The Saragossa Manuscript

This three-hour swirl of Polish phantasmagoria, from 1965, is an epic piece of japery; it celebrates visions and magic by means of labyrinthine storytelling.

The director's eye for baroque black-and-white imagery puts him behind only Bava and Welles, while the film's sharp social satire gives heft to its ambition.

By any standard, a long strange trip.

Infus[es] a similar unearthly cadenceo the swashbuckling genre that Jodorowski did to the western with El Topo.

These trials suggest a goofy, sprawling, all-purpose allegory so overstuffed with symbolism that it plays as a kind of epic spoof of the form.

In terms of narrative technique, The Saragossa Manuscript represents a triumph of Baroque wit combined with Surrealist imagery. A master of digressive technique, Has is never afraid of losing himself or the audience in his mould-breaking visual poems.

One comes away from viewing the film ultimately impressed by the power of imagination in nearly all aspects of life.

Has reaches the epitome of his dazzling talent for warping cinematic time in this three hour epic, a giddy, almost unclassifiable work with elements from such disparate genre works as "The Brides of Dracula" to swashbucklers and European sex farces.

I do not hesitate to call "The Saragossa Manuscript" a masterpiece in every way.

Derived from a hundred-sixty-year-old novel written in French, Wojciech Has's 1965 Edinburgh and San Sebastin prize-winning 'The Saragossa Manuscript' is in beautiful black and white