Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass screened at the Offscreen Film Festival, 16 Mar 2025, together with Peter Strickland’s short film Cobbler’s Lot (2018)
Twin brothers Stephen and Timothy Quay first made their name for a series of highly mannered hand animated short films, including Street of Crocodiles (1986) which was adapted from a short story by Bruno Schulz, and for their live-action debut feature Institute Benjamenta (1995). Now after a hiatus of two decades since their second feature The Piano Tuner of EarthQuakes (2004), they have come full circle, adapting their third feature once more from the often obscure writings of Schulz. This time the source text is Schulz’s 1937 novel Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, previously adapted by Wojciech Has as The Hourglass Sanatorium (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydra 1973).
Liminality is key (or Quay) to Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass – a film which switches between stop motion and live action and between monochrome and colour, even as its characters drift between wakefulness and sleep, life and death. Here everything always seems to be on an edge or at a threshold, and indeed it opens with an auctioneer (Tadeusz Janiszewski) perched perilously on a rooftop as he hawks a range of rare occult objects (including a lot of “twin quail eggs”, which sounds like a sly, paradoxical cameo from the directors). He then exhibits for auction a strange cabinet-like apparatus, whose seven lenses he claims show – when the sun is in its right celestial position – the last seven things witnessed by a dead man’s retina preserved within.
This peculiar device is a reflex for the power of cinema itself to project and resurrect spectral images from the past – and the rest of the film is divided into seven formally headed parts that presumably correspond to the seven tableaux vivants promised by the device. For all their opacity, the text of these headings is often as close to a narrative thread as this hermetic, oneiric, even impenetrable film will ever get on its labyrinthine quest for memory and meaning. For the episodes here offer an exquisitely crafted Kafka-esque shadow world through which figures pass as though sleepwalking – a veritable peepshow for the merely half-awake.
Jozef has come to a sanatorium in the Carpathian mountains in search of his father, and even before arriving, the train itself proves a space of irrationality and emptiness, where the traveler must chase his own elusive Magrittian hat as a guide to where he should go. Yet the sanatorium is even more confusing – run by the six-armed Dr Gotard, it is a place where it is always night, where patients (and visitors like Jozef) spend most of their time asleep, and where time itself operates according its own schedule, so that Jozef’s father, though dead in the outside world, is still alive here, if only as fleeting fragments of a ghost of a dream of a memory.
As Jozef searches the sanatorium’s cabinets, closets, drawers and miniature theatres, all of which resemble the compartments of the auctioneer’s device, and as Jozef peeps through key holes and watches the fetishised activities on the other side in much the same way that the auctioneer peers into the lenses, this becomes a panopticon of perverse viewing and voyeuristic longing.
If all these dustily textured antiquarian visions, with their rewinds, recursions and recessions, are hypnotic, even soporific, then the Quays at one point knowingly cut away to the auctioneer slumped in slumber before one of the lenses, almost as though to assure the viewer that somnolence is an acceptable response to these materials. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is the type of film to experience rather than to understand, all disorienting journeys, dead-end corridors and demonically directed dramas of one or more lost souls. You will feel as if you have dreamt it – so long, that is, as you can keep your eyes open – and probably emerge with very little idea of what has actually happened, or why, or where you have ended. So perhaps after all this curiosity box of a film, for all its mazes and mysteries, is not entirely unlike life.
strap: Hermetic, hypnotic, half-animated, half-asleep, half-dead: the Quay brothers’ latest is a projected peepshow for lost souls
© Anton Bitel
