Wojceich Has' beautiful, surrealisitic nightmare, 'The Hourglass Sanatorium" is full of some of the most impressive imagery ever committed to celluloid, but it's the dense, endlessly fascinating narrative, if you can call it that, which makes this film such a truly memorable experience. The film begins on a dilapidated passenger train with our main protagonist, Jozef, on his way to visit his ailing father in a worn-down sanatorium. Dilapidated is an understatment, with the train being occupied by passengers who are closer to representing corpes, than lively human-beings. Arriving at the Sanatorium, Jozef is told by the doctor that his father is dying but strangely suggests that he may recover at some point, as time works on a different level in the sanatorium. From that point on, The Hourglass Sanatorium gets downright mesmerizing, with sequence after sequence of dreamlike narrative threads that feel more like vignettes than one cohesive narrative. Seemingly jumping through time, we relive many aspects of Jozef's youth, many centering around his family, with his father being portrayed both as a sick man and lively man in different sequences throughout. As this surrealist dream barrels towards its conclusion, it becomes somewhat apparent that Jozef is in fact the man who has died, with The Hourglass Sanatorium being an incredibly intricate portrait of a character's psyche. Of course the nature of this film makes it up to many interpretations, but the blind train conducter reappearing throughout the film sure seems to symbolize death. Joseph and Jacob, our two main protagonists, and much of the film also deals with jewism symbolism, with Hourglass Santorium being an allegoy of the death and destruction caused on the Jewish community in Eastern Europe during WWII. Endlessly fancinating, complex, and full of heart-stopping surrealistic imagery, Wojcich Has' The Hourglass Sanatorium is a great example of what filmmaking can be.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
|