The Hour-Glass Sanatorium DVD

Mr. Bongo Films presents the next installment from the wonderful director Wojciech Has which follows on from the cult classic 'The Saragossa Manuscript''. 'The Hourglass Sanitorium'' is a surrealist head-spin of a film and has been compared to the best works of Gilliam Greenaway and Bunuel. 'The Hourglass Sanatorium'' is an adaptation of Bruno Schulz''s story collection 'Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass''. Schulz was seen as the Polish Kafka he was later murdered by the SS during WWII. The film depicts it''s protagonist Joseph (Jan Nowicki) travelling through... a dream-like world taking a dilapidated train to visit his dying father in a sanatorium. When he arrives he finds the entire facility is going to ruin and no one seems to be in charge or even caring for the patients. Time appears to behave in unpredictable ways reanimating the past in an elaborate artificial caprice. The many occurrences in this visually potent phantasmagoria include Joseph re-entering childhood episodes with his eccentric father (who lives with birds) being arrested by mysterious soldiers reflecting on a girl he knew in his boyhood and bringing historic wax figures to life with names from a postage stamp album. Throughout his strange journey an ominous blind train conductor reappears like a death figure. Has also includes a series of reflections on the Holocaust that were not present in the original novel reading Schulz's prose through the prism of the author's tragic death and the destruction of the world he described. [show more]

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