The Saragossa Manuscript.

"Magic potions, Inquisition torture, drunken revelries, voices from beyond the grave, erotic dreams, skull chalices, bosom-baring temptresses and a cast of 18th Century Spanish kooks including geometricians, thieves, demons and cabalists: it's none other than legendary The Saragossa Manuscript, Polish School iconoclast Wojciech Has's 1965 Chinese box epic, back in a new print and at its proper (but originally truncated) three-hour runtime." Michael Joshua Rowin celebrates in the L Magazine.

"This three-hour super-production - set during the Napoleonic Wars and shot in sumptuous wide-screen black-and-white - is a convoluted succession of stories-within-stories and dreams-within-dreams, with the rude awakening serving as its running gag," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "The Saragossa Manuscript first blew minds at the 1966 San Francisco Film Festival, attracting a New York hippie following six years later with a midnight run at the old Elgin theater." The film is, "by any standard, a long strange trip."

Updated through 4/5.

"By the time we're watching a story being related to us by another character in a story that was being told to us by a character in yet another story, who is part of a story being told to us by yet another character in the very first story, who was, after all, a character in a book being read in the bombed-out ruins of Saragossa, the feeling is akin to drowning in a ball of yarns," writes Grady Hendrix in the New York Sun. "But rather than coming off as a remote, overly intellectual exercise in audience bafflement, The Saragossa Manuscript is vitally alive - full of lovers, duelists, topless nuns, cowards, and magicians. Its veins run hot with black-and-white blood, and whenever a scene begins to drag, someone inevitably interrupts with, 'This reminds me of a story...'"

At BAM April 4 through 10.

Update, 4/5: Kevin Lee's dossier.

Posted by dwhudson at April 4, 2008 12:27 PM