I Would Like to See It: The Hourglass Sanatorium

There are few subgenres of film I find as challenging as the Polish surrealist wave of the 1970s and 80s, relentlessly talkative movies with no room for quiet or reflection, consumed with existential angst and saturated with complex and fettered cultural anguish as the children who survived the Holocaust and the Russian and German occupations come into their own as filmmakers under strict censorship. Wojciech Jerzy Has’s The Hourglass Sanatorium is as exhausting and demanding an experience as Zulawski’s Devil or On the Silver Globe, and like those films it presents not just a visual feast but a substantial reward to the attentive viewer, who may begin to experience its elliptical presentation of time as a reality unto itself. When Józef (Jan Nowicki) arrives at the titular sanatorium to visit his comatose father Jakub (Tadeusz Kondrat), time begins to pool around them like blood beneath bruised skin, the past swelling up inexorably until it lies flush with the present.

There’s something distinctly Orphic about the film, with its blind train conductor weaving in and out of timelines like the ferryman trawling the banks of the Styx and its inescapable past beckoning Józef to look back again and again. The Hourglass Sanatorium’s sets are worlds unto themselves, from the cramped streets and towering tenements of the Warsaw ghetto to the swampy open country of some nameless and exotic locale where bedraggled colonial troops march in formation and elephants wander past aimlessly. Throughout these adventures Józef appears physically unchanged, but the characters surrounding him sometimes treat him as if he were a child, remarking on invisible details of his appearance and chiding him for unruly behavior, creating the impression that as an adult Józef carries these small moments with him in an unchanging and eternal present. Like the wax automatons of famous European powers he stumbles upon, he is driven by an unseen and arcane machinery of meaning.

Has’s movie can feel punishing, never once resting to let any of its exceptional images sink in, never letting up on its ceaseless chatter about the nature of self, time, suffering, and aging. It requires great focus to watch effectively, but in its struggle between Józef and his father across the varied temporal fields of their shared lives and its lavish explorations of the anguish of the Holocaust, its survivors, and their children, it expands on and embellishes the fanciful story from which it is adapted into something dazzling in the truest sense of the world. Something overwhelming to the senses. It circles again and again, monotonous as a shark, through the progression of small lives until their sins and secrets and hidden dreams become inseparable from the great events unfolding in the world around them. A naked woman in her dressing room, the emperor Leopold’s loathing for his cousin, it’s all the same, all vulgar and grandiose and impossible to parse.