The Delicate Touch of Surrealism in The Saragossa Manuscript

by Iwona Grodz

Iwona Grodz lives in Poland, wrote a doctoral thesis on Wojciech Has and studies film, plastic arts and literature.

“All is imagination-dependent and it is through imagination that all reveals itself” – so wrote Louis Aragon (Le Paysan de Paris). Undoubtedly, Wojciech Has could subscribe to these words as well. It is also for him that reality was a mere impulse able to impregnate imagination with most bizarre images. Just like in the surrealists’ case, to The Noose’s author the world appeared through sensations, impressions and vibrations. A pure rational cognition was not important. Therefore, Has often went beyond the limits of human imagination in his films. Sometimes the “sidestepping” from the human self was supported by the literature he adapted, just to mention The Saragossa Manuscript by Jan Potocki, Bruno Schulz’s prose (descriptions taken from a story entitled The Spring call to mind the process of watching moving pictures on the screen) or Les Tribulations heroiques de Balthasar KoberbyFrédérick Tristan; at other times it was his artistic imagination and a general outlook on the film which is primarily the materialization of dream visions as put by the author of The Sandglass.

The surrealistic system of reference clearly is not the only system relevant for setting the right research perspective for the assessment of film output of Wojciech Has. One shall not ignore the expressionism of the director’s early works nor his attitude to tradition: the aesthetics of baroque, romanticism, symbolism and, last but not least, modernism.

Working on his debut The Noose, Has claimed he was ready to acquiesce to the picture’s expressionistic ontology only assuming that it be “surrealism-filtrated expressionism (1) ”. He stressed that the surrealists’ vision fascinated him ever since, in his youth he “devoured” their poetry. Therefore, “the changes to a story introduced by Hłaski followed this very direction” (2) . In so saying, he pointed to a clear, albeit covert at limes, cohesion of his films’ artistic dimension. It is also Konrad Eberhardt who maintained that ”Wojciech J. Has is an author wrapped in a cocoon of his likings, obsessions and fascinations. It seems he is a creator of the only film constantly filled with new supplements, with newly discovered inspirations drawn from such discrepant authors” (3) . In this context, surrealism turned out to be this very “binding agent”.

Wojciech Has Among Surrealists

So as to understand the essence of surrealistic genesis of the films by Wojciech J. Has (including The Saragossa Manuscript), one needs to resort to his biography and declarations in which not often though definitely the director opted for the surrealistic vision of reality. In an interview conducted by Maria Kornatowska he confessed that he ”was brought up on surrealism” (4) . He claimed that ”<<realism>> is by all means a general notion as it embraces both surrealism and socrealism” (5) . Therefore, he tried not to put his films in the context of realism.

He would read André Breton’s manifestoes (particularly those on painting which said ”the eye exists in a savage state” (6) as put by the top French surrealist), the poetry by Louis Aragon, Jean Arp, Paul Eluard, and last but not least, the most “film-like” by Robert Desnos. Jerzy Skarżyński – the set designer for many of his films – pointed to Has’s fascination with the surrealistic painting particularly by Max Ernst, Salvador Dali or André Masson. Meanwhile, Konrad Eberhardt wrote about a bilateral interest of Has and Buñuel. The Spanish artist even went on to rank The Saragossa Manuscript among top ten best films he had ever seen (My last sigh ).

In Cracow Has met Polish artists whose interest in surrealism cannot be overlooked. The group included Tadeusz Brzozowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Jadwiga Jarema and Jerzy Skarżyński. The members of ” The Cracow Group” believed in the experiment and surrealism with its flagship slogan “imagination to power”. The painting of the Polish version of surrealism is dominated by a poetic metaphor. Often the “theatricality” of the art is brought up in the sense that it more and more “deserts the picture” for the sake of poetry and set design. Like Has, the surrealists also combined modernism, the heritage of the Young Poland’s bohemians and the tradition of romanticism.

Surrealism Of Set Design – Lidia and Jerzy Skarżyński

It is worth taking a closer look at the work of the set designer, Jerzy Skarżyski, and of his wife Lida, both of whom had dealt with the artistic organization of a theatre stage before they turned to set design for Has’s films. Zenobiusz Strzelecki noted that ”in surrealism the set designers found illusion and the world of fantasy” (7) . Surrealism brought back the illusionist dimension, perspective, “falsified, grand and mysterious space” to the theatre and film performance. The elements characteristic for surrealistic set design also include window-empty houses, apartments with torn tapestry, empty tunnels, corpse-like trees, characters dressed in superb albeit rotting costumes, a fantastic and frightful world. What is more, surrealism also implemented a metaphysical element, it alluded some kind of spiritual world, it introduced new symbols such as windows and trees hanging in mid-air. The latter is one of new signs in art, a symptom of surrealistic formal plot – levitation ushered in by the works of Marc Chagall. Features vital for surrealist stage design also manifest themselves by abandoning the representation of plot setting and historical dress, by disintegration of space and costume, by deformities and building up dramatic apprehension.

The Manuscript by Has contains a scene in which Alfonsa van Worden looking out of the window can see princesses and a mirror frame floating in mid-air in a distance. It was obviously earlier so that artists painted flying creatures which carried a symbolic meaning, however, as Zenobiusz Strzelecki noted, „this right was denied to a clock, a cow or a nag drawing a cart” (8) . It was only surrealism with the world so close to subconsciousness that granted to everything and to everybody the right to float above the ground, thus, the right of artistic metaphor.

Just like in Has’s films, in surrealism stage accessories became the characters. For instance, surrealism had numerous means (identical with those used in The Manuscript) to evoke the “macabre” atmosphere, including death’s heads, crossbones, rotten attire, dummies, mechanisms, etc.

Surreality has developed a perfect method also for the creation of costumes. First and foremost, the principle of coincidence, association, surprising juxtapositions provided abundance of invention and adaptation both to the type as well as to the peculiarity of the drama. Costumes’ deformity was yet another characteristic component shown through an excessive size of elements or details, their multiplication, unexpected combination.

Moreover, ”surrealistic being” is conceived in the film by means of editing, due to the use of close-ups and due to surprising appearances in the frame. Notwithstandig, “the surrealist image does not head for allegory. Its function is the creation of tension resulting from a constant negation of the potential, the expected and the possible” – so wrote François de la Breteque (9) . It has to be borne in mind that the surrealistic discord is not traced back to baroque as surrealism implies the opposite to the normal, the natural and the commonplace.

One of the first theatres to find interest in the surrealist world of drama and fine art was the Cracow puppet theatre ”Groteska” (“Grotesque”) headed by Władysław Jarema. The surrealistic world was created here by fine artists: Kazimierz Mikulski, Lidia and Jerzy Skarżyński. Therefore, the Skarżyńskis’ set design is the best example of surrealist vision of reality. Their work, including The Manuscript by Has, took advantage of the whole array of surrealist techniques such as a precise definition of form, lumpiness of space, a tendency to apply torn tapestry (e.g. fabric scraps on bushes in Los Hermanos Valley), putting costumes together from partial, intuitively combined elements. Manifestations of the latter are seen in Has’s The Manuscript , be it in the princesses’ oriental costumes or the Polish Rider’s (lisowczyk’s) cap.

Both in decorations, as well as in costumes there govern composition regime, purity of concept, order of forms and colours. It stems from ”the Skarżyńskis’ surrealism being their own to a large degree: clear, precise, often graphic, always smart. Also intellectual, poetic, thus full of meanings and signs, metaphors” (10) . It coincides with the director’s visions all the more that their unity, identity with an artistic shape of The Manuscript is so striking.

Imagination

Coming out against the ”captivity of mind”, André Breton claimed freedom could only be achieved through the materialization of imagination. Therefore, an attempt to break out of the magic circle of ”what is” was his first step towards the unknown. Rejecting the rights of schematic perception coming down to the revelation of phenomena in the cause-and-effect order, in their topicality, the surrealists strived to focus on still unveiled aspects of each phenomenon. In their opinion, imagination first and foremost had the power to surpass contradictions, antimonies holding the mind captive. It allowed to see differently what others can see, or to see the invisible. It provided the “leading thread” enabling to explore the extrasensual, spiritual reality.

The Saragossa Manuscript by Wojciech J. Has was also described as a peculiar materialization of illusions. Unlike many other directors, Has did not venture to find a “key” to the contemporary time. According to Maria Malatyńska, “his films are aesthetically detached from the experience of reality” (11) .

This ”materialization of imagination” is to a degree connected with the theatricality of Saragossa. Konrad Eberhardt pointed out that The Manuscript ”to some extent a theatrical, consistently conventional, a costume and actor performance”. Meanwhile, Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz wrote that it is already the ”IX Symphony quotation that elucidates the type of this work’s conventionality” (12) .

The literal comprehension of the ”materialization of imagination” gave rise to most bizarre forms filling the canvas of surrealists: Salvador Dali, Max Ernst or Josef Ister. Let me refer to a picture by the latter entitled Extasy, as it is akin to ephemeral and fantastic shapes portrayed by Jerzy Skarżyński’s drawings from The Manuscript‘s front scene.

The logics of released imagination were described in the context of René Magritte’s output. Magritte harnesses its perfectly mastered skills to the service of imaginative art’s fundamentals. René Passeron wrote: „Realistic painting he clings to helps him, more than any other, to create an illusion (...)” (13) . Has acted in a similar fashion, he never really went beyond reality, he only discovered its other side. He supplied the comonplaceness with as if mythical dimension, he expressed the surrealism of reality.

Ontological categories of surrealistic outlook on life are tightly connected with aesthetic categories. Thus, surreal notions of horror (le horreur), marvel (le merveilleux), surprise (le surprise), strangeness (l’étrangeté), lived to their artistic implementation in The Saragossa Manuscript by Has.

Horror

Similarly to Has, surrealists promoted a vision of world filled with horrific and mysterious phenomena. In The One Hundred-Headed Woman series by Max Ernst, e.g. monstrous cocks arrange a human-hunt and human-shaped snakes crawl out from dark corners so as to attack frightened chamber maid, staid matrons, etc. The painter’s works were desribed by Krystyna Janicka in her book entitled Surrealizm: ”Juggling freely (...) with the elements of reality, juxtaposing them in a manner least expected, the artist deepens the process of art’s depersonalization, he spreads the limits of arbitrariness in the picture’ s construction and he achieves often unprecedented visual effects. What prevails here is the effect of horror and incredibility obtained through the alienation of reality’s fragments from their usual surrounding or context and their juxtaposition with other ready elements in a manner defying the laws of nature” (14) . Has acts in a similar fashion in Saragossa while he locates e.g. bulls’ skulls in different spaces in order to bring out the atmosphere of horror and picturesqueness. Bones and skeletons appearing in the film may also resemble representations from Salvador Dali’s paintings (e.g. The Face Of War) or Luis Buñuel’s films.

Horror, the mystery with surrealists and in The Manuscript is furthermore connected with the interest in occultism, cabbala, Paracelsus and esoteric knowledge in general. Krystyna Janicka wrote about the convergence of some aspects of the surrealist thought with the assumptions of esoterism and magic. She pointed that e.g. Breton’s writings contain such names as Hermes (Trismegistos), Cabbala, Tarot, Nicolas Flemel, Abraham Jew, the Book of Zohar, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Joachim de Fioris (15) .

The surrealist horror, like that from Jan Potocki’s novels and Wojciech J. Has’s film (a grotesque representation of a skeleton) is coloured with irony and black humour, the latter used by surrealists as a tool of criticism towards “the conventional mental mechanism”, endowing everything with grotesque character.

Marvel

Marvel is a passionate unification of the real with the surreal. André Breton maintained that ”the surrender to marvel is the only source of eternal communion among people” (16) . Marvel aimed to ”subordinate a set of phenomena going beyond common sense interpretative patterns of a work of art and generally to look for its exemplification in the domain of artistic phenomena” (17) . Surrealistic art always created marvelous atmosphere so as not to completely breach the work’s logics. What comes out here is clear convergence with the atmosphere in Has’s The Manuscript and with apparently accidentally selected stories which give evidence of a logical and coherent truth about the repetitiveness of human fate.

The category of ”marvel” was visually realized in all of the film’s events taking place in a mysterious cave (particularly when Alfons meets his double), in a scene in which, through the auberge’s window, he sees princesses calling at him, also by the gallows.

Surprise and strangeness

Barbara Mruklik thus stressed the effect of surprise evoked by Has’s film: ”(It is) a film which attacks the viewer with a multitude of extraordinary situations imbued with outright swarming surprises, unexpected turns of events and metamorphoses of individual characters. At the same time, a superproduction far from any possible templates, in a way leading the viewer astray: offering him characters’ sketches, incorporeal phantoms, flamboyant interiors and caves being concomitantly nothing else but a peculiar mirage vanishing at an attempt of closer inspection” (18) .

The effect of strangeness which evokes surprise is attained both by surrealists and Has through the choice of real elements and juxtaposing them on completely different principles. An example is the use of the Polish Rider’s cap or contemporary make-up in the film. It brings about blurring the antymony and it prompts the discovery of analogy between distant phenomena. Therefore, surrealism of The Manuscript, is first and foremost about taking by surprise our inborn mechanisms of world perception.

Dream and poetry melted in the work of art

One of the ways to break out of established patterns of perception is, in the surrealists’ opinion, a more profound reflexion upon the essence of a dream. That is why dream became their subject of art, which is particularly visible in the works of Giorgio de Chirico. They center around towns in sleep enveloped in mysterious mist, show the sorrow and melancholy of late nights, enigmatic afternoons of reflexive dusks.

The onirism of Wojciech J. Has’s films was stressed by the critics since his debut. In the case of The Noose, the comments focused on ”a ghastly dream that life is” when led by an alcohol addict. On the other hand, a visionary character of The Manuscript was brought up by Jan Słodowski in a chapter with a telling title of Oniryzm i fantastyka, czyli ktoś w świecie nadrealnym (Onirism and fantasy, which is somebody in the surreal) (19) . Konrad Eberhardt pointed out that the film was ”a world from dreams. (...) (It) preserves external shapes, forms, but it is in fact a mirage, a projection of somebody’s imagination” (20) . Therefore, a materialized artistic vision of metaphysical mystery imbuing with apprehension, melancholy, even horror, manifesting itself through the scenes of Alfons’s awakening at the gallows or his meetings with princesses, is a transparent example of surreal theory of dream.

A poetic look at the reality is yet another similarity to the surrealist vision of Has, whose film was thus defined by Jan Słodowski: ”Saragossa is an attempt at film poetry” (21) , The whole Manuscript is in a way permeated by poetry which is connected with the metaphoricalness of image, of some dialogues, of a particular construction of set design, etc. Therefore, a surrealistic principle defined by René Passeron: ”Surrealist painting (...) was subject to the primary surrealist dictate so that anything a human does in art, language, or even politics, should be poetry” (22) , could as well apply to Saragossa.

Convulsive beauty

André Breton described the convulsive beauty as ”being at the same time erotic and hidden, exploding and still, magical and ”circumstantial”. Thus, the convulsive beauty is both erotica and petrified explosion. Of importance is also the ”circumstantial magic” which discovers beauty in inanimate objects. For instance, the surrealists loved “locomotives overgrown by a virgin forest”. What is more, it was supposed to become a visual equivalent of an age-long fight between Eros (life) and Tanatos (death), and primarily, the evidence for the possibility of combining contradictory elements of reality.

The most evident manifestation of convulsive beauty in The Manuscript by Wojciech Has is the succession of the following: meetings with the princesses (Eros), awakening at the gallows (Tanatos) or the cameleon-like changeability of atmosphere, also the typically Has’s accessories encompassing dusty, spider webbed objects of mysterious origin (skulls, caskets, books, etc.).

Confusion and Viscosity

The concept of convulsive beauty and a dream is related to the surrealistic category of confusion manifesting itself through a large number of objects amassed on canvas (cf. Yves Tanguy) or through the representation of spider forms (cf. Salvador Dali, André Masson). In the film by Wojciech Has it takes on a form of a casket composition. Many a critic have pointed to this uniqueness of The Manuscript.

Casketness, the emergence of new shapes from old forms are also close to specific representations of surrealists as exemplified by Max Ernst’s Long Live Love or Pays Charmant which surprisingly resembles Jerzy Skarżyński’s drawing from the The Manuscript‘s front scene (a shape emerging one from the other).

”Confusion” in Saragossa also pertains to a sensation of frowst and besetment brought on by a condensation of elements in the picture, ”Has’s panopticum of matter” (23) . Hence, the richness of spaces constructed by the set designer resemble – as Anna Marzec wrote – ”luxuriant flora exuberating in deserted places and on the cemeteries” (24) .

The surrealist category of confusion is well linked with viscosity, another formal plot in surrealism. In painting it is expressed by opposition to neo-cubistic angularity. In Has’s film it is particularly visible in the meander shape of Los Hermanos Valley, the cave, the cabalist’s castle and a wavy line of lights (a scene immediately preceding Alfons’s parents’ wedding night and van Worden talking with Rebecca in the cabalist’s castle) which resembles the spider forms from Max Ernst’s or André Masson’s paintings in the way they roam as if rocked by recurrent waves on a calm beach.

”The Eye”

Surrealists urged to look differently at an already familiar reality, to discover its unknown dimension. The symbol of the desire for cognition was a representation of an eye which very often appears on surrealists’ paintings. It also concerned the metaphoric of sight as a way to discover the new world, in other words, ”an invisible vision in eternal mystery”.

The eye motif appears in The Saragossa Manuscript on the front page drawing by Jerzy Skarżyński, and in the text itself as Paszek’s gauged eye. This character’s blindness is justified by the film’s contents (resulting from an adaptation of Jan Potocki’s book), however, it may carry yet another meaning. What speaks to the latter, is the appearance of an eye in the front scene, the fact that it is often to be seen (quite off the plot) in the director’s other films, e.g. The Sandglass, it also corresponds to an identical visual motif from Luisa Buñel’s The Andalusian Dog.

Analyzing The Andalusian Dog, Linda Williams wrote that the violence towards an eye may symbolize violence towards the viewer (25) , and as such, forcing him to discover the “other vision”. That is why, to my mind, the emphasis put on the scene of eye-gauging and the blindness of one of the Has’s film’s characters is not only due to a faithful adaptation of Jan Potocki’s book or an attempt to introduce a dreadful element for the sake of sheer ”aesthetic pleasure”, but, similarly to the Spanish surrealist’s film, it is an attempt to point to Alfons (and indirectly, to the viewer) the existence of other than sensual cognitive capacity.

Window And Mirror

”...I cannot see a picture differently than as a window. A question turns up instantly – what does the window overlook, in other words, if the ”view is beautiful” from my perspective and what I like the most is what stretches out ahead of me up to where the sight cannot reach more”.

(André Breton)

A typically surrealist attempt to break out of the magic circle of ”what is” was given a perfect visual equivalent in Has’s film in the scenes of looking out of the window or fixing one’s eyes in the mirror. This obsession of the director was noticed a long before, even in a documentary on his artistic output Ze snu sen (A dream out of a dream) the director is only shown while looking out of the window.

In The Saragossa Manuscript the most representative scene is that in the cave in which Alfons sees his double in the mirror and when he notices the auberge’s princesses for the last time. Tadeusz Sobolewski pointed out that ”the mirror sheet is a boundary between art and the nonsense of human life”. While looking in the mirror, Alfons immerses himself into the unreal world. Van Worden on the other hand, sees through auberge window the princesses calling at him in a downright surrealistic scenery made up of dead animals’ bodies hanging out around as if in a slaughterhouse (similarity to Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox, 1655), there is also a visual motif connected with a surrealistic formal motif, levitation, in the form of a mirror floating in mid-air. This location of an object in empty space, symbolic of window, door as a kind of a threshold, limit of cognition, have all already appeared on René Magritte’s A Haunted Place.

Due to an application of this artistic motif, Has symbolically rejected in The Saragossa Manuscript the laws of schematic perception boiling down to a revelation of phenomena in cause-and-effect order. Just like the surrealists, he ventured to concentrate on still unveiled aspects of every phenomenon. To reach ”where the sight cannot reach more”.

”So far just squeezing into the cracks of Has-created world, here [in The Manuscript] fiction, dream and imagination win the upper hand and subordinate the character” (26) . In Maria Kornatowska’s view, The Saragossa Manuscript and The Sandglass are the fullest and the most profound statement of Has’s vision of things and phenomena, of the ”single rhetoric alchemically consolidating life and death, reality and dream, fiction and the real” (27) . It is in this film that the artist was much close to ”touching” another reality, this delicate touch of ”invisible vision in eternal mystery” André Breton wrote about.

Translated by Anna Matysiak

Notes

1. Debiuty polskiego kina, editor-in-chief: M. Hendrykowski, Konin 1998, p. 66.

2. Ibidem, p. 66.

3. K. Eberhardt, Sny sprzed potopu, ” Kino” 1973, No. 12.

4.Debiuty polskiego kina, op. cit.

5. I. Stanisławska, Dużo dziwnych wątków, ”Film” 1997, No. 7.

6. A. Breton, Surrealizm i malarstwo (1928), [in:] Surrealizm. Teoria i praktyka literacka. Antologia, editor-in-chief: A. Ważyk, Warszawa 1976, pp. 110-116.

7. Z. Strzelecki, Współczesna scenografii polska, Warszawa 1984.

8. Ibidem.

9. F. Breteque, W zwierzęcej skali. Przyczynek do kinowego bestiariusza surrealistów, translated by M. Oleksiewicz, ”Film na Świecie”, 1981, No. 11.

10. Z. Strzelecki, Współczesna scenografia polska, op. cit.

11. M. Malatyńska, Twórca uwiedziony literaturą, ”Kino” 1978, No. 1, pp. 10-17.

12. K. T. Toeplitz, Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie, ”Świat” 1965, No. 7, pp. 4-5.

13. P. Mróz, Surrealizm a filozofia. André Bretona przygoda z nadrzeczywistym, Kraków 1998.

14. J. Janicka, Surrealizm, Warszawa 1985, p. 63.

15. K. Janicka, Światopogląd surrealizmu. Jego założenia i konsekwencje dla teorii twórczości i teorii sztuki, Warszawa 1985, p. 137.

16. Cf. P. Mróz, Surrealizm a filozofia, op. cit.

17. Ibidem.

18. B. Mruklik, Polski barok Wojciecha Hasa, ”Ekran” 1965, No. 7.

19. J. Słodowski, T. Wijata, Rupieciarnia marzeń, Warszawa 1993, p. 34.

20. K. Eberhardt Wojciech Has, Warszawa 1967, p. 11-13.

21. J. Słodowski, Oniryzm i fantastyka, czyli w świecie nadrealnym, op. cit., pp. 28-30.

22. R. Passeron, Encyklopedia surrealizmu, translated by K. Janicka, Warszawa 1997.

23. Jan Słodowski, Rupieciarnia marzeń, op. cit.

24. A. Marzec, Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą, ”Wiadomości Kulturalne”, 1995, No. 43, p. 9.

25. Cf. I. Kolasińska, Estetyka wynaturzeń i obsesja rozkładu – obraz ciała w filmach Luisa Buñuela, ”Kwartalnik Filmowy”, 2000, No. 29-30, pp. 114-134.

26. K. Eberhardt, W Hiszpanii, czyli nigdzie, [in:] Wojciech Has, op. cit.

27. M. Kornatowska, ...Lecz nie wiem, co się z nami stanie. O twórczości Wojciecha Hasa, [in:] Kino polskie w dziesięciu sekwencjach, editor-in-chief: E. Nurczyńska-Fidelska, Łódź 1996, pp. 41-42.

The Saragossa Manuscript

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