’Zanoni’), then Lewis Carroll and eventually James Joyce. It was copied by Fowles as ‘the Magus’ and thence influenced the structure of the Beatles’’White Album.’

In recent film history, it was restructured as a book and then a more successful film by the greatest Polish filmmaker, Roman Polanski, as `the Ninth Gate.’ All of these follow the same precise structure.

Cinematically, this is no masterpiece. It borrows its stance from `Seventh Seal’ which has some of the same notions but without the strict structure. From that stance, a comic self-parody is adopted. The score is wonderful.

Posted in 2002

Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

IMDB