While I’m not a big fan of the Grateful Dead, I’m eternally grateful to Jerry Garcia for saving “The Saragossa Manuscript.” Back in the 1960s when rock music, movies, drugs, and politics were one big, simmering witch’s brew, the Polish director Wojciech Has’s “The Saragossa Manuscript” screened at the San Francisco Film Festival.
Garcia saw it, fell in love, and bought a print which he gave to the Pacific Film Archive on the condition that they would screen it for him whenever he asked. Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola also fell under the film’s spell, and eventually they all raised money to have the print restored. The resulting three-hour “Saragossa Manuscript” will screening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the next week, and even a cynic will quickly see how it can seduce the unwary.
more from the NY Sun here.