From LAWeekly:

The Saragossa Manuscript

The scene-selection menu has never been more useful than on the DVD for The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), an Arabian Nights-style tale directed by Polish filmmaker Wojciech Has. Here, the menu does’t simply help you navigate the three-hour film, its 44 chapter titles help make sense of a hypnotic, convoluted plot. Based on a 17th-century novel by Jan Potocki, The Saragossa Manuscript takes the flashback to quantum extremes with stories told within stories told, in turn, within other stories until we’re lost along looping tunnels of time through what appears to be an infinitely expanding universe — and a haunted one, at that. After a brief framing prologue, in which soldiers discover a dusty tome, we take up the travails of Alphonse van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski), a Spanish army captain whose journey to Madrid ends up on permanent hold after two spellbinding Moorish princesses put the zap on him. Suddenly unable to travel beyond the cragged mountains where he spent the night, van Worden wanders a countryside populated by ghosts and littered with spiritualist imagery. Skulls, mysterious rock formations, tarot-card tableaux and cabalist signs surround him, all within Has‚ fun-house framing. When he finally finds refuge in a castle, a Gypsy chief opens the rabbit hole of stories in which magic and mysticism play a role in every tale and every tale holds a fatalistic clue to Worde’s predicament — if he can only sort them out. The Saragossa Manuscript gained an unlikely countercultural following in the 1970s as a good film for long trips. But while you may not need drugs to enjoy it, you should still keep the remote handy so you can find your way back. —Paul Malcolm