Jewish History in Film: Poland's broken Jewish past in 'The Hourglass Sanatorium'

'Sanatorium pod klepsydra' ('The Hourglass Sanatorium'), directed by Wojciech Has and starring Jan Nowicki and Tadeusz Kondra, is one of the most imaginative films to come out of the 1970s. It is both an adaptation and an "anti" adaptation of the Polish Jewish author Bruno Schulz' short story collections, 'The Street of Crocodiles (1934)' and 'Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937)'. Although most of the dialogue is ripped directly from the page, it is arranged in a way that is both unique to director Has' sensibilities and a true celebration of Schulz' life and prose. The film perfectly captures the delirious aspects of Schulz' writings; it is a miracle a Polish filmmaker got away with it and, even more than that, succeeded.

By the time Has' adaptation hit screens, the world that Bruno Schulz existed in had been long dead. Born in Drohobycz, Austrian Galicia, a part of the Kingdom of Poland, historically, and now Ukraine, in 1892, he wrote both volumes of his work in that small town and died there in 1942. Venturing outside of the Jewish ghetto through the "Aryan" quarter with a loaf of bread, Bruno Schulz was shot down by a Gestapo officer, partly due to the officer's bitterness of his own "personal Jew", a dentist, being killed several days earlier. Schulz was a man who, in the words of filmmaker Benjamin Geissler, was "...born an Austrian, grew up as a Pole, and was murdered as a Jew." During the Nazi occupation between 1939 and 1945, Eric A. Goldman said, in his book 'Visions, Images and Dreams: Yiddish Film Past and Present (2011)', "Poland ceased to be one of the great centres of Yiddish life and culture; instead, it became its burial ground."

After the end of World War II, and a Europe trying desperately to forget the atrocities that took place during that time, Schultz' work was no longer printed. When they were published again by 1957, it was still a rare find for Polish readers. Schulz' imagination was bound to inspire the minds of young Polish filmmakers, fatigued by the government's imposed 'realist' standards. One of these filmmakers, and one of the most eccentric of them, was Wojciech Jerzy Has. Born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother in Krakow in 1925, Has was a filmmaker who militantly stood by his artistic sensibilities, proudly venturing as far as he could from the mainstream. Has said, in a 1981 interview, "I reject matters, ideas, themes only significant to the present day. Art film dies in an atmosphere of fascination with the present."

'The Hourglass Sanatorium' came just five years after the 1968 Polish political crisis, where protests arose against the communist regime by students and intellectuals alike. Security forces pushed back against the protests with force, enforcing suppression among educational institutions across the country. This was followed by an antisemitic campaign the minister of internal affairs, General Mieczyslaw Moczar, among others labelled as 'anti-Zionist'. Poland was no doubt following the USSR's lead as they severed their diplomatic relations with Israel because of the Six-Day War. Moczar ultimately failed at his mission to overthrow Wladyslaw Gomulka's government, succeeding instead with the exile of thousands of Jewish individuals from Poland, from the working class to party officials. Losing their jobs and facing strings of harassment, at least 13,000 Polish Jews left Poland between 1968 and 1972. The turmoil scattered throughout Poland would backlight Has' adaptation, his country's lost Jewish past emerging from Schulz's prose.

Director Wojciech Has said of Bruno Schultz's works, "Schulz's poetic prose was the reading of my early youth. It influenced my films. That is why the realization of 'The Hourglass Sanatorium' was a must for me. My aim was not to make a literal adaption of the work, but rather to do justice to what we call the work's poetics: its unique, isolated world, its atmospherics, colours and shapes."

The film itself follows a young man named Joseph (Jan Nowicki) as he travels to a sanatorium his father has been staying. From the moment he arrives to the isolated sanatorium, things are out of structure and time. The building is overgrown as if it has been abandoned for years, cobwebs grow over food and mirrors, vines crawl in from the floors and the windows. His encounters are even more bizarre than the setting, from his first encounter with the nurse in the hall to his father's doctor himself, who tells him his father is already dead. "Time is late here by an interval which I cannot precisely define...Here, your father's death hasn't occurred yet. But he met with death in your country."

Joseph finds himself in a dimension that can prolong the life span of its patients, but not necessarily time as it is known to us. "It is used-up time, worn out by other people, a shabby time full of holes, like a sieve." Not so much life as it is the dream of life itself.

Unlike Shulz' work, this film does not shy away from its Jewish origins, in fact does so explicitly, sometimes delving into uncomfortable caricatures. If there is anything to criticize in this film, it would be this aspect. But, considering the political backdrop of when this film was made, it would be hard to avoid such missteps. It would have been a far greater crime to avoid Schulz' Jewishness, even in the slightest.

'The Hourglass Sanatorium' was a major production in Poland, but that did not save it from scrutiny from the Polish government. It was hard to ignore the parallels of the sanatorium to the state of many institutions and mansions in Poland at that time. Not only that, the emphasis on Schulz' Jewish identity played a very big role in Polish authorities deciding to ban Has from submitting it for the Cannes Film Festival in 1973. This did not stop Has, who smuggled a print of the film out of Poland to submit to the festival where it was honored with the Jury Prize that year. 'The Hourglass Sanatorium' was later chosen as one of twenty-one restored Polish films for 'Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema'.

'The Hourglass Sanatorium' represents many things that were lost in the history of the Jewish people in Poland. What remains is merely a series vignettes, a dream of a memory once easily grasped and lived, and even easier to fade out from and lose. The ghosts of Poland's Pre-World War II shtetls are brought to life in ways only Schulz could imagine, in broken memories and echoes in its hero's mind. This film represents the dream of what Europe was and what it became - a field of headstones illuminated with nothing but candlelight.

Zachary Aborizk is an independent filmmaker and writer based out of Orlando, FL. His work has appeared in such publications as Adelaide Magazine in New York as well as the Tampa Bay Underground Film Festival.