Sure, they’ve been a little quiet lately, but this looks promising: a proposed feature based on Polish author Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. [Twitch]

The brothers made a name for themselves in the 1980s, thanks in large part to their short film Street of Crocodiles, based on the Schulz short story of the same name. It’s nice to see them returning to such impressive, visually rich source material.

Bruno Schulz is a criminally under-appreciated writer whose collection of work is criminally small and limited. But what’s their is impressive and it’s worth reading every drop of the man’s prose.

The Quays’ feature (only their third) will be a mix of live action and stop-motion animation.

Here’s the cracked-out (and totally interesting) synopsis for the film:

“The main subject of the narrative is a journey through a somnambulistic world by the son, Jozef, to visit his purportedly dying Father in a Sanatorium. Once there, Jozef reports on the confusions and horrors of this ever shifting Limbo. Little by little the tissues of reality loosen around Jozef; he becomes subject to a different clock and to the peculiar experiments with Time presided over by a mysterious Dr. Gotard[and a ventriloquizing Auctioneer]: “……here, we are always late by a certain interval of time of which we cannot define the length. Your Father ‘s death, the death that has already struck him in your country, has not yet occurred. “. This certain interval  will give rise to the eerie phantasmatic ir-reality of the Sanatorium as a result of the contamination and rapid decomposition of time. Through these morphined  and labyrinthine corridors Jozef will vainly pursue and hunt for his Father, or rather, versions of his Father. A Father seen in different guises: incorrigible fantasist, shop owner, the lonely hero who becomes prey to the aberrations of this realm. Jozef will always arrive too late to discover only the fading ghostlike husk of his Father’ s being- a mere hand gripped to a stairway door [and to the repeated sound of his feeble coughs].  The Sanatorium’s corridors will multiply and double, sometimes as rooms, sometimes becoming streets which give onto town squares and will perpetrate corporeal and psychic memories upon these spaces[both Jozef's, his Father, and that of others, all overlapping].Thus, no centre will ever be reached. Within the Sanatorium’s labyrinthine corridors parallel tracks of time,- represented by both a live-action realm and a puppet/object realm [each one secretly mirroring the other] will be traversed simultaneously.”

What do you think of the Brothers Quay? Are you excited for their next film?