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The Saragossa Manuscript

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

Add four or more of our September releases (The Inugami Family, Corruption, The Saragossa Manuscript, New Rose Hotel, Treasures from the Golestan Film Studio, Joe) to cart to receive 10% off. Discount automatically applied at cart. Ends July 8th.

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

Press:

"The thing to be savoured about The Saragossa Manuscript is its lack of irony and self-awareness; there is a kind of innocence and even refinement in the drama, even as it outrageously swerves off the beaten track of conventional storytelling." - Peter Bradshaw, Daily Telegraph

"This three-hour swirl of Polish phantasmagoria, from 1965, is an epic piece of japery... Wojciech Has sustains a sardonic, slaphappy tone; the elegantly modulated black-and-white cinematography, with tones ranging from bleached to silken, and the off-kilter compositions suggest that the director himself is sporting a death’s-head grin." - Michael Sragow, The New Yorker