“There is no dead matter,” the narrator’s father proselytizes in Bruno Schulz’s 1937 book Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, “lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life.” Schulz’s slim body of surviving work is a series of stories where memoir meets myth, and at its center is the figure of the father, an eccentric with a bad habit of transforming into various creatures — a fly, a cockroach, a crab — when he isn’t busy dying or dead. He’s also prone to metamorphoses less literal; a shopkeeper by trade, father assumes the roles of amateur ornithologist, maverick inventor, and, in one particularly memorable story, self-styled modern Demiurge who exalts the secret liveliness of all matter:
“Can you understand,” asked my father, “the deep meaning of that weakness, that passion for colored tissue, for papier-mâché, for distemper, for oakum and sawdust? This is,” he continued with a pained smile, “the proof of our love for matter as such, for its fluffiness or porosity, for its unique mystical consistency. […] In one word,” Father concluded, “we wish to create man a second time – in the shape and semblance of a tailors’ dummy.”
This treatise could easily pass as the manifesto for the Quay Brothers, ardent disciples of Schulz whose 1986 stop-motion adaptation of his Street of Crocodiles launched them to arthouse fame. While all stop motion might be considered a kind of animism — an art of bringing objects to life — the Quays take that promise to its limit, creating worlds of dancing screws or pencil leads, and bricolaged puppet people. Sometimes, it’s unclear whether the Quays are pulling the strings or vice versa.
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass — a feature nearly 20 years in the making — adapts the titular story of Schulz’s second and final collection, in which Józef visits his father, Jakub, at a time-bending sanatorium. Jakub is dead in our protagonist’s world, but in the shadow world of the sanatorium, as the insectile Doctor Gotard explains, time is set back an unspecified interval so that Józef’s father is not yet dead, and might avoid his fate altogether. Rather than staging a meeting between parent and child, most of the film is dedicated to the latter navigating the labyrinthine spaces of the sanatorium — an exploration of a psyche through dream and memory. Or, a cinema where metaphor is possible.
Schulz’s book has been adapted before. Wojciech Has’s 1972 film The Hourglass Sanatorium views the stories through the lens of Schulz’ own tragic death at the hands of a Gestapo officer in his native Drohobycz in 1942; the film ends with an evocation of the Holocaust that provocatively resonated with the violent resurgence of antisemitism in Poland at the end of the ’60s. (Has was banned from directing for several years after he defied authorities and smuggled a print of the film to Cannes.) The Quays are not political filmmakers, and are even more allergic to conventional storytelling than Has. Their version strips out most of the dialogue as well as the bustling world beyond the sanatorium. What they do offer is a series of tableaux that faithfully adapt the texture of Schulz’s prose, with which the film shares an atmosphere of pervasive grayness and an aesthetic of ruin and decay: dust, scrawled graffiti, flaking paint on the walls and on the faces of the puppet too. (Schulz: “We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of material.”) Images stretch and replicate, stutter and flicker to the point of challenging basic legibility.
We “enter” the film, as it were, through a gelatinous ocular portal. In a framing device — one of the few live-action sequences, with no direct source in Schulz’s work — we meet an auctioneer (Tadeusz Janiszewski, who, with his long white hair and waistcoat, looks suspiciously like a third Quay brother). He announces his next lot: a “Maquette for the Sepulchre of a Dead Retina,” a wooden contraption with seven lenses, each offering a glimpse of one of the final images beheld by an eye now hidden away in a secret compartment. Once a year, on the 19th of November — the day Schulz died — the sun’s rays strike the retina, setting the visions in motion. The sanatorium section of the film, then, is these images; camera-eye becomes film projector.
Or is it a peep show? Cinema’s voyeuristic gaze has always fascinated the Quay Brothers, and in Sanatorium the brothers again make a spectacle of looking itself. The “Maquette” is another version of the “Wooden Esophagus” seen at the beginning of Street of Crocodiles, itself a variation on the Kinetoscope — an early device for watching films, one viewer at a time. The sanatorium is similarly littered with structures and objects suggestive of the cinema and Victorian optical toys, and pocked with peep holes Józef voyeuristically spies through.
Some of the visions offered by the dead retina are not adapted not from Schulz’s fiction but his Booke of Idolatry, a sequence of semi-pornographic cliché-verres that underline the masochistic streak of his work. In one, we see only disembodied legs in stockings and heels, and then a horsetail whip. In another, a topless woman sashays slow-motion down a corridor, followed by a gaggle of crawling men, hands pathetically outstretched. “A procession?” asks the auctioneer. His female assistant looks into the lens, settling her gaze beyond the figure and onto the men, now blurred into one monstrous mass of limbs. More like a pursuit.
There’s little here in the way of narrative, certainly less than in The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005), the brothers’ last feature. It might be that the best way into Sanatorium really is through early cinema or the peep show: not a story but a series of views, images imprinted on the eye in a flash. The Quays’ authorial signature is the repeated gesture, a short clip looped and zoomed in on, which does not ask us to discover more in the image but rather to submit to the mood set by the repetition itself — hypnotic or maddening, depending on who you ask. This writer is more inclined toward the former; as with all their work, this is genuinely oneiric cinema, reminiscent of early Maddin, or late Lynch. And like those filmmakers, it’s not without a sense of humor: Józef will find his father on the stage of a theater with “seating for one [with a restricted view only]” — a neat encapsulation of the thwarted voyeurism involved in spying on the dreams of another.
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