185 The Saragossa Manuscript

[Finch]

At the height of the Napoleonic wars, a Polish soldier seeks refuge in a deserted house in the Spanish town of Saragossa, and discovers a mysterious manuscript written in a language he doesn’t speak. When enemy Spanish officers arrive to arrest him, one of the soldiers realises that the book appears to tell the story of his grandfather, Alfonse Van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski, Ashes and Diamonds), and his surreal, mystical adventures in the region several decades before. He starts to translate the text for the Polish soldier, and so begins a time-shifting, genre-hopping, ouroboros-like epic narrative, one that blends the gothic, quixotic and erotic, and in the process interrogates the very nature of storytelling itself. Championed by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, The Saragossa Manuscript has grown in status since its initial release from a cult oddity to a film widely regarded as one of greatest ever produced in Poland, and a work that cemented Wojciech Has as one of European cinema’s most visionary and idiosyncratic directors.

4K UHD & BLU-RAY LIMITED EDITION SPECIAL FEATURES

New 4K restoration from the original camera negative, presented in Dolby Vision HDR
4K UHD and Blu-ray presentation of the feature; world premiere on 4K UHD
Uncompressed mono PCM audio
The Saragossa Labyrinth - new visual essay on the cinema of Wojciech Has and The Saragossa Manuscript by Polish film expert Michael Brooke
Saragossa - archival making-of documentary made for Polish television on The Saragossa Manuscript, featuring Wojciech Has, cinematographer Mieczyslaw Jahoda, production designer Jerzy Skarżyński, and assistant director Barbara Sass-Zdort (1998, 29 mins)
Newly improved English subtitle translation
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow
Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by author David Hering and archival writing by Annette Insdorf
Limited edition of 5000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

Year: 1965
Country: Poland
Cert: TBC
Format: UHD + Blu-ray
Region: ABC
RAD185UHDLE
EAN: 5060974683673
Release date: 14/09/26

[MichaelB]

Stating the obvious, this is not the notorious 2K wax-museum version that’s bedevilled all previous Blu-ray releases. I saw this new 4K version on the big screen last year, and it looked terrific.

[TMDaines]

Nice. Now for some more Has Blu-rays to liberate them from the big, expensive Polish boxset...

[TechnicolorAcid]

Praying this and Hourglass sell out fast because that can hopefully mean that more Has can hopefully be licensed out to Radiance, at the very least I would expect a release of How to Be Loved to be somewhere in the pipeline since it’s the only other Has film to get an HD beyond Poland to my knowledge. Also nice to see a 4K restoration of this get released since I didn’t even know there was one!

[Peacock]

How To Be Loved is on sale right now, but I’ll hold off in case Radiance get to it someday.

Anyway, looking forward to the 4K’s of Saragossa and Hourglass!

[TechnicolorAcid]

How To Be Loved is on sale right now, but I’ll hold off in case Radiance get to it someday.

It ranks as my personal favorite Has, if only because of the tremendous performances that anchor the whole film, especially from Barbara Krafftówna who has one of my personal favorite female performances in any film

[MichaelB]

The Noose is the one whose absence from international distribution (aside from France, Has’s long-term national champions) is truly baffling.

It was refused an export licence at the time, because the authorities didn’t think that a film about an unrepentant alcoholic was an ideal cultural ambassador at a time (1958) when people were only just beginning to discover Polish culture in volume, but that’s obviously not relevant now.

Anyway, for my money it’s the single strongest Polish feature debut between the end of WWII and Polanski’s Knife in the Water, because Has was lucky with his timing; while peers like Andrzej Munk, Jerzy Kawalerowicz and Andrzej Wajda had to conform to the tenets of Socialist Realism with their debut features (although Munk’s Man on the Tracks and Wajda’s A Generation are good examples of how clever directors could get around some, but not all, the restrictions), Has had much more freedom.

I was at last year’s BFI Southbank screening of The Noose, and people were absolutely stunned by it; I eavesdropped on assorted conversations as they were leaving, which were variations on a general theme of “why the hell hasn’t that been part of the world cinema canon for decades”?

[49CHOMPS]

The making-if documentary is especially exciting.

YouTube is terrible for searching for any interview of Has. Between all of the Yellow Veil releases, I was beginning to believe there was no footage of the man.

[Orlac]

In my school library, we had a copy of the 1976 book Science Fiction Movies by Philip Strick, and the picture of the scantily clad maidens from this movie (plus Valerie Perrine from Slaughterhouse Five) meant the book was very popular with the lads!