What happened in Zaragoza?
Count Jan Potocki wrote a story between 1805 and 1815 that he called
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. The story puts
Inception and
Atonement to shame in its use of nested tales: there is a framing story, but there are stories within stories, all of which crisscross and reference each other, sometimes dramatically, and sometimes humorously. It's recursive to an almost ridiculous, mind-bending degree, and it plays with reality a lot with its use of dream sequences and spells. Due to the disappearance of the ancient Greek nested-tale comedy epic
Ta hyper Thoulen apista ("The Wonders Beyond Thule") by Antonios Diogenes,
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is probably the best extant and cleverest such story we know of. In the 1960s, Wojciech Hus filmed the story, and remarkably managed to capture a great deal of what made it so neat despite only a three-hour run time. It became known in the West during the 1990s, in significant part due to Martin Scorsese, and has been available on DVD for the past ten or so years. I watched it as part of an undergraduate class on the Greek comedies some years ago.
Although most of the story happens in Iberia, the Zaragoza manuscript part goes back to the siege of the city during the Napoleonic Wars. A soldier fighting in the city rushes into a house, where he happens to see a book on a reading stand. Ignoring the rest of the fighting around him, and intrigued by the pictures on it - men on a gallows and women in a bed - he brings it over to a table and starts to read. An enemy soldier follows him and tries to apprehend him, but notices that the name of his own ancestor, Alfonso van Worden, a member of the Walloon Guard, is on the book. They soon lose themselves in Alfonso's recounting of his own life, and then of the stories of some others he became associated with.
It's definitely a mindscrew of the first order, but a fun film, especially if you're into puzzles.
