Sanatorium pod Klepsydra (1973) Online

The late Polish director Wojceich Has is better known for his amazing "The Saragosa Manuscript" which has a Chinese box structure of nested stories. However, this film (known to english audiences as "The Sandglass"), tops its predecessor in fantastic imagery. Based on several stories of Bruno Schultz, this film might be the most successful recreation of the inner psyche ever commited to celluloid.

A man journeys by dilapidated train (where most of the passengers look like corpses) to visit his ailing father who is kept in a crumbling ornate sanatorium. He is told by a doctor that time exists differently there and his dying father may recover. The man experiences a flood of dreamlike visions of his past and the small Jewish town he was raised in. The father is seen both ill and as a giddy philosopher in an attic full of birds. At some point we get the creeping sensation that it is the man himself who is dying, not the father as a blind train conductor reappears like a death figure. The increasingly baroque episodes become the rich compost of a graveyard.

The film can also been seen as a requiem for the Eastern European Jewish culture that was wiped out by WW2. It isn't an accident that the protagonist is named Joseph and his father Jacob. Many of the films episodes evoke Jewish symbolism.

Did I watch this film or did I dream it. This may be your initial response after watching "the Hourglass Sanatorium". Those who are fans of Fellini, Jodorowsky, Peter Greenaway and Andrej Zulawski will feel right at home. Originally the film was based on a novel, and the story deals with a man who takes a train to see his sick father at a sanatorium. The sanatorium feels Gothic and abandoned. Time seems to be non existent there. Since time has slowed down the father goes on living and the son gets lost in the many rooms of the sanatorium. His journey is as comical as it is frightening. Memories and history become reality and the main character walks throughout many strange scenarios from the past and from his childhood. A simple action like crawling under a bed, can transfer him to a different time and place. Among the strange images in the film which are the most breathtaking are, the Jewish Rabbis breaking out into a song number, people who are part human and part wax figures, dead zombie like soldiers, people in strange bird masks, elephants, and odd philosophical discussions. This is one movie that is so complex and confusing that if you miss 1 minute (or even if you don't miss anything) you'll feel lost. After the film was over, I was left scratching my head; it was like I had just woken up from a bizarre dream. This is one of the most breathtakingly surreal film experiences I have ever had. Film is a visual art, so words can't come close to describing "the Hourglass Sanitorium". You have to see it for yourself!

Based on a story collection of the same name by Bruno Schulz, who was shot by the Gestapo in 1942, this movie is one of the rare cases of a congenial adaptation of modern fantastic literature. It's a demanding movie and it is impossible to extract something like a plot line. There are various changes in between time and space, but once you get involved with the narrative, they seem perfectly logical. Also, there are many highly impressive sequences and settings - i have read somewhere (i can't give no reference right now, sorry) that it was the most expensive movie ever made in Poland, and maybe it still is. It certainly is one of the best. And, by the way, there is one scene with a room stuffed full of mannequins that looks like an inspiration to a similar sequence in Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner", which is a great movie of its kind, but was made some years later and did much better at the box office.

Wojciech Has must have created one of the most unique and enigmatic movies I've ever seen. Inspired by Bruno Schulz' novel, Has invites the viewer to journey with Jozef to a decrepit sanatorium where his father is living. But it doesn't take long for the viewer to realise the journey isn't taking place in any definitive place or time. The sanatorium is a cobweb-filled, deserted, wasting place where only a nurse and a doctor work.

As Jozef arrives, he finds his father living in a sort of animated suspension. He should be dead, the doctor tells him, but time in the sanatorium works differently. And Jozef soon realises just how differently. The story begins to move from place to place and time to time randomly. Jozef can find himself crawling under a bed in his house only to come out somewhere else.

The movie is full of fascinating and creepy imagery. There's a great sequence in which Jozef visits a room full of mannequins that come to live. At another time, he's surrounded by men dressed as birds. The art direction and settings are beautiful throughout the movie, possibly the most intricate ever brought to a movie. Everything has a feeling of decadence, of a world where mankind stopped living a long time ago. In a way it seems Jozef is just a dead soul reliving parts of his life and all time and space are unified in this place of memory. Maybe. This is the type of movie that doesn't offer one single interpretation. But trying to make sense of it is part of the fun.

I didn't even know about existence of this gem, I came across it by chance. Long time ago I've read short story by Polish writer Bruno Schulz named Sanatorium under the Clepsydra and appreciated it greatly so I was lucky to find this excellent film adaptation. A son goes to visit his ill father in some mysterious sanatorium – in reality his father died but in this bizarre sickbay he continues to live due to some shift of time backward. In fact all the times there are merged and he meets himself younger and sees his old dead mother and takes part in all kinds of affairs occurring someplace between nightmare and reverie. The Hour-Glass Sanatorium perfectly opposed the passage of time as if this film itself has been placed into some timeless capsule.

At the day of writing this, the great Chilean filmmaker Raoul Ruiz passed away. This is dedicated to him - a film, I like to think, he would have loved.

This is an exceptional film that I will cherish for a number of reasons. It's the kind of film I'm looking for, that places consciousness within itself to give us actual in-sight of our place in the world of narratives.

For afar, it is a little like Jodorowsky; the heavy, symbolist system visualized inside a cacophony. But it ventures freely beyond the threshold where Jodorowsky (and most filmmakers) barely fumbled; it is a story about unconscious stories about the broader metaphysical narrative from which they flow and illustrate.

It begins with the promise of a journey, a common motif in early myth; a man's symbolic descent in the underworld in search of his father. But a little preamble.

The narrative of the understanding is one after you abstract. It has been fractured from the one into many, according to the provincial peculiarities of human experience, yet taken together each of the symbolic motifs or shadowy shapes that comprise it, insinuate the same fabric of the experienced world. The same images, the same narratives, seem to bubble forth in almost identical repetition, as though something in the soul calls out for them.

Two observations further elucidate this. In the places that ancient cities were built like temples, with clearly defined pattern that reflected above (usually in circles), denizens lived within the dimensions of their symbol. They were situated directly inside the blueprint of their cosmology, one they had constructed to reflect the cosmos.

The reverse of this is the mandala of the Buddhists, as sacred space for the concentration of the mind. The image was not the painted sum of its counterparts, but a way of passage. Meditations practiced on this symbol are directed from the symbolic world into the world at large; so that, outside the temple, the entire world becomes a support for meditation.

On a deeper level, both these describe the same thing; the spiritual effort of aligning a center inside with something outside, so that the cycles of life become one. Can we say this is the forgotten knowledge? Modern life is scattered in the chaos of ever-changing peripheries. We build - and live - in random.

So this is what the filmmaker does. Our man, having embarked on his inner journey, is constantly frustrated by the apparent randomness of the world he participates in. He turns for guidance to a child, an inner child who is his heir in the dreamlike underworld, holding a book filled with stamps about places - a book of names and forms that symbolically encompasses the totality of the catalogued world; but there is no answer there, meaning another world extends from our catalogue of it which cannot be fully accounted for.

From inside his limited perspective in the fictional world, the protagonist is baffled, exasperated for meaning. But we, observing from a vantage point, can recognize first pattern, and then that the protagonist, who seems to himself to be a hapless stooge, to be the one creating the narrative.

It is stunning stuff if you contemplate it a little. There are, of course, the notions about nested stories. The journey that transports across different levels of symbolic life; there is the place where history is a gallery of the pliable, lifeless mannequins of famous persons; elsewhere, language is shown to be the random teetering of birds.

Above all, there is the world, the space of human experience limited by reason; our symbolic translation in terms of a graven image, passage for meditation; our understanding of the image as applicable to both the personal and cosmic cycles (being-nonbeing, light-dark) and the meaning of those cycles within the larger cycle of sentience that observes them; and finally, the threshold once crossed and returned from, the unbound sentience now effortlessly understands all these things to be emanations of the one source.

Having aligned all these cycles, the film is - at every point - at the center of each and all. A beautiful thing.

Sandwiched somewhere between David Lynch and Luis Bunuel is Wojciech Has, a little known Polish director responsible for "The Saragossa Manuscript" and "The Hourglass Sanatorium", two rather grand exercises in surrealism.

"The Hourglass Sanatorium", which might as well be called "Alice in Shoahland", concerns the journey of Jozef, a man who arrives at a derelict sanatorium after an exhausting train journey. Two minutes into the film, and already we're assaulted by a barrage of symbolism. The train represents a shuttle for dead or dying souls. It's a gateway to "the sanatorium", a sort of limbo where life and death commingle before one is shunted permanently off into the afterlife. On another level, the train represents the carriages used to transport Polish Jews to concentration camps during the Holocaust.

So this is a film which not only deals with a dead Jozef stumbling through the memories, events and fantasies of his life, but a film about the culture of a pre-World War 2 Europe. Or rather, the film mirrors Jozef's mental and bodily disintegration to the way Poland crumbled during and after the Holocaust. As the film progresses Jozef will lose his eyesight whilst the world around him likewise falls apart, objects in the sanatorium becoming increasingly claustrophobic, closed and nailed shut, as if ready to be taken away.

But the film offers not only a historical, cultural and personal perspective on death and the passage of time, but a kind of subconscious look at the way Jozef's relationship with his father throughout his life forced him to confront, not only his own mortality, but the perishability of all things.

As the film progresses, we're thus treated to an Alice in Wonderland styled journey in which Jozef bumbles from one strange set piece to the next. Only after multiple viewings do these sequences coalesce into meaning, the film serving up episodes in which Jozef re-experiences events from his life in an increasingly psychedelic fashion. Encounters with naked women, dead Jews, Nazi camps, erotic fantasies, Yiddish chants, memories of his mother, his home, his father, his father's textile shop (a meeting place for Jewish men), his marriage, being disciplined as a child, the encroachment of war and an extended sequence filled with mannequins, clockwork dolls and motionless historical figures, are all thoroughly confusing until your brain starts sorting through all the symbolic information.

On top of this is a subplot which seems to suggest that Jozef's father was killed by the Nazis for assisting or hiding Jews in some way, but the film's intricately linked web of symbols are so esoteric that it's hard to get a read of things. With audiences so unfamiliar to this kind of filmic language, such a film is likely to only appeal to a very narrow range of people.

Adapted from a book by Bruno Shulz, a victim of the Nazis, the film is, at its best, an unconscious (or repressed?) look at the traumas of the Holocaust as well as a journey through the memories of a man who tumbles through time on his deathbed. At its worst, however, this is a film almost opaque in its symbolism. So if you aren't phased by Jodorowsky's "The Holy Mountain", Tarkovsky's "Nostalghia", Bergman's "Hour of the Wolf", Greenaway's "Prospero's Book" and Lynch's "Inland Empire", then give Wojciech Has a taste. If not, stick to drugs.

8/10 – Requires multiple viewings. One has to start with Tarkovsky, Greenaway and Lynch before tackling this beast. See "Night and Fog", "Hotel Terminus" and Melville's "Army of Shadows".

This is a film that will either absorb or exasperate, depending on one's temper. It mostly exasperated me, but many of its images have stayed with me, and I think viewers who have the patience for, say, Strindberg's "Dream Play" will enjoy its corkscrew narrative. Many may be amused, as I was, by the highly shadowed, highly colored Gothic decor but may have difficulty, as I did, staying the course. The synopsis above is slightly misleading on one count: The old man in the sanatorium is or would be dead in the real world, but his death would be financially inconvenient to the family and so his son is paying to have him kept in the enclosed world of the sanatorium, where time moves more slowly and he can stay alive indefinitely. The film begins like a horror movie, with the protagonist taking an eerily populated train to the ruined sanatorium. But once he's taken care of his business there both he and the story wander into a series of absurdist-picaresque adventures, set in scenes from his memory and imagination (apparently: some are quasi-historical, and his father appears in one of them as a young man). They grow and flower and intertwine with one another as they would in a dream or a reverie, until at last the protagonist arrives back where he started and finds out his fate after all. That seemed arbitrary to me; and why the place should have led him where it did, literally or symbolically, I don't really know; and to my taste the film is so boldly stated as to be a little cheap. But it still has a way of floating around inside the head for a long time after. And if enough people were interested enough by it, the process of identifying and interpreting its cornucopia of allusions and symbols could fuel a semester's worth of late-night discussions.

"Sanatorium pod klepsydra" is a surreal assault on the senses and perhaps one of the most beautifully shot Polish movies ever made.It's based on the remarkable collection of stories 'Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass' written by Bruno Schultz.Our protagonist Josef(Jan Nowicki)travels on a dilapidated and mysterious train to visit his father at a decayed sanatorium in the middle of the Polish countryside.His journey into a tangled world of real and imagined experiences begins.Extremely stylish and surreal mind trip is the best way to describe "Hourglass Sanatorium".Filled with elaborate set-pieces and philosophical dialogue the world imagined by Bruno Schultz is truly one of its kind.The sleazy shots of half-naked women are a nice touch and the glimpse into Jewish culture is fascinating.A must-see for fans of bizarre and unusual cinema.The wax mannequins sequence is stunningly beautiful.9 out of 10.

It is amazing that so many people can see this film without realizing that its subtext and central subject is the Shoah (Holocaust); its unspeakable and incomprehensible enormity in the mind, especially in Communist Poland where the memory of that history was somewhat suppressed. This is really the best fictional treatment of the Shoah on film, because of its indirection in dealing with this terrible subject. It is simultaneously an adaptation of a literary work by a victim of the Nazis, Bruno Shulz, who explored the world and imagery of the unconscious, fantastic and dreams like no other. It is probably the best evocation of this world ever committed to film. The film will be tedious to some, but those willing to immerse themselves in it will emerge, like the protagonist, forever changed by the experience. By the way, this film is NOT set in prewar Poland, but in some indeterminate time after the war. Where Shulz was the prewar victim haunted by memories of his father and childhood, the protagonist in this film is the postwar survivor haunted by the fate of his own father's generation - and world.

Like it or not, this movie is hell of a ride! Movie opens with a train travel. Passengers seem like dead. A bit later we found out that a son goes a visit to his dying father to a sanatorium, where time ticks differently. His father is dead and not dead at the same time, doctor tries to save him by playing with time. Son seems did not understand what's going on. Doctor advises to sleep and son sleeps. Or doesn't he? At this point everything goes up and down. You can go to a town just simply going under the bed or there might be a town center in your basement. Movie goes through times/places/memories. We follow teenage fantasies, books, women, birds, mannequins... Movie is hard to follow and there are lots going on, but with a style. Director did a wonderful job at picturing scenes. Cinematography are over the top. Acting are flawless. Movie is funny, mysterious, scary and sad at the same time. If you haven't seen this gem yet, which is most likely, give it a go. This will be a different journey at least.

Insert trying to insert but t can't in this new fat format alex Viewed at the Lodz film school this turned out to be a one-of-a-kind masterpiece known in Polish as "Sanatorium pod Klepsdydra", or in English as "Sanatorium under the Hourglass". In Poland the hourglass, which marks time by allowing sand to sift one grain at a time from an upper chamber to a lower one through a narrow opening, is associated symbolically with the sands of human life running out, and is often seen as a symbol accompanying obituary reports. The film is based on a highly symbolic novel, dealing among other things with the death of Jewish culture in Poland -- written by the Polish-Jewish writer, Bruno Schulz, who was murdered by the Gestapo in WW II. While literary adaptations are quite common in Poland, this bizarre Schulz tale was long considered to be so abstract as to be unfilmable. Has not only found the images and the narrative style to bring Schultz's words to the screen, but in the process created a film that is so spectacular that it out-Fellinies Fellini in "Juliet of the Spirits" - in short, one of the most amazing films I have ever seen. "Klepsydra", one of the most extraordnary films ever made in Poland, is about a middle aged man who comes to visit the sanatorium where his aged father has recently passed away and there encounters the father's ghost who leads him through a series of personal and philosophical revelations as they move from room to room in the gloriously cluttered premises. Cobwebs and junk are everywhere, but this is the debris of the collective unconscious. Early in the picture the bemused visitor - played by handsome actor Jan Nowicki, who radiates a bit of the aura of a Polish Paul Newman -- dons a golden fireman's helmet which he then wears throughout, an odd touch which we soon accept as par for the course in these fantastically colorful surrealistic surroundings. Towards the end of the film the man finds himself wandering through the dreamy streets of a resurrected Jewish village and is swept up in a traditional public celebration of some kind which is going on all around him. This is presumably a reference to writer Schulz's own Jewish childhood in Drohobycz, but in Has' film it becomes a mystical epitaph for the entire Jewish culture of Poland which was ruthlessly eradicated during World War II. The entire atmosphere of the film is dreamlike -at times a little nightmarish -but never off-putting, because Has' narrative style keeps things flowing and the visuals are so lush that the eye is constantly delighted. All-in-all a unique, dazzling, and thought-provoking motion picture

Viewed at the Polishfilm sch Viewed at the Lodz film school this turned out to be a one-of-a-kind masterpiece known in Polish as "Sanatorium pod Klepsdydra", or in English as "Sanatorium under the Hourglass". In Poland the hourglass, which marks time by allowing sand to sift one grain at a time from an upper chamber to a lower one through a narrow opening, is associated symbolically with the sands of human life running out, and is often seen as a symbol accompanying obituary reports. The film is based on a highly symbolic novel, dealing among other things with the death of Jewish culture in Poland -- written by the Polish-Jewish writer, Bruno Schulz, who was murdered by the Gestapo in WW II. While literary adaptations are quite common in Poland, this bizarre Schulz tale was long considered to be so abstract as to be unfilmable. Has not only found the images and the narrative style to bring Schultz's words to the screen, but in the process created a film that is so spectacular that it out-Fellinies Fellini in "Juliet of the Spirits" - in short, one of the most amazing films I have ever seen. "Klepsydra", one of the most extraordnary films ever made in Poland, is about a middle aged man who comes to visit the sanatorium where his aged father has recently passed away and there encounters the father's ghost who leads him through a series of personal and philosophical revelations as they move from room to room in the gloriously cluttered premises. Cobwebs and junk are everywhere, but this is the debris of the collective unconscious. Early in the picture the bemused visitor - played by handsome actor Jan Nowicki, who radiates a bit of the aura of a Polish Paul Newman -- dons a golden fireman's helmet which he then wears throughout, an odd touch which we soon accept as par for the course in these fantastically colorful surrealistic surroundings.

Towards the end of the film the man finds himself wandering through the dreamy streets of a resurrected Jewish village and is swept up in a traditional public celebration of some kind which is going on all around him. This is presumably a reference to writer Schulz's own Jewish childhood in Drohobycz, but in Has' film it becomes a mystical epitaph for the entire Jewish culture of Poland which was ruthlessly eradicated during World War II. The entire atmosphere of the film is dreamlike -at times a little nightmarish -but never off-putting, because Has' narrative style keeps things flowing and the visuals are so lush that the eye is constantly delighted. All-in-all a unique, dazzling, and thought-provoking motion picture

Very fun to watch, some really thoughtful and cinematically awesome moments. I'm just a white little American kid so all the references to Polish Judaism which dominate this film aren't much I can understand or relate to. The cinematic transition where he's lost in thought and it zooms out through the flowers at around 19 minutes is one my favorite ever. I remember the first time I saw that how it had me sucked into that feeling of being lost in thought then snapping back to reality so well.

Worth watching even if you can't relate to the greater themes like me. Looking forward to seeing more from this director regardless of whether or not I can relate to it.

This is an effort to bring Bruno Schultz's literary masterpiece to the screen. Like many movies based on great books, this too is weak, though some visual aspects are interesting and do convey the atmosphere of the book. In all honesty the task that Wojciech Has took upon himself is an almost impossible one. In many ways it is the same story with Kafka?s novels; the few attempts to bring them to the screen were not very successful. The problem is that those books are great for reasons different than just visual surrealism. That is why script that was written in movie in mind works much better. Take for example "The Hour of the Wolf" by Bergman. Altogether this movie is an interesting attempt - not all bad. I wish somebody else would try to make this movie again. Bruno Schultz deserves that.

How Mark Twain and Danilo Kis would have torn this pretentious nonsense apart in scathing reviews.

The first 15 minutes are deceitfully promising, with the mysterious mood and the excellent sets somewhat reminiscent of movies such as "Stalker". Once whassisname gets to the Sanitarium (or whatever the hell it is), HS sets itself up as a Kafkaesque drama, in which some sort of a time-warp seems to be dominating the premises. Or at least it seems to be Kafka-like. It isn't.

Soon HS disintegrates into surrealist farce – which is the same as a mainstream farce but devoid of laughs. The hero has dozens of meaningless conversations with real or imagined (irrelevant which) dullards, all of whom babble about obscure or inconsequential piffle. HS is one of those highly ambitious yet intellectually hollow art-fart Euro-trash flicks designed to please critics (and film-students who are forever enslaved by critics), while fully ignoring the needs of any sane viewer – and by that I don't mean people who seek out "Porky's" every time they pick a movie. I'm all for an intelligent story/concept, provided it really IS intelligent, and not just TRYING to appear "deep".

HS is one of many such 60s/70s European art-flicks that utilize the ultimate 20th-century art-world hoax, the "Picasso con". You know the charlatan drill: create something pointless and meaningless – yet very importantly ABSTRACT - and then sit and wait for pompous intellectual wannabes to rush into the room, injecting their subjective, ludicrous interpretations into the whole empty mess. The "Picasso con" works precisely because it preys on man's biggest enemy: his own fear. In this case, it is the fear of being thought of as stupid and/or uncultured. In a world in which status means everything (to certain people at least), few people are confident enough to speak out against pretentious drivel they don't understand. Therein lies the catch: there is nothing to understand. The movie is what it appears to be: an almost random collection of scenes and dialogues that are somehow supposed to be profound merely because they are full of fortune-cookie aphorisms, mostly superficial philosophical musings, and historical references.

So consumed was the 1974 Cannes Festival jury with this fear that they might look like jackasses for failing to make head or tails of this "grand, poetic work" that they copped out by giving HS the Grand Jury Prize – which is usually awarded to awful movies, I might add.

When it comes to those consummate liars and fakers - the movie critics – abstract imagery and endless existentialist gobbledygook is often all you need in your "allegorical" surrealist malarkey to get your thumbs up. As for the film-students, well, they simply "enjoy" whatever critics and their movie professors tell them to; they are mindless sheep, seeking to convince both themselves and their surroundings that they are high-brow intellectuals whose opinions matter and that nobody should ever dare underrate the exquisite depth of reason and imagination one needs in order to be an A-grade film student. In reality, Film Schools are low-brow, more in line with African History Studies, and the like; this explains the strong urge to prove oneself worthy of respect.

It is almost scary (but also fascinating and hilarious) to consider that so many film buffies, and other film-studenty type of human debris, have so successfully been brainwashed by the cultural movie establishment that they have actually learned to train themselves to sit through these kinds of two-hour drags and then even boast (lie) later how much they'd enjoyed them. But no amount of pseudo-intellectual BS can hide the roots of these movies, because the roots are showing from all sides.

Nor do film-students, film-buffies and film-critics differentiate between quality surrealism ("O Lucky Man!", for example) and low-grade, empty-headed nonsense (this Polish crap). It is all the same to them. It is as though the genre itself – the surrealist allegorical abstract drama (sounds "fancy", doesn't it?) – is enough by definition to give any such film the "official seal of approval for intellectual excellence" from the esteemed, confused, fearful movie community. Many vastly overrated directors (check out my "Overrated Directors" list) have built their entire careers on such obvious charlatanry. Think about it: it's much easier to write a script that has neither a structure not a plot (or at least only a vague one) and to simply glue together a bunch of scenes in which wide-eyed overactors dish out quotes from Nietzsche and Rousseau and make references to greats of literature and art.

Surely breasts are art? Nearly every actress in the movie shows her bazookas – in the name of art, naturally. One of the few good things about "surrealist" cinema: if you want tits, you'll find them here.

Going back to "Stalker"; perhaps if HS had no buffoonery, especially from its protagonist, and if it had a more eerie, mysterious mood – and a "somewhat" more finely-tuned script (or just A script as opposed to a lack of one), then perhaps this could have been a great movie. As it is, we've got great sets, nice photography, but not much else. Unless you believe that randomly injected philosophical discussions and occasional lines of pretentious poetry can ever possibly serve as a valid replacement for a story.

Believe it or not, there is one fart joke here, but in the non-skilled hands of film-critic spin-doctoring, I am sure even this basic bodily function can be interpreted as having vast layers of profundity. The world, after all, is full of false interpretations of riddles, with very few correct or sane interpretations. Trouble is, in order to interpret something you need to have a meaning to begin with, otherwise you're just indulging your own fantasies, making up things as you go along.

OK, enough of this rant. I'm off now to get a few laughs by reading the 10-star reviews here.

This mystical wide-screen allegory was inspired by the short stories of Bruno Schulz (the Polish Franz Kafka), but is closer in spirit to an Eastern European 'Alice in Wonderland'. The film has the rich visual texture and elliptical logic of a dream, but viewers unprepared for the haphazard structure and lack of any linear plot may find their patience wearing thin after a few scenes. It opens with a young man visiting his father in a remote sanatorium, where he enters into a kaleidoscopic world of real and imagined events spanning back and forth across time and memory (at one point he glances out a window and sees himself arriving at the front door). Like many post '60s head-trips the film has a devoted cult following, but the primitive, post-dubbed stream of consciousness style hasn't aged very well, and what may have once been a daring escape from the straitjacket of narrative convention can now seem like two full hours of sloppy self-indulgence.

The director, as he did with Sargosso Manuscript, seems more interested in trying for comic surreal than drama/horror or psychological depth.

This is not to say that Surrealism doesn't work when it has a comic edge, but that this director doesn't do surreal comedy that well, while when he gets serious, and visual he's so good you just wish he'd really stick with that.

As in the previous film the more serious aspects are the best elements, this film is more impressive visually but a good part of that is that it's in color. I admit the first time I saw this film I thought quite highly of it and in seeing it again I thought it would get even better as I'd understand more of how the pieces came together and what they meant. But after a long gap between viewings the film almost fell apart for me. Despite a powerful wrap up sequence.

After a strong start the script just doesn't come together or feel like it's rushing into nightmare or meaning, it plods along. Some of the episodes just seem pointless--especially the soldiers near the boat and the manikin sequence. These set pieces aren't really that funny and go on forever. And most of the manikins are obviously people trying to stand still so you end up watching to see them breath or move when you should be reading subtitles. Another thing about the attempts at antic bizarre comedy is that these are the talkiest sections of the film, really almost like a stage play in these spots.

These have nothing to do with the core story which is the man and his father sort of loose in time. At one point the son talking to his father says these various episodes are "hard to discern, the meaning." He's got that right!

The Jewish seuqences and elements are interesting--especially coming from a Communist country at the time it was made is praise worthy.

And yes indeed Blade Runner owes this film a debt.

But aside from the stunning sets and transitions you just don't know what is going on some of the time and with a film that is a bit over 2 hours in length you just stop caring. You can still sit there and marvel at the images, but this is not enough. It's almost like footage cut out of a great movie because it didn't advance the story.

The film also tends to get really talky in spots. The best moments and sequences are silent. The whole thing feels like a missed opportunity despite some great silent sequences and a great core idea, it doesn't hold you or hold together for the whole length. Opening and closing sequences are the best though there are scattered images and an excellent, if sparsely placed, music score. For the record there is also a fair amount of female nudity involving a brothel, though this too seems a bit forced after awhile and is played with a leering comic quality never with any erotic intent.

Though it has some great dream images it fails ultimately to convince us there is a dream logic at work here.

All in all an almost fascinating film that becomes frustrating instead. Have to fault the script as all the elements on a production level were there ready to make a great film, but as is so often the case you need a great script to make a great movie no matter what genre.

One final note I have read THE SARGOSSA MANUSCRIPT, I have not read the source material to this film, so I make an assumption about the director's interest in comedic twists rather than more serious horrific ones based on what he did with the first film and book.

The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973)

Coming eight years after the monumental black and white bore that was The Saragossa Manuscript, writer/director Wojciech Has has fashioned a surreal, philosophical adaptation of Bruno Schulz's Sanatorium Under The Sign of the Hourglass. Whilst technically brilliant, in fact a marvel of camera-work and production design, its intellectual bent will leave many sagging under the weight of its pretentiousness and sluggish pace. Painstakingly restored the movie is a joy to behold visually, courtesy of cinematographer Witold Sobocinski, with each frame alive with an abundance of colour and vivid imagery the likes of which Terry Gilliam can merely take to bended knee and give worship to. Accompanied by a wonderfully discordant score from composer Jerzy Maksymiuk and a haunting atmospheric vibe, similar to the vibe that David Lynch would go on to make his own, there's much to admire about The Hourglass Sanatorium outside of the plot.

The plot feels needlessly convoluted and random and one can only image that this will appeal to only those that either have a rabid love of Polish cinema or deliberately embrace the obscure for no other reason than to feel snobbish about more commercial fare. They will no doubt praise THE Hourglass Sanatorium with big and important sounding words when in fact outside of the main story arc they will be as clueless as the next person.

Set in pre-World War II era the film opens with a young man called Józef (Jan Nowicki) travelling on a dilapidated train crammed with an odd assortment of people including a blind train conductor (Mieczyslaw Voit). His destination is a sanatorium in the middle of the Polish countryside where he is to visit his dying father Jakub (Tadeusz Kondrat). Upon arriving he finds the grounds untended and the building in a state of disarray both outside and in. Undeterred he enters and is met by an indifferent nurse (Janina Sokolowska) and his father's doctor (Gustaw Holoubek). Józef discovers that time runs differently at the sanatorium, slowed down in order to maintain his father's life signs.

He soon meets with his childhood friend, a young boy called Rudolph (Filip Zylber), whose postage stamp collection triggers episodes within the narrative, all of which could be childhood memories in which the adult Józef is very much treated as an infant. This leads to encounters involving spooky mannequins re-enacting the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, references to exotic birds and colonial black mercenaries.

There's an abundance of female boobs on screen and it seems that no woman can be shown on in the movie without either one or both of her mammaries showing. In writer/director Has' movie women appear to be sexualized, objectified or promiscuous.

From the arresting and dreamlike opening image of a bird flying, to the decrepit and decaying sanatorium of the title, there is much to admire in terms of the visuals and terrific production design. If it wasn't for the astonishing visuals, chances are you'd give up watching. Crammed with unusual and haunting images such as the clockwork mannequins it's a shame that the philosophical bent the plot arc takes ends up leaving the viewer with nothing else but exquisite frames of film on which to hang their boredom and frustration.

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