The Saragossa Manuscript, one of the great masterpiecesof Eastern European cinema, is a story without end-a closed loop that begins withghosts and the supernatural, proceeds with a series of strange evanescentexperiences, and finishes where it began, with rousing derring-do and spookymagic. These are the picaresque adventures of a young nobleman of the seventeenthcentury, who encounters phantoms, spirits, fiery Gypsies, and dreamlike maidensof all sorts. The film is a baroque fantasy based on a collection of bizarrestories under the same title by one Jan Potocki, a peripatetic nobleman whoselife was as strange as his book. Not available in decades, this cult classic isnow presented in a glorious new black-and-white cinemascope print in the PFACollection.-Dennis Jakob