directed by Wojciech Has, 1973, 119 minutes.

Josef (Jan Nowicki) travels to an isolated sanatorium to visit his elderly father Jakub (Tadeusz Kondrat). There he learns that his father, along with the other inmates exists in a state of temporal stasis which defers his physical death. As Josef explores the Sanatorium dreams and memory become indistinguishable from waking life.

Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) is a literary celebrity in Poland. He is sometimes compared to Frank Kafka, but although Schulz had read and clearly enjoyed Kafka (in one of his tales the protagonist’s father is transformed into a crab) he has his own, distinctive voice. Both writers have a complicated relationship with their Jewish cultural heritage; their shared pool of imagery may include references to the sacred, but they are primarily secular writers, more comfortable with the works of Einstein and Freud than the Torah. Whereas Kafka is interested in the individual’s relationship to the state Schulz’s imaginative world is more intimate and enclosed. Schulz transmutes the ordinary into magic: A vagrant in an overgrown garden appears as the god Pan and during a long winter night a dowdy provincial town becomes a magical wonderland; charged with possibility. Schulz is intensely animistic, for him the most mundane household objects have a hidden life, even seasons are sentient. In his exquisitely crafted short stories everything is alive, and shines.

Director Woiciech Has directed ‘Saragossa Manuscript’ in 1965, an adaptation of Jan Potocki’s complex novel of nested, intertwined folk tales that blurs the lines between memory, fiction and history. This film became a favourite of LSD trippers whose altered consciousness appreciated the film’s intricate, hallucinogenic structure. With his keen interest in dreams and psychology Has proves a good creative match for the fictions of Bruno Schulz. ‘Hourglass Sanatorium’ matches his dreamlike prose as action and setting shift, seemingly at random. Has’ screenplay retains a close textual and thematic engagement with his source, taking dialogue directly from the page and packing the frame with visual references to Schulz’s stories.

Schulz made a living as an art teacher. His graphic work recalls the satirical eye of George Grosz and the expressionist line of Egon Schiele but has a more playful tone whereas his writing exhibits a lyricism that recalls the imagery of Marc Chagall.  Schulz’s etchings display a disarming and forthright fascination with dominant women, an interest that is personified in his writing as the flirtatious Adela (played in the film by Halina Kowalska). Like many visual artists who write fiction (for example Mervyn Peake) his work is vividly coloured and finely detailed; image is paramount, narrative secondary. Schulz’s ability to stretch time and freeze the moment poses a challenge for screenwriters who need to build linear narrative. ‘Hourglass Sanatorium’ has the same somnambulistic quality as Schulz’s prose. Characters become lost in labyrinthine spaces where the boundaries between reality and unreality are unclear. In the film scene transitions are smooth: Day changes to night, past into present, inside becomes outside in languid horizontal tracking shots that follow Josef as he crawls under furniture or navigates obstructed passageways. Has represents the Sanatorium as a decrepit memory palace where the past can be replayed indefinitely allowing patients to reconsider the relationship between remembered events, dream and fantasy.

Viewers familiar with Schulz’s work will find the Sanatorium filled with characters that populate his imaginative universe: Schulz’s elderly father Jakub is an almost magical figure, a holy fool who challenges the boundaries between real and unreal. He believes that he can imbue inanimate objects with life, but unlike like the golems of Jewish folklore, Jakub’s creatures lack any practical purpose. Mannequins recur in Schulz’s writing: In the film waxwork celebrities endlessly re-enact their own version of historical events. Schulz may have seen these uncanny creatures as a metaphor for the human condition; the waxen ‘young genius ruined by masturbation’ who appears in the film is taken from his story ‘Treatise on Tailor’s Dummies’ (1934); this representation of a life lived in self-indulgent fantasy may be a touch of self-deprecating irony on Schulz’s part. In the film the character of Rudolf (Filip Zylber) with his exotic stamp album reflects Schulz’s childhood dreams of foreign adventures but Schulz would never visit the romantic destinations that he read about as a child and rarely left the confines of his hometown. Instead, Schulz created his imaginative world from the materials to hand: The tawdry emporiums of the Street of Crocodiles and its shop assistants are alchemized by his imagination into something alluring and miraculous. Schulz delights in challenging conventional rules of reality and often portrays the natural world as out-of-balance: Seasons are abortive or malformed, summers are too hot, winters are unseasonably warm. In his stories objects become animals and people become objects (at one point an uncle finds new purpose as a doorbell). He is fascinated by ‘parallel strands’ of time: In the film Josef sees his own arrival at the Sanatorium replayed but with a slightly different outcome is if alternate realities where past, present and future possibilities all co-exist.

Schulz is best experienced in print, no doubt his work is even more memorable in its original Polish but there are also some excellent English translations which attempt to capture the beauty of his prose. Has strives to recreate the thematic complexity Schulz’s unique universe in ‘Hourglass Sanatorium’ but the essence of Schulz’s work is difficult to capture cinematically, and he is only partially successful. The Brothers Quay come closer in their 1988 animation ‘Street of Crocodiles’ which uses visual motifs, music, movement and texture to simulate Schulz’s temporal distortion and elaborate metaphor. Despite his intimate knowledge of Schulz’s work Has’ film feels incomplete. ‘Hourglass Sanatorium’ misses the playfulness of Schulz’s writing. He never succumbs to whimsy or sentimentality but Schulz refuses to take himself too seriously. His description of the childhood awakening of his artistic talent is evocative and intense, but he punctures the mood with domestic farce before it becomes too pompous. Has struggles to separate Schulz’s work from the tragedy of the Holocaust and the film is too sombre in tone. Opening on a train filled with refugees clutching fragments of Jewish culture, some of the passengers are naked and some appear to be dead. Josef approaches the Sanatorium through a cemetery and finds the entrance blocked by tombstones. Images of invasion and pursuit haunt the film. We may, with hindsight, discern hints of the apocalypse which would overcome Schulz and his world in his stories but Has overloads his film with funereal imagery and recasts Schulz’s work as a prophecy of Holocaust. Has may have been responding to resurgent anti-Semitism in Poland when he made ‘Hourglass Sanatorium’ and his film upset government censors. Schulz was murdered by a Nazi officer in 1942 and his death provides eloquent testimony to the consequences of racial hatred; Has honours Schulz by condemning the bigotry that took his life but ‘Hourglass Sanitorium’ does Schulz a disservice by draining so much of the sensual pleasure out of his work. The film’s elegiac tone gives viewers unfamiliar with Schulz’s writing the impression that he is a gloomy writer, but this is not so, his writing transcends the tragedy of his death to celebrate life in all its eccentric diversity.

‘Hourglass Sanatorium’ is beautifully crafted and full of familiar Schulzian motifs and characters; those familiar with the stories will recognize the firemen, raspberry cordial, lunatic ornithology and waxworks as old friends and enjoy spotting the references. Hourglass Sanatorium’ offers a pleasing visual counterpoint to his Schulz’s prose but fails to convey the full emotional range of his work. Those who haven’t read the stories should meet Schulz in the pages of his writing before they see the film to fully appreciate his genius.

Quotes:

“In fact, many mere books can be given a borrowed life. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars, screaming like a phoenix, all its pages aflame.”     Jakub (Tadeusz Kondrat)

“Why do I feel as if I’ve already been here? A long time ago…Don’t we, in fact know in advance every landscape we see during our lives? Can something completely new ever happen?”      Josef (Jan Nowicki)

Connections:

Film:

‘The Saragossa Manuscript’ directed by Wojciech Has (1965)

‘Street of Crocodiles’ directed by The Brothers Quay (1986)

‘Kafka’ directed by Steven Soderbergh (1991)

‘Everything is Illuminated’ directed by Liev Schreiber (2005)

‘A Serious Man’ directed by Joel and Ethan Coens (2009)

Reading:

Arthur Machen, Hill of Dreams, Parthian Books, 2017, ISBN 978-1906998332

Mervyn Peake: The Gormenghast Trilogy, Vintage, 1999, ISBN 978-0099288893 (particularly ‘Titus Alone’)

Eva Hoffman, Shtetl, Public Affairs, 2010, ISBN 978-1586485245

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles and other stories, Penguin, 2008, ISBN 978-0143105145

Issac Bashevis Singer, Collected Stories, Penguin, 2011, ISBN 978-0141196770

Franz Kafka: The Complete Short Stories, Vintage Classics, 1992, ISBN 978-0749399467

Ethan Coen, Gates of Eden, Doubleday, 1998, ISBN 978-0385410373

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated, Penguin, 2003, ISBN 978-0141008257

Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes, Visual Editions, 2010, ISBN 978-0956569219

Web:

 https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/10/08/cracked-fairytales-and-the-holocaust/

Discusses murals, painted by Schulz shortly before his murder and rediscovered in 2011.