THE HOURGLASS SANATORIUM. Extraordinary Polish masterpiece

Kazimierz Kutz, the then artistic director of the Silesia Film Team, trusted Has. The Hourglass Sanatorium got the green light. On the outskirts of Krakow, huge decorations were created depicting the Jewish city taken out from between the lines of Schulz’s stories. Andrzej Płocki and Jerzy Skarżyński were responsible for the monumental set design, and Jerzy Skarżyński, along with his wife, Lidia, also created unforgettable costumes. Witold Sobociński was chosen as the cinematographer, and Jerzy Maksymiuk composed the music.

Has had a clear vision of how he wanted to deal with Schulz’s texts. After completing work on The Saragossa Manuscript, his vision of cinema began to crystallize into what he used to call “the formula of poetic cinema.” The director said, “For me, poetry is an inspiring factor; I am not isolated: the tradition of great romantic poetry, evoking a magical world, with all its resulting consequences, is very strong in Polish art to this day. It seems to me that the broadly understood formula of poetic cinema can capture the kaleidoscopic variability and high emotional temperature of reality…”. Schulz thought in a very similar way. Art was for him a kind of incantation, an act, capturing the emotional world in another medium. Has knew that cinema based on such a prototype could not proceed from point A to point B. A journey through The Hourglass Sanatorium is not straightforward because life and memory are not simple either.

Digital reconstruction is a painstaking process consisting of several stages. The first of these is to find the materials that remain in film archives. Care is taken to find all versions of the film, all fragments. Once we are sure that the material is complete, the actual reconstruction work begins. Each frame of the film, after thorough cleaning, is scanned into a digital version. Then they are rid of all the flaws that such materials often suffer from. Scratches, flickers, abrasions are removed. At this point, work also begins on cleaning up the sound track. The next stage is the so-called Color correction of the image. This is the moment when new life can be breathed into the film, giving it new visual qualities. At this point, if possible (in the case of The Hourglass Sanatorium such a situation occurred), the operator of the reconstructed film is involved in the work. The correction takes place under his supervision. The Hourglass Sanatorium we can watch today is the film as Witold Sobociński wants to see it, the man who created these images many years ago.

The Hourglass Sanatorium debuted on screens fifty years ago. It would be banal to dwell on the great technological leap that has occurred in cinema over these four decades. However, Has’s film has not aged a bit. The colorful gels stretched over the lights by Sobociński still cast a light on the props that remains in memory long after the film ends. The set design is truly world-class – no one in Polish cinema, neither before nor since, has demonstrated such imagination. It’s no wonder that Has’s cinema became an inspiration for many foreign creators. Among his devoted fans, we find names like David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Luis Buñuel. The Hourglass Sanatorium, as one of the few Polish feature films, was appreciated at the Cannes Film Festival. It was hailed as one of the most perfect poetic films in the history of cinema right from its premiere. Has remained one of the most recognizable Polish filmmakers beyond the country’s borders. But what is a visit to Doctor Gotard’s sanatorium?

The Whistle of a Nonexistent Train

Bare tree branches, somber music, black birds pulled straight from a graveyard nightmare, and the circular movement of the camera that reveals the mystery – what we were just watching on the full screen is merely a landscape stretching beyond the window of a rushing train. This is how The Hourglass Sanatorium begins, as well as the journey of Józef (Jan Nowicki), the film’s main character.

The train space is striking with an atmosphere of death, decay, and oblivion. Among the broken windows, stopped clock hands, cobwebs, and people who look more like ghosts than real characters, there is no hope that the final station will be a warm home. The blind conductor (Mieczysław Voit) leads the locomotive and approaches Józef to announce that his journey has just ended. Slightly disoriented, Józef asks for directions to the sanatorium, which is the purpose of his journey. The conductor replies that the question is unnecessary – Józef must find his way without anyone’s help.

However, the path in Has’s film is not what we’re accustomed to. In the world of The Hourglass Sanatorium, there are no paved roads or signposts that allow for easy navigation. Time and space are wild in Has’s film, eluding the perception of both the characters and the audience. In Doctor Gotard’s sanatorium (Gustaw Holoubek), there is no room for a single time and space. There is also no talk of the difference between reality and sanatorium reality being simply a matter of “reversing time, shifting it by a certain interval” (Gotard’s words). Such a statement is only a diabolical trick. In fact, within the sanatorium, times proliferate, overlap, and fight like wild animals. Has’s film is a continuous dialectic of forgetting and remembering, of gaining and losing forever. It is also a desperate question about the limits of human knowledge, but – step by step.

The Tragedy of Time

During Józef’s first meeting with Doctor Gotard, behind the latter’s back, we can see a painting the size of an adult. On the damaged canvas, we can see the outline of a human figure – a darkened face and a hand preserved much better than the other elements of the painting. It seems as if the figure is reaching out, piercing the canvas, and, in some quiet gesture of despair, asking for help. Almost gone, yet still there – it exists as a barely discernible beacon between the rectangle of the massive frame. We don’t know if it will disappear in a moment, nor do we know if by some strange fate it will leave the space of the painting and return in full glory, if only for a fraction of a second. This is exactly how time is in Has’s world.

Józef’s journey from the very beginning is marked by a defiance of clock time. Despite visiting many places and talking to many people, we don’t know if even a minute has passed from the beginning to the end of the film. Gotard emphasizes that the train that brought Joseph doesn’t exist. Besides, the blind conductor will follow Józef even when he leaves the lethargic carriage. Józef could have disembarked, but he could also never have boarded or remained on the train forever. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the hero’s journey continues despite the violation of the laws of physical time, which turns out to be merely a worthless prosthesis, another crippled creation of man.

The map that Józef navigates by is memory – with all its advantages and weaknesses. Sobociński and Has ensure that the viewer has a sense of continuousness, a smooth transition from scene to scene. In The Hourglass Sanatorium, there’s no room for sharp cuts or title cards informing of a change in spacetime. With Józef, we plunge into the whirlwind of memory, which mixes events from different periods of his life, but not only that. Imagination also comes into play, significantly modifying memory – blending historical events, personal experiences, emotional states, and legends that inspired Józef as a child. Hence the talk of wild time, impossible to master or categorize. We never know if the hero is on the right path or has just veered into the “illegal time branch” that the conductor told him about on Bianka’s bed.

Practically all the places Józef finds himself in are marked by a form of decay. Gotard’s entire sanatorium is littered with dilapidated equipment, broken windows, tombstones that almost invade the interior of the building (the restaurant). The same applies to other spaces – a mother plunged into mourning, dying birds, decaying mannequins, the unrestrained chaos of his father’s store are just a few examples. Amidst all this, people bustle about. Often strangely agitated, captured in the frame to dominate its composition. In the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, they cope better than the inanimate world. Time turns out to be a relation with another person for Joseph – it is in these brief encounters with others that memories are born and burned. Beautiful worlds are created, but also crippled ones, marked by death, returned from the dead.

Schulz wrote that “poetry is a brief tension of meaning between words, a sudden regeneration of original myths,” and “the essence of reality is meaning, what makes no sense is not real to us.” In the context of poetic cinema, Has said: “It seems to me that the broadly understood formula of poetic cinema can capture the kaleidoscopic variability and high emotional temperature of reality; to unify into one, harmonious, and yet gripping whole the real and imagined world, myth and reality, props from an era and the play of imagination, the memory of custom and the dream mirage, historical fact and fabrication, color and shape.” These brief tensions are flashes of meaning, and they create Józef’s identity.

Husserl spoke of the present as a comet that burns before our eyes. It’s just a flash, and then we only see the afterimage of the tail. We won’t see the moment as it was before a fraction of a second. After the flash, it is subject to the manipulations of our memory. Barthes similarly perceived the act of photography. The flash is synonymous with killing the “now.” Another association, in the context of Józef’s journey perhaps most justified, is Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, one of Walter Benjamin’s treasures. The philosopher said of it, “it looks as though it is about to move away from something it is gazing at. Its eyes are wide, its mouth is open, its wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” The ruins of memory, so starkly present in Has’s film, and Józef’s final blindness, as he begins to grope forward like an angel driven by the wind, perfectly fit Benjamin’s description, who developed many of his theses through discussions with Gershom Scholem – one of the most eminent scholars of the culture that inspired Schulz.

What does all this mean? What does Józef’s journey mean? Can a man fight against time, transience, the devilish antics of memory? Has does not answer this question unequivocally. It all escapes human knowledge, and that is precisely the second great theme of The Hourglass Sanatorium.

Treatise on Mannequins

Józef’s journey is not merely a “search for lost time.” It is equally a struggle to establish his own identity, to understand the mechanisms that govern the life of the main character. Józef constantly moves between spaces that combine different aspects of his life. During the journey, he also undergoes transformations, most often emphasized by the change or removal of his headgear (for example, when he puts on the firefighter’s helmet found in Adela’s room, he gains distinct childlike features – starting to make silly faces, behave less seriously, and accept the fact that people address him as a teenager).

During the film’s prologue (the train and arrival at the sanatorium), Józef appears to be a stable man who has traveled a long way just to be with his father. His “return” to other times initiates the occurrence of a time interval, as mentioned by Dr. Gotard. Namely, Józef watches his return through a broken window. This time, however, it looks different. The gate, which was previously an obstacle, is now opened by Rudolf, the owner of an almost magical marksmanship (we see something akin to Husserl’s comet tail – in the sanatorium, time operates differently, memory began to create, not reproduce). At this moment, the hero’s proper journey begins.

Józef’s peculiar map consists of two books. One of them is the “sacred original, in such deep humiliation” found in Adela’s room, the other is Rudolf’s marksman. Despite warnings from his father, who during one of their meetings tells Józef that the “book is a myth,” that it’s like a phoenix – it flashes with an extremely bright light for a moment, and then turns to ashes, that one should not trust it unreservedly because one reads “between the lines,” from the “bird’s-eye view,” Józef for a long time cannot rid himself of the conviction that by following the book, he will reach the truth, solve the mystery of the sanatorium. At many moments (for example, the first encounter with the mannequins and Mr. de V), Józef behaves like a child playing detective, deriving satisfaction from solving a complicated puzzle. Over time, Józef’s enthusiasm diminishes somewhat. The places he encounters on his journey also become increasingly darker.

The first significant change in behavior occurs during the meeting with his father in the aviary. It is there that the symbolic removal of the infantile helmet and the donning of a hat take place. The father also mentions “unwritten books,” which in some sense can be connected with “things too great, too splendid to fit into an event” (the conductor’s words). This is another critique of literal reading, holding onto dry facts, thinking of history, time as a line with a beginning and an end. After this meeting, Joseph’s world loses the exotic flamboyance that accompanied his earlier adventures. However, Józef still does not abandon the book and the marksman, nor does he abandon the word.

It is through them that he animates the mannequins from Bianka’s house. However, this is not a creative act, but rather bringing golems to life. An act of defiance against God. Not coincidentally, as Marcin Maron notes, the first word used by Józef to “animate” is the well-known “abracadabra.” According to the Hebrew meaning, the word means “send your beam into death.” Initially delighted with his act of creation, Józef quickly realizes that he has failed. The mannequins are not capable of “human” functioning. Ultimately, they are condemned to wander the world with the hurdy-gurdies, which Rudolf mercifully endowed them with. By Józef’s act, Mr. de V commits suicide, and Bianka and Rudolf ultimately disappear from his world. The hero recognizes his mistake and begins to shout “Ignorabimus!”, part of Emil Du Bois-Reymond’s agnostic formula – “Ignoramus et ignorabimus,” meaning “We do not know, and we will not find out.” Human knowledge is limited. Józef brings a gun to his temple, but at the last moment, he is dissuaded from suicide.

Questioning God

After this scene, the world of The Hourglass Sanatorium undergoes increasingly rapid decay. The father’s shop disappears, people start fleeing the town, the father’s birds die (in the room, only their skeletons are found), Adela dies in an accident, Bianka and Rudolf depart forever, and ultimately, in one of the most beautiful scenes in the history of Polish cinema, the father himself dies. Józef ceases to understand what is happening around him, rebels against the mischievously smiling Gotard, who ultimately dresses him in the conductor’s robes and sends him on an eternal wandering, blinded, almost as if dead. Was Józef’s cursed for bringing the golems to life?

Both Schulz and Has remain very close to Jewish philosophy. The Kabbalah adds quite a lot to the understanding of The Hourglass Sanatorium and Józef’s fate. Schulz researchers point out that the theories of the so-called Lurianic Kabbalah had a significant influence on his work. According to it, the history of the universe unfolds in three stages. The first stage (Cimcum) is the withdrawal of God and the emanation of his power into empty space. The second stage (Shevirat ha-kelim) is tragedy – the universe could not contain the divine light in its full forms, so its individual sparks were trapped in scraps, shells scattered throughout the world. The third and final stage is Tikkun, which involves collecting the shells/sparks and placing them in their proper places – thus, man becomes responsible for the world’s affairs. In the book Dramas of Time and Imagination, Marcin Maron emphasizes that Schulz’s work was interpreted within the framework of the act of Tikkun – collecting shells, searching for meaning, repairing the tragedy of Shevirat ha-kelim. It is hard not to see a similar dynamic in Has’s film. Maron (quoting Marc-Alain Ouaknin) also notes that in the Kabbalah, the relationship between the faithful and the text/word is very ambivalent. The text cannot become an idol (as was the case with Józef). “Disagreeing to possess the Text is simultaneously a refusal to appropriate divinity. The relationship to the text and to God is therefore paradoxical: one must step back, maintain distance, so as not to become idolatrous.” [Ouaknin] Józef’s father was therefore right.

However, Józef is not cursed. It seems that after shouting “Ignorabimus,” he realizes that he has reached the limits, that he cannot learn anything more about his fate. The book is no longer needed, the marksman loses his mysterious power, no words or rational figures will allow him to reach the truth – “We do not know, and we will not find out.” Józef seems to brush against what Levinas called the “non-removability of pure existence,” he has reached a certain limit and sunk into himself. He encountered nothingness. The riddle of fate and time is unsolvable without the presence of God, who remains silent. Man is condemned to wander through the Sanatorium, although it should not be forgotten that neither Schulz nor Has deny the possibility of escaping this strange space, the miracle. It is in it that Joseph’s hope lies.