Smuggling
a censored film was a trickier proposition in 1973. Instead of a flash drive,
you had to schlep cans of film. Nevertheless, Wojciech Has managed to convey
his banned mind-bending prestige production to Cannes, where the jury led by
Ingrid Bergman awarded it the Jury Prize. While never explicitly political, it
is easy to see why Has’s The Hourglass
Sanatorium (trailer
here) would be too much for a risk averse Communist
apparatchik to countenance when it screens as a handpicked selection of Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema, hosted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Based
on the novel and short stories of Bruno Schulz, Hourglass is never intimidated by the constraints of narrative. Józef
is traveling to a remote sanatorium, where his lower middle class merchant
father Jakub is a patient. Actually, his father is already dead everywhere else
except the decaying sanatorium. Within the crumbling walls, the randy
inattentive staff apparently has the power to roll back time to a point where
his father is still living. Through the strange power of the sanatorium, Józef
is able to revisit his past through his subconscious (or vice versa) for a
series of chaotic encounters with his sort of late father. Or something like
that.
You
could debate just what Hourglass is
until the cows come home, but no way, no how is it Socialist Realism. Meaning
that densely ambiguous spells nothing but trouble for a professional censor. To
make matters worse, Has chose not to soft pedal the main characters’ Jewish
heritage while the Polish Communist Party was still engaged in its campaign of
anti-Semitic purges. At times, Has even evokes images of the Holocaust, even
though the work of Shulz (himself a fatal victim of National Socialism)
predated WWII.
Good
for Berman for digging Hourglass. It
will not be to everyone’s tastes. However, it is visually stunning. The depth
of vision Has employs with his swooping camera is truly dizzying. It might be heresy
to suggest, but Hourglass could be
that rare classic worth giving the 3D fixer-upper treatment. Ironically, the
film authorities clearly opened the coffers during the production stage. The
work of art director Andrzej Halinski is absolutely baroque, even decadent in an
evocatively decayed way. Viewers may well wonder if Hourglass was an early influence on a young Tim Burton or Terry
Gilliam.
Hourglass is an auteur’s
film in just about every way, rather than an actor’s showcase. It is dashed
difficult to forge an emotional connection with the audience amid all the
trippiness, but at least Jan Nowicki looks convincingly lost as Józef.
