Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Hourglass Sanatorium
1973 · Wojciech Has · The Hourglass Sanatorium on Sightlines
Somewhere else, Józef's father is dead. Inside the sanatorium the clocks have been pushed back far enough that the death hasn't caught up yet, so the old man is down the corridor, alive, and his son can go and sit with him. A doctor explains this early, in the flat tone of someone describing a treatment. Then Józef goes looking for the room.
That search is the film. He opens a door and walks into his own childhood. He opens another and finds a colonial phantasmagoria belonging to no year he has lived, waxworks under cobwebs, a shtetl laid out in loving and mournful detail, the dead going about their business. The camera doesn't cut between these places. It glides, the way it glided through the nested chambers of Has's own The Saragossa Manuscript eight years earlier, which is where he learned that a house can hold more stories than it has rooms.
Deleuze spends much of Cinema 2 separating two things that look alike: the flashback, and what he calls sheets of past. A flashback is dated. It announces that we are going back, takes us there, returns us, and the film's present survives intact on top of the pile. Has never announces anything. In his sanatorium the past isn't behind the present, it's through the wall, and you get to it by walking. Deleuze's term for that is regions or sheets: the whole of a life coexisting at different depths, and a man moving among them the way you move among rooms, sometimes landing in the wrong one. Here that isn't a metaphor. It's the floor plan.
Is the lens worth the trouble? The alternative is to call the film a dream and stop, and calling it a dream is a permission slip. It says anything may follow anything and none of it need mean much. But the film doesn't behave like chaos. Józef gets lost with a kind of rigor. The father recedes and returns, the same figures come back with their relations shifted, the building has an order he can't master but plainly obeys. Sheets of past names that rigor. It insists the layers are real and navigable, and that being lost in them is a fact about the topology rather than a mood.
Then the father himself, dead out there and alive in here, with the film refusing to arbitrate. Deleuze calls that point the crystal-image: the actual and the virtual, what is happening and what is only remembered, become impossible to tell apart, and you can no longer say which side of the mirror you're standing on. Has's contribution is that his crystal has a reception desk. You can check into it. And the specific variant is one Deleuze drew from Visconti's dying aristocrats, crystal-decomposition, the ordered world rotting from inside. In Sanatorium it is literal. The interiors are dressed to bursting, plush and gilt and stuffed with objects, all of it furred with dust. Splendour and rot arrive in the same shot, which is why horror lists claim the movie and aren't entirely wrong, even though its real register is grief staged as carnival.
One more term earns its keep. The treatment is a trick, and the film says so plainly. Deleuze's powers of the false describes exactly this situation: a fabrication that nonetheless produces something real, a forgery that works. The father is being kept alive by a swindle and the visits are genuine anyway. Mourning has always run on that arrangement.
The debts are legible and Has doesn't hide them. Wild Strawberries let an old man walk into his remembered past inside one unbroken spatial continuity; Has hands that walk to a son hunting for a father. Last Year at Marienbad turned the tracking shot through ornate interiors into a means of moving through chronology, time as a layout you cross; Has takes the layout and puts a roof on it. 8½ proved that remembered and imagined figures can materialize inside a continuous take with no cut to excuse them, which is the procession logic behind the sanatorium's revived dead. Juliet of the Spirits showed that overloaded décor carries an interior life better than any line of dialogue. Orphée built doorways and mirrors as working passages to the dead, in camera, without apology. Has's own invention is to weld all of it into one machine, so that the film has no dreamer at its centre but a building that remembers. Resnais put the gap between incompatible times at the edit. Has folds that gap into the camera movement, so you cross it on foot and feel it in your legs.
There is a reason he needed a whole building. Bruno Schulz, whose stories these are, was murdered by a Gestapo officer in 1942, and the Polish-Jewish world his prose described was erased with him. Writing on modern political cinema, Deleuze keeps returning to a phrase of Klee's: the people are missing. Not offscreen, not silenced. Gone. A filmmaker who cannot address an existing people has to invent one, and Deleuze calls that fabulation, legending, telling a vanished collective into provisional existence. This is what the sanatorium is for. It is a device for holding a people in a time before their murder, in rooms the news hasn't reached. The communist authorities, in the wake of the antisemitic purges of 1968, understood the assignment well enough to bury the film. It reached Cannes anyway and took the Jury Prize in 1973, and Has paid for it with years of official disfavour.
Which complicates the question of what it seeded. Suppressed films don't found schools. This one had to be re-found, carried outward by a festival prize instead of a domestic run, its influence arriving the way its own time arrives: late, sideways, out of order.
What it did to narrative is easy to state and hard to overstate. It retired the flashback and replaced it with architecture. Time stopped being a sequence you cut through and became a space you walk. Every door is a date.
So watch it again for the doors. And keep the question the film keeps. The sanatorium is either a mercy or a con, and Has, who loved his father and loved his murdered author, declines to say which. That refusal is the most honest thing in it.
Concepts in play
- Sheets of past (order of time / coexistence) — Every door in the sanatorium opens onto another layer of memory, history and dream, and the camera glides from one century to the next inside a single ruined house — the past entered by walking, never announced as a dated flashback.
- The crystal-image (hyalosign) — The father is dead outside the sanatorium and alive within it, kept by a trick of suspended time; the film never arbitrates between the two, so actual and virtual stay indiscernible.
- Crystal-decomposition — Crumbling interiors dressed to bursting, plush and gilt furred with dust, cobwebbed waxworks — an ordered bourgeois world presented in the act of rotting from within.
- The powers of the false — The sanatorium's treatment is openly a trick of suspended time, a fraud that nonetheless produces a real father to visit.
- The people are missing — A shtetl conjured in loving, mournful detail as elegy for the Polish-Jewish world the war erased, from stories by Bruno Schulz, murdered by a Gestapo officer in 1942.
- Fabulation (story-telling / legending) — The film legends a vanished collective back into provisional existence — the revived dead going about their business in rooms where the news of their murder has not arrived.
- The seer (voyant) — Józef's journey through the rooms alters nothing; he visits, looks and endures while the sanatorium conjures worlds around him.
- Pure optical & sound situations (opsigns/sonsigns) — The colonial phantasmagoria, the waxworks, the crowded shtetl street: spectacles presented to be beheld, offering no action Józef could take on them.
- Movement of world — Józef is largely carried rather than driving — the decrepit train delivers him, and the rooms, crowds and centuries move past a passive body.
- Irrational cut / interstice — Incompatible times are joined inside a single continuous camera movement through interlocking chambers rather than at an edit — the interstice folded into the take.
- The mobile section (plan) — The wandering camera inherited from The Saragossa Manuscript, gliding through nested rooms so that a change of century registers as a change in the whole.
- The time-image — Nothing Józef does resolves anything; the film's subject is the coexistence of layers of time in one building, presented for itself rather than as the measure of action.