KimStim: Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (2024) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of KimStim

Polish novelist Bruno Schulz first published his dreamy Kafka-esque meditation on life and death under Polish authoritarianism with Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass in 1937 where it quickly became a legendary piece of surrealist satirical literature.  Loosely based on the author’s own life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire where he was born, the surreal exercise soon found its way onto the silver screen in 1973 with Wojciech J. Has’ cinematic adaptation The Hourglass Sanatorium with Jan Nowicki in the lead role.  A major film in the annals of Polish cinema, its spooky haunted squalor and nebulous qualities helped usher Wojciech J. Has into the pantheon of the all-time great Polish directors and further cemented Bruno Schulz’s novel as an important contemporary literary work rife with cinematic possibilities.

 
Naturally, the story was ripe and ready for further screen potential from none other than the equally legendary team of American identical twin brothers and stop motion animators the Quay Brothers Stephen and Timothy Quay.  Working for years in England, having directed many numerous short films including Street of Crocodiles and The Sandman and contributing a short segment to Julie Taymor’s biographical drama Frida, the Quay Brothers established their own wholly original aesthetic and style of animation and storytelling.  Looking a bit worn or archaic like a series of found dolls or puppets being resurrected back to life or perhaps pushed even further into death, their style is akin to the work of Jan Svankmajer as Earthy tactile and worn Eastern European stop motion photography. 

 
Ordinarily working in stop motion but sometimes dabbling into live-action photography as well, these two paths intersected in their second feature film The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes which saw a wealth of footage with actors performing on sets intercut with sparse and occasional animation.  It was a singular, impenetrable odyssey into the half-asleep subconscious co-produced by Terry Gilliam, but that was all the way back in 2005.  Some twenty years later, following a theatrical tour of many of their shorts compounded with a documentary by Christopher Nolan, the Quay Brothers have returned to the feature film format with their loose, lyrical and elliptical adaptation of Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.  A seventy-six-minute color/b&w production made between England, Germany and Poland as well as filmed in the Polish language, it takes the premise of the novel and impetus of the 1973 film as well as working over many of the Quays’ own recurring tropes and fixations like footage of a rubber band coming off of a knee played backwards. 

 
On a ghostly train journey interspersed with fog and soft focus as the 5.1 surround soundscape reverberates over the viewer’s head and ear space, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass intercuts between a doctor in a sanatorium monitoring the gulf between sleep, the waking state and time itself.  As he peers into a microscopic device into shapes and insignia, the film becomes a bit like a broken record with cuts and scratches in the grooves occasionally distorting or repeating what we see and hear.  Much like Aleksandr Sokurov’s Fairytale or more recently Lars Von Trier’s The House That Jack Built, we’re thrust into a sleepy state of mind where characters speak softly with long pauses between words, accentuating the sleepy vibe of it all as characters seem to traverse places that doesn’t seem to exist in time or space.

 
The disc itself from new releasing company KimStim comes housed with plentiful extras including short documentaries of the Quay Brothers either being interviewed, introducing the film and there’s a video essay about how the Quays interpreted Bruno Schulz.  A primarily Polish production previously adapted for Street of Crocodiles and featuring Christopher Nolan as an executive producer and presenter for the film featuring evocative and foggy cinematography by Bartosz Bieniek and a haunted ambient soundscape rendered by Timothy Nelson, watching and deciphering the film is a bit of an exercise in futility as the Quays further blurred the original narrative into incoherence deliberately.  It’s a journey and you either surrender yourself to its nooks and crannies or you get exhausted by it within the first few minutes.  As someone who is familiar with Quay’s second feature and their short film work as well as the aforementioned Wojciech J. Has film, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass plays a bit like a video installation you drift in and out of, enchanted and sometimes disturbed but never really fully sure of what you’re seeing.

--Andrew Kotwicki