Timothy and Stephen Quay have developed an entirely unique style in the world of stop-motion animation: vigorously kinetic yet meticulously controlled; balletic in its interweaving of aural and visual rhythms; full of the sort of trivia and esoterica that fascinated Borges and Pessoa; and given to looped sequences of pure, sensual, cinematographic abstraction. Their latest production, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, which draws generously from Bruno Schulz’s novel of the same name, adds yet more stylistic oddities to the foregoing list, albeit in a more conventional, narrativized context.
The precise details of this context are hard to elaborate completely, but we can be sure of a few things. The protagonist is Jozef, a lithe, ruddy man who is visiting his father at a sanatorium in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. In the real world his father is dead; but at the sanatorium, where the clocks have been set back by an undefined amount of time, his father is still alive. There are also the sanatorium’s six-armed proprietor, Dr. Gotard, an unnamed maid, and a malevolent satyr with a scalene head. And all of this exists inside a strange device which, by some alchemy that ought not to be questioned, allows one to view the memories, or perhaps premonitions, of a mystical retina.
If the film has anything like a narrative progression, then it is to be found within the tremendous flux of visual imagery and sub-rational drives, and is more like a series of recurring motifs in different guises than isolatable events in a three-act structure. Which is to say that the largest progressions, of theme and character and atmosphere, occur in some of the most ephemeral details: within loops of top hats tumbling down a set of stairs, or in the small shuffles the camera makes around a woman putting on a high heel, or in the swift movement of Dr. Gotard pricking a metal rod into an infinite vibration. And yet, to an eye wondering where the maid has gone or when such-and-such thread will be neatly tied up, Sanatorium will seem quite stagnant and without rhythm.
This structural inside-outness is due in part to the film’s visual style, which, as with much of the Quays’ work, is rooted in German Expressionism. Every texture, every movement, every melody is suffused with weight and symbolism, and the characters are entirely subordinate to these elements: they have no internal state, no sense of being separate from their surroundings; everything they think or feel is externalized in the intricate sets, in the distorted shadows and monosyllabic close-ups, in the calligraphic swirls of smoke, and in the silver shimmer of their blurred faces. It is a haunting effect similar to the mood of Kafka’s The Castle in that it instills in every moment a pervasive ambiguity, an existential dislocation, which is never resolved and which never abates.
To describe the visual style in this way, however, is to ignore the multifarious additions the Quays have made––whether it be adapting Dalian landscapes into celluloid netherworlds, or using changes of ratio and perspective to map out psychosexual geographies, or riffing absurdly on the avian motifs in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. And how are we to incorporate into that categorization the live-action sequences, which play out like perverse silent films, serving as organic parallels to the puppet world? The fun and frustration in answering such questions is key to an ongoing enjoyment of the Quays’ work. For one of the great pleasures of their films is that they are both highly personal and perpetually out of reach, speaking to us directly but in a language we cannot fully understand. They are, to borrow a phrase from Sanatorium, theaters for one, with a restricted view.
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass screened at the BFI London Film Festival.