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
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