Sanatorium pod Klepsydra

Did I watch this film or did I dream it. This may be your initial response after watching "the Hourglass Sanatorium". Those who are fans of Fellini, Jodorowsky, Peter Greenaway and Andrej Zulawski will feel right at home. Originally the film was based on a novel, and the story deals with a man who takes a train to see his sick father at a sanatorium. The sanatorium feels Gothic and abandoned. Time seems to be non existent there. Since time has slowed down the father goes on living and the son gets lost in the many rooms of the sanatorium. His journey is as comical as it is frightening. Memories and history become reality and the main character walks throughout many strange scenarios from the past and from his childhood. A simple action like crawling under a bed, can transfer him to a different time and place. Among the strange images in the film which are the most breathtaking are, the Jewish Rabbis breaking out into a song number, people who are part human and part wax figures, dead zombie like soldiers, people in strange bird masks, elephants, and odd philosophical discussions. This is one movie that is so complex and confusing that if you miss 1 minute (or even if you don't miss anything) you'll feel lost. After the film was over, I was left scratching my head; it was like I had just woken up from a bizarre dream. This is one of the most breathtakingly surreal film experiences I have ever had. Film is a visual art, so words can't come close to describing "the Hourglass Sanitorium". You have to see it for yourself!

At the day of writing this, the great Chilean filmmaker Raoul Ruiz passed away. This is dedicated to him - a film, I like to think, he would have loved.

This is an exceptional film that I will cherish for a number of reasons. It's the kind of film I'm looking for, that places consciousness within itself to give us actual in-sight of our place in the world of narratives.

For afar, it is a little like Jodorowsky; the heavy, symbolist system visualized inside a cacophony. But it ventures freely beyond the threshold where Jodorowsky (and most filmmakers) barely fumbled; it is a story about unconscious stories about the broader metaphysical narrative from which they flow and illustrate.

It begins with the promise of a journey, a common motif in early myth; a man's symbolic descent in the underworld in search of his father. But a little preamble.

The narrative of the understanding is one after you abstract. It has been fractured from the one into many, according to the provincial peculiarities of human experience, yet taken together each of the symbolic motifs or shadowy shapes that comprise it, insinuate the same fabric of the experienced world. The same images, the same narratives, seem to bubble forth in almost identical repetition, as though something in the soul calls out for them.

Two observations further elucidate this. In the places that ancient cities were built like temples, with clearly defined pattern that reflected above (usually in circles), denizens lived within the dimensions of their symbol. They were situated directly inside the blueprint of their cosmology, one they had constructed to reflect the cosmos.

The reverse of this is the mandala of the Buddhists, as sacred space for the concentration of the mind. The image was not the painted sum of its counterparts, but a way of passage. Meditations practiced on this symbol are directed from the symbolic world into the world at large; so that, outside the temple, the entire world becomes a support for meditation.

On a deeper level, both these describe the same thing; the spiritual effort of aligning a center inside with something outside, so that the cycles of life become one. Can we say this is the forgotten knowledge? Modern life is scattered in the chaos of ever-changing peripheries. We build - and live - in random.

So this is what the filmmaker does. Our man, having embarked on his inner journey, is constantly frustrated by the apparent randomness of the world he participates in. He turns for guidance to a child, an inner child who is his heir in the dreamlike underworld, holding a book filled with stamps about places - a book of names and forms that symbolically encompasses the totality of the catalogued world; but there is no answer there, meaning another world extends from our catalogue of it which cannot be fully accounted for.

From inside his limited perspective in the fictional world, the protagonist is baffled, exasperated for meaning. But we, observing from a vantage point, can recognize first pattern, and then that the protagonist, who seems to himself to be a hapless stooge, to be the one creating the narrative.

It is stunning stuff if you contemplate it a little. There are, of course, the notions about nested stories. The journey that transports across different levels of symbolic life; there is the place where history is a gallery of the pliable, lifeless mannequins of famous persons; elsewhere, language is shown to be the random teetering of birds.

Above all, there is the world, the space of human experience limited by reason; our symbolic translation in terms of a graven image, passage for meditation; our understanding of the image as applicable to both the personal and cosmic cycles (being-nonbeing, light-dark) and the meaning of those cycles within the larger cycle of sentience that observes them; and finally, the threshold once crossed and returned from, the unbound sentience now effortlessly understands all these things to be emanations of the one source.

Having aligned all these cycles, the film is - at every point - at the center of each and all. A beautiful thing.

The late Polish director Wojceich Has is better known for his amazing "The Saragosa Manuscript" which has a Chinese box structure of nested stories. However, this film (known to english audiences as "The Sandglass"), tops its predecessor in fantastic imagery. Based on several stories of Bruno Schultz, this film might be the most successful recreation of the inner psyche ever commited to celluloid.

A man journeys by dilapidated train (where most of the passengers look like corpses) to visit his ailing father who is kept in a crumbling ornate sanatorium. He is told by a doctor that time exists differently there and his dying father may recover. The man experiences a flood of dreamlike visions of his past and the small Jewish town he was raised in. The father is seen both ill and as a giddy philosopher in an attic full of birds. At some point we get the creeping sensation that it is the man himself who is dying, not the father as a blind train conductor reappears like a death figure. The increasingly baroque episodes become the rich compost of a graveyard.

The film can also been seen as a requiem for the Eastern European Jewish culture that was wiped out by WW2. It isn't an accident that the protagonist is named Joseph and his father Jacob. Many of the films episodes evoke Jewish symbolism.

I've watched this film twice within the year now, and the first time, I'll admit, I was a little too overwhelmed to write a review for this movie. It left me both confused and completely enchanted, and I knew immediately that I wanted to watch the movie again, now knowing how the film would progress. Indeed, this is a movie that I feel like needs either two viewings or a bit of prior knowledge to fully appreciate. It's absolutely one of a kind when it comes to production design, story structure, even atmosphere and acting. This movie is a rabbit hole down which the viewer falls, and the first time through, it's difficult to take in everything, because there is so much going on. When I sat down to watch this for a second time I knew what to look for, I knew the general storyline, and I felt myself not only enjoying the film as a story a lot more, but I also found myself appreciating the cinematic tricks and imagery more too. This is not an easy film to watch- it requires thinking, patience, and a lot of imagination, but if you're a cinephile who likes movies in the same vein as Jodorowsky or have an interest in production design, this is a film you wont want to miss.

The movie has no typical narrative or storyline, it is just a series of surrealistic vignettes (surrounded by the framing of a sanatorium with a dying father and time moving differently). So it's all about "finding meaning" and interpretation and symbolism. There is also a heavy dosage of holocaust & judaica themes. For those that like this sort of movie, especially the "film school" and arthouse types, this may be an amazing film. For other movie goers this may be a huge bore and seem meaningless and pretentious. I am somewhere in the middle (and I have studied film and seen numerous "art house" films by choice). I generally found this boring, but appreciate the attempt and historical context.