La Clepsydre

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.

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!

Based on a story collection of the same name by Bruno Schulz, who was shot by the Gestapo in 1942, this movie is one of the rare cases of a congenial adaptation of modern fantastic literature. It's a demanding movie and it is impossible to extract something like a plot line. There are various changes in between time and space, but once you get involved with the narrative, they seem perfectly logical. Also, there are many highly impressive sequences and settings - i have read somewhere (i can't give no reference right now, sorry) that it was the most expensive movie ever made in Poland, and maybe it still is. It certainly is one of the best. And, by the way, there is one scene with a room stuffed full of mannequins that looks like an inspiration to a similar sequence in Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner", which is a great movie of its kind, but was made some years later and did much better at the box office.

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.

This is a film that will either absorb or exasperate, depending on one's temper. It mostly exasperated me, but many of its images have stayed with me, and I think viewers who have the patience for, say, Strindberg's "Dream Play" will enjoy its corkscrew narrative. Many may be amused, as I was, by the highly shadowed, highly colored Gothic decor but may have difficulty, as I did, staying the course. The synopsis above is slightly misleading on one count: The old man in the sanatorium is or would be dead in the real world, but his death would be financially inconvenient to the family and so his son is paying to have him kept in the enclosed world of the sanatorium, where time moves more slowly and he can stay alive indefinitely. The film begins like a horror movie, with the protagonist taking an eerily populated train to the ruined sanatorium. But once he's taken care of his business there both he and the story wander into a series of absurdist-picaresque adventures, set in scenes from his memory and imagination (apparently: some are quasi-historical, and his father appears in one of them as a young man). They grow and flower and intertwine with one another as they would in a dream or a reverie, until at last the protagonist arrives back where he started and finds out his fate after all. That seemed arbitrary to me; and why the place should have led him where it did, literally or symbolically, I don't really know; and to my taste the film is so boldly stated as to be a little cheap. But it still has a way of floating around inside the head for a long time after. And if enough people were interested enough by it, the process of identifying and interpreting its cornucopia of allusions and symbols could fuel a semester's worth of late-night discussions.