General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Hourglass Sanatorium

The Hourglass Sanatorium (Polish: Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą) is a 1973 Polish surrealist feature film directed and written by Wojciech Jerzy Has, freely adapted from the prose of the writer and graphic artist Bruno Schulz. The film follows Józef (Jan Nowicki), a young Jewish man who travels by train to a decaying sanatorium run by Dr. Gotard (Gustaw Holoubek) and finds his father, who has died in the outside world, kept alive there in a different dimension of time. It is now counted among the most important works of Polish cinema¹^•².

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą; in Polish klepsydra means both an hourglass and an obituary notice³
Year and length	1973; 119 min (the Harvard Film Archive lists its restoration at 125 min); Polish premiere 11 December 1973¹^•³
Source	Bruno Schulz's 1937 story collection Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą, chiefly the title story and "Spring" (Wiosna), with material woven in from many other stories⁴^•⁵
Key crew	Cinematography Witold Sobociński; music Jerzy Maksymiuk; production design Jerzy Skarżyński and Andrzej Płocki¹
Principal cast	Jan Nowicki (Józef), Tadeusz Kondrat (Jakub, Józef's father), Irena Orska (Józef's mother), Halina Kowalska (Adela), Gustaw Holoubek (Dr. Gotard), Bożena Adamek (Bianka)¹
Awards	Jury Prize, Cannes 1973; Grand Prize Golden Asteroid, Trieste 1974; set-design award, 1st Polish Feature Film Festival, Gdańsk 1974¹
Languages	Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew and Latin³

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film opens on a train packed with visibly Jewish passengers, where the blind conductor (Mieczysław Voit) wakes Józef and tells him he has reached his destination. At the Hourglass Sanatorium he learns from Dr. Gotard that although his father Jakub has died in the outside world, "his death has not yet taken effect" inside the sanatorium, which obeys different temporal rules. From this premise Józef drifts through rooms and loops of past time: his childhood, his father's shop, the Jewish shtetl (small prewar Jewish town in Eastern Europe), the garden of Princess Bianka, who left with his friend Rudolf, and historical fantasies peopled with waxwork figures such as the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph and his brother Maximilian¹^•⁸.

The narrative abandons linear chronology and spatial logic. Its unifying devices are Sobociński's long takes, which track Józef crawling under beds, scaling walls and walking through mirrors, and recurring props and images: a stamp album, an ancient catalog, exotic birds and automata resembling historical figures⁶^•⁹.

Background and adaptation

The film's literary source is the collection Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą, published in 1937 in Warsaw as the second and last book Schulz released during his lifetime. The title story had appeared in 1936 in Tygodnik Ilustrowany; Schulz, who was shot dead by an SS officer in Drohobycz in November 1942, never saw either book filmed⁴^•⁶.

Has, a trained painter, had encountered Schulz's work during the Second World War and decided then that he would one day film Sanatorium. In 1965 he asked Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, the screenwriter of Has's The Saragossa Manuscript, to draft a script; Kwiatkowski produced further versions, but Has ultimately wrote the final screenplay himself. The opportunity to produce the film came in the 1970s, when Kazimierz Kutz, head of the Zespół Filmowy "Silesia" studio, agreed to back the project²^•⁷.

The task was considered nearly impossible at the time, because Schulz's stories have almost no plot. Has treated the title story, the most narrative of the collection, as his starting point and combined it with several other stories, including "The Book" (Księga), "Dead Season" (Martwy sezon), "Spring" (Wiosna), "My Father Joins the Firemen" and "The Age of Genius", while also drawing on tales from the earlier collection Cinnamon Shops such as "Birds", "Cyclones" and "Treatise on Mannequins"²^•⁷. He explained his method in a 1973 Polish Radio interview: he asked himself how Schulz would have written the screenplay, used the title story to build the situation and dialogues, and invented the characters' adventures himself on that key⁷.

Jewish Poland and politics

The film is read as an elegy for prewar Jewish Poland. Has, who was himself half-Jewish, pointedly evoked the vanished world of the Galician shtetl in direct response to the anti-Semitic purges that followed the 1968 events in Poland³. In the film's second time loop, the world of the Jewish towns proves destroyed and depopulated after the Holocaust². Critics trace the theme from the opening train, where gaunt bodies lie on hay in a manner that recalls transports to the death camps, to the final scene, in which Józef climbs out of a grave in a candlelit Jewish cemetery¹⁰^•¹¹.

Censorship and the Cannes affair. Even in 1973 the film was an uncomfortable production for the communist authorities because of its Jewish themes and historical allegory. After finishing the edit, Has, aware of how Polish officials selected films for Cannes, smuggled a working print out of the country; it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize in 1973. For this act Has paid with a ban on directing films, which Culture.pl describes as lasting ten years; other accounts call it a several-year prohibition²^•⁵^•¹².

Reception and legacy

The film was initially rejected by Polish critics, but later assessments place it among the masterpieces of Polish cinema². In 2014 Martin Scorsese included it in his festival program Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema, and it has since circulated in restored digital form at archives and festivals²^•³. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.4/10 from about 6,400 votes¹³.

The source's elusiveness has produced a second feature adaptation: the Brothers Quay's largely animated Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (2024), which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on August 29, 2024, 76 minutes long and part stop-motion, part live action⁶^•¹⁴. In the hourglass of the title, a traditional element of Polish obituaries and death notices, both adaptations retain the image of mortality and the possibility of its reversal¹⁴.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026