“Perhaps we were misled by skillful advertising when we decided to send Father here. Time put back – it sounded good, but what does it come to in reality?”–Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium pod Klepsydra, 1937

DIRECTED BY: Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay

FEATURING: Tadeusz Janiszewski, Wioletta Kopanska, Allison Bell

PLOT: An auctioneer witnesses the activation of a sepulchrum for a deceased retina while Jozef visits his dead/dying father in the titular sanatorium.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: A film adaptation of the titular surreal short story by Bruno Schulz already earned a place on the List. Is another deserving? This version boasts the Jan Svankmajer-esque animation stylings for which the Quay Brothers are rightfully renowned (with the technique utilized more heavily than in their Certified Weird feature Institute Benjamenta). Wojciech Has‘ Hourglass Sanatorium exploited the dream logic of the story, with events frenetically shifting from scene to scene. The Quays, in contrast, excavate the idea of time held back for an unspecified interval, its “limbos and afterbreezes,”ⁱ creating a somnolent Sanatorium of vague and enigmatic impressions.

COMMENTS: Like many films by the Brothers Quay, Sanatorium is difficult to summarize. A seven part structure forms less a coherent story than a series of tableaux nested within each other. The perspective shifts among dutiful son Jozef, an auctioneer, and a mysterious female patient, J. Jozef’s visit to his father, at the sanatorium where the dead still live because time is arrested, serves as a frame narrative within a frame narrative, within which isolated occurrences taken from a selection of Schulz’s collected writings appear.

We first meet an auctioneer on a rooftop, beneath a sky of swirling clouds, soliciting bids for unusual and impossible items like the thirteenth month and exotic birds’ eggs (recalling Father’s ill-fated menagerie in Schulz’s story “Birds”). His audience consists of only two chimney sweeps, and when neither makes a bid, he lets them to get back to work.

In the house below, a maid prepares for the auctioneer’s arrival. As he enters the room, she removes the dust cloth from an object perched on a table : a pyramidal box with oculus windows in its sides and a little drawer which opens to display the glassy retina of an eye. The auctioneer explains the mystery of this rare sepulchrum—at a propitious moment the eye will liquify and shed seven tears, and the preserved sights contained within will become Jozef’s dreams as he succumbs to the sanatorium’s will to sleep.

The auctioneer’s frame is live-action, filmed in the gauzy black and white style of Institute Benjamenta, as is J.’s (and a few scenes where an actor, and not a puppet, portrays Jozef). When the scene cuts to Jozef’s ominous train trip (he’s uncertain whether or not his father lives, and this uncertainty will persist), we enter the Quays’ puppet theater. Their minutely detailed miniature sets, to use Schulz’s words, “exude an air of strange and frightening neglect.” The sanatorium setting, its vaguely nineteenth century atmosphere with faintly glowing contrasting colors, and the puppets with scratched faces, the paint peeling from their spindly fingers like skin from bone, recall Street of Crocodiles (1986), based on another of Schulz’s stories.

There’s a sense of moving back forth within the history of the Quays’ forty-plus year oeuvre, as well as within Schulz’s body of work. For those familiar with their short films and features, recognizable motifs resurface : a seated woman’s legs, one foot wearing a shoe, the other bare, recalling Lisa in Institute Benjamenta (1995); the birch forest and rounded knee of The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005); the pylons from The Eternal Day of Michel de Ghelderode, 1898-1962 (1981). The scenes constantly move back forth between live action and animation through the telescoping device of lenses, both within and without the film. These transitions blend into each other due to the soft, blurred quality of the image, which casts a mesmerizing haze over the whole. Many of the sequences featuring live actors crop the frame to particular body parts, with legs, arms, hands, and knees almost becoming puppets and/or actors in their own right (no distinction exists between the animate and inanimate in the Quays’ film universe, inspired by Father’s philosophy that there is no such thing as “dead matter”).ⁱⁱ

As is also usual in Quay films, the images are orchestrated to the score, and certain musical motifs repeat as actions repeat and duplicate themselves, indicating the sanatorium’s stutters in time. A door will open, and open, and open. The pendulums in clocks quiver in a state of indecision. Jozef repeatedly nods off, often losing his top hat in the process. The hat then takes on a life of its own, making its way onto a stage where it replicates itself and performs a whirling dance.

The puppet of Dr. Gotard has six arms; both Mephistophelean and Shiva-like in appearance, he and his assistants tempt the patients into a world of dreams and decay in order to capture their fragile vitality. Father relives his obsessive bird-collecting days, surrounded by feather-covered eggs, while simultaneously sleeping in a dust-filled bed chamber. Illusions prove to be short-lived. Once the birds take flight, they come crashing back to earth, to Father’s disgust, revealed to be nothing more than feathered lumps of flesh.

Jozef receives a pornographic book which transforms into a room-sized camera obscura. He can see the maid in the sanatorium through its lens, and it seems she can see him, too. In the sepulchrum, the maid and the auctioneer then witness the “Idolatrous Procession,” in which a woman performs a strip tease while a group of shop assistants follow after her.

At the end of each part, the camera zooms out to a refrain of syncopated beats and title cards announce the next one. There isn’t much dialogue to make sense of these scenes, with titles more poetic than explanatory. A Polish voiceover provides narration from Schulz’s text, but without any prior knowledge of the source material Sanatorium will be pretty confusing. The meandering pace, repetitions, and lack of clear narrative may be off-putting to some viewers, but the films of the Brothers Quay have always been more about the experience of seeing than storytelling. For fans, this one is definitely a long-anticipated must-see. Not the best starting point for those new to their work, but since the Quays’ films are difficult to come by, the curious should seize this rare opportunity for retinal exposure to their unique vision.

As of this writing, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is playing in theaters in select cities. For those in the NYC area, screenings at Film Forum are accompanied with a pre-recorded intro by the Brothers Quay about the nineteen years-long development of the film. You can find a list of upcoming venues here.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There’s a wealth of interpretative symbolism and meaning to infer from nearly every scene in ‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,’ from its dream-like opening. . . to its haunting and foreboding climax. It is a film that, at the risk of cliché, is better seen and felt first than necessarily understood; better peripherally intuited than explicitly interpreted.”–Toussaint Egan, RogerEbert.com (contemporaneous)