Journey to the edge of consciousness: “The Hourglass Sanatorium” at the 2024 Samizdat Film Festival4 min read
The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) is an oneiric and elusive film, where the sacred and the profane flow interchangeably. Director Wojciech Jerzy Has, drawing on the legacy of Bruno Schulz’s surrealist prose, invites us on a journey which blurs the concepts of time and space with the ease of a mystical trickster.
From the opening scenes, The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) takes its audience into a dense atmosphere of fear and uncertainty. We watch Józef (Jan Nowicki) as he travels on a train driven by a blind conductor, sitting among the frozen figures of his fellow passengers. Józef’s destination is the mysterious Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, a bizarre, seemingly desolate place, filled with miasma, and overgrown with a thicket of wild plants. It is run by Doctor Gotard (Gustaw Holoubek), and is a place where, as a nurse informs Józef, “everyone is asleep.” Gotard leads Józef to his dying father Jakub (Tadeusz Kondrat), and announces that his death only occurred outside the confines of the centre, where time flows differently, suggesting that a reversal of Jakub’s quasi-inevitable death is possible.
Józef returns home, and ends up transported back to his childhood. He begins a surreal journey through a phantasmagorical Jewish town, and encounters his own father, who seems to be alive and well. Travelling through the space-time continuum, he runs into numerous other figures from his past, including Bianka, the girl he fantasised about in his youth, and the blind train conductor. Eventually, he awakens from this fanciful dream, and lands back at his father’s bedside in the liminal sanatorium.
In his last moments, Jakub complains of being lonely and regrets that his son had not visited him more often. He passes away, after which Józef puts on conductor’s clothes and gradually loses his sight, becoming the blind conductor encountered throughout the film. In this new persona, he walks through the town square, now full of graves, towards the land of the dead.
The Hourglass Sanatorium was produced as a homage to the prose of Bruno Schulz, a versatile Polish artist of Jewish origin who worked in the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, it is a film firmly rooted in a specific historical moment, made in the shadow of the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968.
That year, after a wave of student political protests at Warsaw University, the communist press began to accuse ‘Zionists’ of sabotage, which then led to a rise in anti-Semitic sentiment in society, eventually leading to active purges within the party apparatus, administration, and business.
Unable to gain the approval of the communist authorities, the film was only brought to a wider audience with a dose of cunning and bravado — it was secretly taken abroad by its German co-producer Manfred Durniok, who first took a copy back to his home country and then handed it over to the French. The clandestine operation ended in success, and the film was selected for the main competition at Cannes, where it won the Jury Prize. Has himself paid dearly for this misconduct, and was banned from directing for several years.
Much has already been written about the film itself, whose symbolism has been analysed in detail in film magazines and academic circles. The most striking aspect of the film, however, is the visually outstanding set design by Jerzy Skarżyński, captured in Witold Sobociński’s cinematography. It perfectly conveys the almost poetic atmosphere of magical realism present in Schulz’s short stories “Spring” and the eponymous “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass”, on which the film’s script is based.
The Jewish motifs that appear in Schulz’s prose have been recreated in the film, but also reinterpreted by the director — possibly influenced by the Galician writer’s own life story, in which he fell victim to German persecution and was shot by the Gestapo in his home town of Drohobycz on 19 November 1942.
References to the Shoah can be read in the first scene of Józef’s journey to the sanatorium, when he is mostly accompanied by Jews on the dilapidated train. A more explicit scene is the final one, in which the protagonist observes Jews fleeing through the streets with suitcases, as if in fear of being deported to concentration camps, or in fear of the post-March 1968 future that awaits them.
Inexplicably curved space-time, an escapist journey into childhood memories, and voluminous symbolism make it impossible to pigeonhole Wojciech Has’s work — it defies categorisation and lives a life of its own in the minds of stunned viewers after the screening. Józef’s journey through the meanders of his childhood is highly individual, making it difficult to identify emotionally with the sequence of events on screen. Nevertheless, the visual aspect and the complex story will certainly be appreciated by patient and demanding viewers, who will enjoy uncovering new interpretative tropes of this exceptional work of Polish cinematography — and may even find themselves on a journey into their own consciousness.
The Hourglass Sanatorium was screened in Scotland on 4 October as part of the 2024 Samizdat Film Festival.
