"The Saragossa Manuscript" (1965)

A manuscript found in Saragossa. In Saragossa a film found in a manuscript. In a film a manuscript found in Saragossa. = The premise's plain as a moonlit skull's lucid. = 'Film as literature.' = Or: 'Literature as film' (?) = A relapse of loci woven into the cyclical. (A turn of events, like a trick. = turn of a card. = a turn of phrase; a turn in converse, or the camera pan.) Alphonse van Worden, Walloon Guard, en route to Madrid, never reaches Madrid. La Venta Quemada, again. A group of inquisitors wait for van Worden, their black hoods woven into the fabric of the Sierra Morena & its dry heat & shadowspeak. Instead capture a geometer, Don Pedro Velasquez. Who knows the cabbalist, Don Pedro Uzeda, & his loveliest sister Dona Rebecca. Listen to the gypsy king - Don Avadoro, - as he knits your brows with parables. In the parables are high windows that byway of a ladder lead to either a scandalous lady's bedroom or Don Toledo's amorous villa; but Toledo hears a ghost spell forth the rites of penance, and to penance he goes; the disreputable lady catches sight of her murdered lover whose bloody tete and broad toothy grin pull her sighs and heaving breasts toward the windowpane to which he clings; & love she makes. For spaniards penance enlaces the act of sex - the sex proceeds from a hearty spumy penance, in which interlaced are foretold temptations & curses that cry out from desolate spumedry valleys. Two bandit brothers were hung by where the Guadalquivir graces the parched plain, and at night, when it's cool as wine & rain, are controlled by flesheating ghosts. ('Las gitanas de la Sierra Morena quieren carne de hombres.') Alphonse van Worden, Walloon Guard, en route to Madrid, never reaches Madrid... (Krzysztof Penderecki's score underlines a rendition of a fantastic XVIII cent. polishspeaking Spain set to postmodern rhythms.) ...La Venta Quemada, again. van Worden's father, pitiful duelist & man of easy slights, sells his soul to a moordevil of a woman; after which he miraculously becomes a master duelist. His son Alphonse, engendered by a demonseed, comes to biblically know his cousins at the darkest hour, the princesses Emina & Zibelda, following on the promise of Sheik Gomelez' genealogy. Pacheco the demoniac falls in love with his father's wife's sister; his mother-in-law falls in love with him. Pacheco and van Worden have more in common than demons have with corpse love & skull chalices: neither could refuse a succubus, much less two. The road from Andujar to Madrid is long; the range that parts Andalusia and La Mancha even greater. In one story is another that leads to yet another: the gitano Avadoro builds a mansion of stories in which dwell three other characters who build rooms within rooms of stories. = van Worden's story is only an account of other stories, other locations, other characters. = In himself he is nothing, as a writer cannot help to be when swallowed up by an abandoned book whose pages magnetise two warring enemies to pause and pore over an interrupted destiny, in the midst of the napoleonic wars. = A relapse of loci woven into the cyclical. = Like a card turned over, the king's oneeyed, the queen a harpy; their faces in the mirror: faces in the fatamorgana of a death foretold by flesheaters. (If) Alphonse van Worden, Walloon guard, en route to Madrid, never reaches Madrid (then the kabbalist's the author of a mystical book outlining the decline of an illustrious nobleman's life in 66 days that the cursed Walloon Guard remembers reading in the kabbalist's library, and of which the contents he dictates to Conde Jan Potocki, who in turn writes it out - in that courtly eloquence of his - to amuse his ailing wife, but whose manuscript is not published in his lifetime, only to be found buried in the black-and-white sandgrains of the film Wojciech Has realised over 150 years later - with as much virtual success as Pierre Menard accomplished when he wrote the authentic Quixote.) In this case neither the film nor the manuscript stand as better or worse, neither success nor failure. = Coextensions of the same reproduction whose original author is lost in the pure mechanics of the medium. = Literature as film; film as a manifestation of the literary... La Venta Quemada, again.