Something of a Waking Nightmare, ‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’ Is Worth the Ride

In an essay on an early 20th-century writer and painter, Bruno Schulz, the novelist J.M. Coetzee wrote of the Polish author’s “creation, or perhaps fabulation, of a childhood consciousness, full of terror, obsession, and crazy glory.” Typically compared to Franz Kafka or Alfred Kubin, Schulz left us remnants of a mystical world so deeply rooted and thoroughly imagined that to categorize it as “fantasy” seems something of a cheat. Schulz’s oeuvre consists of two books: “The Street of Crocodiles” and “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.” The length of each book is modest, but their metaphysical scope, their sense of probity and poetic reach, is considerable. Schulz was awarded a Golden Laurel from the Polish Academy of Literature in 1938 and was working on a novel when he was killed by the Gestapo four years later at age 50. The book that was in-process has been lost.Literature, particularly the sort that purposely consolidates the mundane, the philosophical, and the inscrutable, has not always been well served by cinema. Notwithstanding the relative merits of Orson Welles’s “The Trial” (1962) or David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” (1991), film suffers, in this context, from what can only be called explicit reality: a dampening of the mind’s eye caused by an intractable material world. A dream is less convincing when it is made concrete.How the Quay Brothers got around this dilemma in their 1986 short based on “The Street of Crocodiles” is by doubling down on materiality to the point where arrant artifice prompts metaphorical lift-off: sometimes a puppet is the most convincing means by which to tap into our collective unconscious. And so it proves nearly 40 years later with “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” a 75-minute encapsulation of “a floating world halfway between sleep and wakefulness.”The Quay Brothers. (c) Maria PadróNever heard of the Quay Brothers? Stephen and Timothy, identical twins born 78 years ago, might well prefer it that way. After studying at London’s Royal College of Art, these scions of the Philadelphia suburbs pursued careers in illustration before beginning their signature brand of stop-motion animation, taking as inspiration the movies of a Czech surrealist, Jan Švankmajer. The Quays have gained a niche following, and name-brand filmmakers like Terry Gilliam and Sir Christopher Nolan have been vocal in their admiration for the brothers’ “perversely fascinating body of work.” How well have they imagined a netherworld given to, pace Schulz, “excesses and wild aberrations, to cutting incalculable capers, to shambolic clowning”? There’s no gainsaying the precision of the Quays’ craftsmanship or their astonishing gift for light, texture, and atmosphere. The admixture of live action and animation is less jerry-rigged than one might fear and gains in traction as the movie’s hallucinogenic fervor takes hold. A viewer can’t help but wonder what Schulz might have thought of the film. It is a not-so-distant kin of a picture he might have seen, Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920).Those who want a plot should take hold of what they can in this elliptical telling of Jozef and his mysterious train ride to a medical facility nestled within the Carpathian Mountains. He’s on a search for his father, who may or may not be alive. In the meantime there are doctors, monsters, nubile young women, and kaleidoscopic hallways in which to venture. A wrap-around story concerning an Escher-like gizmo called the “Maquette for the Sepulchre of a Dead Retina” channels the introduction of James Whale’s “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935), just as the general ambiance poaches upon the dread found in the cautionary tales of the Brothers Grimm.Would that the Quays’ descent into Schulz’s nightmarish realm were more economical: By the time Jozef’s odyssey comes to a kind of resolution, the Brothers’ cinematic effects — particularly, the stuttered repetition of scenes and an attendant narrowing of the picture frame — have become less an embodiment of temporal dislocation than an affectation of cinematic means. Art should create a deeper sense of logic rather than parade its own machinations. Having said that, “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” is something special — a waking nightmare worth an endless train ride.

Something of a Waking Nightmare, ‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’ Is Worth the Ride

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