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| Images courtesy of Yellow Veil Pictures |
Surrealism is almost synonymous with all things Polish
cinema related, from Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout to Piotr Szulkin’s Apocalypse
Tetralogy and more recently The Lure from Agnieszka Smoczynska. Utilizing dream or fragmented logic to evoke
a subtle social critique of life under post-WWII communist rule in Poland, the
efforts to push against affronts to creative expression resulted in a number of
vivid yet uncategorizable tapestries taking viewers through the past to comment
on the present. Though films such as
Andrzej Zulawski’s The Devil from 1972 faced immediate outright banning
by the Polish government, that didn’t stop filmmakers like Wojciech J. Has from
going against the grain with his seismic 1973 surrealist gargantuan The
Hourglass Sanatorium.
Loosely based on the short stories of Polish-Jewish novelist
Bruno Schulz Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, the film
follows Joseph (Jan Nowicki from O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization), a
young Jewish-Polish man who ventures out to visit his dying father Jakub
(Tadeusz Kondrat) in a remote dilapidated sanatorium where time seems frozen
and the lines between dream and reality are even less distinguishable than a
David Lynch picture. Finding his father
in a place where no one seems to be in authority and the patients are
perpetually neglected, our protagonist Josef finds himself tumbling down an ever-evolving
rabbit hole of Jewish pasts and present, touching on his childhood past as he
stumbles through wax museums, military units, open cityscapes rendered by
magnificent production design all aide by am omniscient blind train conductor (Mieczysław
Voit).
A close bedfellow to such surrealist Eastern European fare
as Karen Shakhnazarov’s Zerograd or more recently Roy Andersson’s Songs
from the Second Floor, The Hourglass Sanatorium is a beguiling
promenade through dreamland and nightmarish woundings pointing to collective
trauma over the Holocaust of WWII. Much
like eventual Ukrainian director Konstantin Luposhansky’s own Russian apocalypse
tetralogy of sorts, the film joins one central character on his journey through
seemingly bottomless portals that feel like real dreams and not just a screen
or literary contrivance. Though blocked
in its country of origin, the director smuggled a print out of Poland to Cannes
where it won a special jury prize, a move that effectively prevented him from mounting
another film production in Poland for the next eight years.
Labyrinthine, evocative and having the feeling of free spontaneity,
The Hourglass Sanatorium for all of its intentional, intricately
designed and blocked squalor the film’s brilliant production design is lensed
exquisitely by O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization cinematographer Witold
Sobociński. The soundtrack by Piotr
Szulkin favorite Jerzy Maksymiuk is appropriately brooding and mournful, capturing
the feeling of a world either in some form of purgatory or void forgotten by
God. The central performer Jan Nowicki
makes the film’s protagonist as bewildered and frightened as we are with increasingly
wild set pieces assaulting the viewer’s senses.
Much of the rest of the ensemble cast drifts in and out of Jozef’s
hemisphere as he inexplicably teleports from one section of Jewish-Polish
history to the next. Special attention
goes to an extended sequence of extras portraying mannequins in a wax museum,
holding perfectly still mid-action as Jozef navigates the room.
While being something of a behemoth boasting astonishing
production design and precise, ornate cinematography and editing, The Hourglass
Sanatorium was suppressed by Polish authorities immediately. Moreover, the country was experiencing an anti-semitic
purge at the time of the very Jewish experience-oriented film’s inception and
thus forbade the film’s entry into the Cannes film festival. Despite this, Wojciech J. Has broke the
embargo by sneaking a print to Cannes where Ingrid Bergman awarded it the
special jury prize. Not long after the
film premiered in Poland but the director temporarily found himself unable to
work on other projects.
Years later Martin Scorsese’s Masterpieces of Polish
Cinema project restored the film digitally for blu-ray disc release (albeit
in Europe) before Vinegar Syndrome’s partner label Yellow Veil Pictures did their
own standalone disc release featuring a booklet and limited slipcover. On its terms, its like if Piotr Szulkin and
Federico Fellini had an out of wedlock child with its own cocktail of squalid
splendor, a ravishingly opulently ugly masterwork that’s as enchanting as it is
repellent to behold. Interest in the surreal
Polish cinema director Wojciech J. Has as well as the film’s eventual
canonization in the annals of the top ten greatest films of Polish film history
has only bolstered the The Hourglass Sanatorium’s reputation as an unmissable
masterwork of Eastern European phantasmagoria eagerly awaiting long overdue
rediscovery.
--Andrew Kotwicki
