[Originally Published: March 26, 2008]
What do Jerry Garcia, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Luis Bunuel and Neil Gaiman have in common? Well, they all in some way are connected with a film made by a Polish director set in the Spanish Inquisition about the surreal adventures of a soldier who has found an ancient manuscript during the Napoleonic Wars. Oh, and the film was based upon a novel written in Spanish by a legendary Polish writer and adventurer, Count Jan Potocki at the turn of the 19th century—crazed mystics help to narrate the sweet wreckage drenched in ghost stories, bent royalty, and seductively demonic women.
The film by Wojciech Has is The Saragossa Manuscript and it is a wild jaunt through incredible scenes of such mind-blowing cleverness that one is drawn deeper down the rabbit hole into a rich maze of tales within a tale within an overall twisted myth. At certain points, narration shifts between characters, settings of time and space (a familiar Hidden Flick theme) leap back and forth, exotic eccentric ‘story-guides’ fade in and out of the mix and all of the adventures are accompanied by a truly spacey soundtrack by Krzysztof Penderecki, who would go on to add music to The Exorcist and The Shining.
And what the heck does that odd cavalcade of artists that began this piece have to do with this rich, ancient celluloid artifact? In the 1990s, Jerry Garcia along with Scorsese and Coppola helped fund a restoration of the film for modern audiences. Sadly, the film was to undergo its final inspection the day after the Grateful Dead leader’s passing in August 1995 and he never saw the print in its full restored 182-minute glory. Read on for more about Jerry Garcia’s favorite movie…
