Hourglass Sanatorium: Has's Decaying Dream Palace

Bruno Schulz is supposed to be unfilmable, and the reason is usually given as style: prose so dense with metaphor that the images exist only in the sentences, dissolving the moment you try to stage them. That is true and it is also a dodge. The deeper problem is structural. Schulz’s stories have no plot to adapt. They have a father, a shop, a provincial town, a season, and a narrator whose memory keeps folding the same few materials into new shapes. There is nothing to put on a storyboard.

Wojciech Has looked at that problem in 1973 and solved it by refusing to solve it. The Hourglass Sanatorium — Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą — does not adapt Schulz’s stories so much as build a structure with Schulz’s properties and then walk a man through it for two hours. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes, it effectively ended its director’s career for a decade, and it remains the most complete translation of literary dream-logic into moving images that anyone has managed.

The premise, which is the whole film

A man named Józef takes a train. The train is a ruin — carriages full of sleeping passengers under dust, upholstery rotted through, and a conductor who is blind and finds his way by touch. It is going to a sanatorium where Józef’s father, Jacob, is a patient.

At the sanatorium, Dr Gotard explains the arrangement with the cheerful pragmatism of a hotelier describing the breakfast hours. Józef’s father has already died. The death happened, back in the ordinary world, and it is a settled fact. Here at the sanatorium, however, they have put time back. The death has therefore not yet caught up. Jacob is alive, in this building, because this building runs on a delay.

The catch is that the delay is not free, and it is not stable. Time here does not run backwards in an orderly fashion. It slips, doubles, sticks and pools. And the building is paying for it: the sanatorium is visibly rotting around its occupants, plaster shedding, damp blooming, dust falling continuously through every shaft of light, because a place that has borrowed against time is being foreclosed on in real terms.

That is the premise, and everything after it is Józef walking. He opens a door and is in his father’s shop. He opens another and is in his own childhood. Another gives onto a wax museum, another onto a street in a Jewish quarter alive with people, another onto a battlefield, an emperor, a library, a bed. The rooms do not connect in any way a surveyor would accept. They connect the way memories do.

The camera is the argument

Here is the craft decision that makes the film work, and it is one decision, applied without exception.

Has and his cinematographer Witold Sobociński almost never cut inside a space. The camera moves — lateral tracks, slow arcs, long unbroken passages through room after room — and the world reorganises itself around the movement rather than around an edit. Józef walks left, the camera walks left with him, a curtain passes across the lens, and on the far side of the curtain it is twenty years earlier and a different country. No dissolve. No cutaway. The transformation happens inside the shot.

This is the entire game. A cut would tell you that two things have been joined together, which is a claim about editing. An unbroken move tells you these two things are adjacent, which is a claim about the world. Has never lets you off the hook by admitting he has assembled anything. The rotting palace really does have his childhood in the next room, because you watched the camera go there without blinking.

Jerzy Skarżyński’s production design is doing the other half. The sets are stuffed to suffocation — birds, books, fabric, wax, clocks, dust — and shot in a palette of ochre, mould-green and tarnish that makes every frame look like a photograph left in a damp cellar. The over-stuffing is functional. It gives the tracking camera enough visual incident that your eye never gets to the bottom of a frame before it has moved on, which is why the film feels like drowning rather than touring.

The sound is the underrated third element. Jerzy Maksymiuk’s score works in fragments — a phrase of something folk-derived, a smear of brass, a passage that sounds like a band tuning in another building — and it declines to score emotion in any conventional sense. It arrives when a room changes and withdraws when Józef stands still. Combined with a sound design that keeps a low continuous rustle under almost every interior, the effect is of a building that is quietly, constantly talking to itself. Turn the music off and the tracking shots become a technical exercise. With it, they become a séance.

The comparison worth making is to Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, released three years earlier over the border. Jireš shoots his dream in blossoming sunlight and lets the horror stain a paradise. Has shoots his in permanent brown twilight and lets the paradise glimmer inside a ruin. Same regional instinct — political constraint metabolised into oneiric imagery — worked from opposite ends of the light meter.

What it cost

The circumstances of this film’s making are inseparable from what is on screen, and English-language writing about it routinely leaves them out.

Bruno Schulz was a Polish-Jewish writer and art teacher from Drohobycz, in what is now Ukraine. He published two thin collections in the 1930s and was shot dead in the street in his home town’s ghetto in 1942. The world his stories describe — the provincial Galician town, the shop, the crowded Jewish streets — was annihilated within a decade of his writing it down.

Has made this film in Poland in 1973, five years after the 1968 political crisis and the antisemitic campaign that drove out most of the Jewish population who had survived the war and stayed. Into that atmosphere he released a picture saturated with the imagery of Jewish life, filmed with enormous tenderness, in which a son travels to a rotting building to spend a little more time with a father who is already dead and cannot be kept.

The film was made against the authorities’ preference and shown at Cannes without their blessing. Has, one of the most accomplished directors Poland had, did not make another feature for the better part of a decade. Read the sanatorium as what it plainly is — a machine for holding on to the dead a while longer, running at ruinous cost, in a building coming apart faster than anyone can repair it — and the reason the state disliked it becomes obvious. Nobody had to say the word.

The honest case against

It is long, it is airless, and it has no forward motion whatsoever. Józef wants nothing. Nothing is at stake that can be won or lost. The film’s method — the endless unbroken glide from room to room — is also its limitation, because a camera that never stops is a camera that never lands, and some viewers reach the ninety-minute mark having stopped believing that any of it will resolve into weight.

That reaction is fair. This is a film with the pulse deliberately removed, and it asks a great deal of a viewer who wants a story. If you need a handhold, Has has removed every one on purpose, and no amount of admiration for the tracking shots will supply it.

Where it sits

The film has been restored and circulates on disc, and it turns up in repertory programmes devoted to Polish cinema and to surrealism — usually double-billed with Has’s own The Saragossa Manuscript, which is the right pairing and the right order. Watch Saragossa first. It is the same director building nested worlds with a rational, mischievous, clockmaker’s precision. Hourglass is what happens when the clock is left out in the rain.

The collector’s note: if you like this, the neighbouring rooms are Czech. The Cremator applies a comparable restlessness of camera to a mind coming apart, and Marketa Lazarová shows you what the same era’s cinema did with landscape instead of interiors. All three were made within six years of one another, all three were inconvenient to their governments, and all three are better than their reputations abroad suggest.

Watch it late, with the sound up, and give up on mapping the building. The building is not mappable. That is what it is for.

Spoilers below

The sanatorium’s arrangement is doomed from the first scene, and Has lets you understand this long before Józef does. Time cannot be put back. It can only be borrowed, and the interest is being paid in rot. Every shaft of falling plaster dust in this film is a payment.

Jacob’s condition tracks the building. He is alive when Józef needs him alive, running the shop, holding forth, present. He is also, at other moments in the same afternoon, unmistakably a dead man being propped up by an institution with a financial interest in the propping. Has never resolves the contradiction because the contradiction is the film’s actual subject: what it is to visit a parent who is dying, and to keep going back, and to know that every visit is being funded out of something that will run out.

The ending is the film’s finest move and it is quietly devastating. Józef, having failed to hold on to his father, having walked through every room the building can offer him, comes at last to the train. He takes the conductor’s cap. He takes the lantern. His eyes are gone. He boards the carriage of sleeping, dust-covered passengers, and the film closes on him working the train — blind, in uniform, ferrying other people’s sons out to the sanatorium, forever.

He does not escape and he does not die. He is absorbed into the mechanism. The man who came to visit the dead becomes the one who brings the visitors, which is the bleakest possible reading of grief and also the truest one Has could have offered in Poland in 1973: the past does not release you. It employs you. And Schulz’s own fate sits inside that image without a word spoken — a man from a vanished town, blind to what was coming, conducting the rest of us through rooms that no longer exist.