Saturday, October 4, 2025 at 7:30 PM
Philosophical Research Society, Los Angeles
7th House beckons you as we enter the phantasmagoric world of surrealist Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, where memory slips into dream and time itself bends. Over two evenings, we will celebrate and investigate Schulz’s dreamlike 1937 modernist classic Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą) through two very different, equally spellbinding cinematic adaptations—screening here on consecutive nights: October 3 — Wojciech Jerzy Has’s The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973): a sumptuous, hallucinatory masterpiece of Polish surrealism, haunted by the vanished world of Jewish Poland and celebrated for its dazzling visuals and dreamlike flow. October 4 — The Quay Brothers’ brand-new Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (2025): an uncanny miniature universe of dust, shadow, and stop-motion wonder, reenvisioning Schulz’s imagination with tactile, otherworldly detail. Seen together—fifty years apart—these films reveal the uncanny dream-logic of Schulz’s stories, where history, memory, and fantasy blur into one hypnotic vision. The Philosophical Research Society’s 7th House Screenings is proud to present SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS, the long awaited film by legendarily brilliant animation/puppet auteurs The Quay Brothers! 20 years in the making, SANATORIUM arrives as the Quays third feature film – notably their first to primarily employ the wholly singular, meticulously handcrafted animation for which they’re known.It also marks their return adaptation of the work of Polish post-modernist author Bruno Schulz, whose Street of Crocodiles was adapted by the Quays nearly 40 years ago for what became their best known film. Schulz’s psychologically labyrinthine collection of stories proves to be the perfect material or the Quays’ uniquely abstract and symbolic visual storytelling. A ghostly train journey on a forgotten branch line transports a son, Jozef, visiting his dying Father in a remote Galician Sanatorium. Upon arrival Jozef finds the Sanatorium entirely moribund and run by a dubious Doctor Gotard who tells him that his father’s death, the death that has struck him in his country has not yet occurred, and that here they are always late by a certain interval of time of which the length cannot be defined. Jozef will come to realise that the Sanatorium is a floating world halfway between sleep and wakefulness and that time and events cannot be measured in any tangible form. In the Quays’ own words: The film is an exploration of motifs and themes taken from the mytho-poetic writings of Bruno Schulz integrating both puppets and live-action to score the demiurgic nervature of Schulz’s 13th apocryphal month in the Regions of the Great Heresy. Framing the narrative is an Auction house in lesser times and an Auctioneer in his greatest moment. For public auction! Lot 47: a wooden Optical Box penetrated by seven lenses, with a skilfully hidden drawer purportedly containing the deceased retina of its original owner and said to liquefy once a year when positioned correctly in the Sun’s rays thereby anointing each of the seven final images and thus setting them into motion one by one. Within the Sanatorium’s labyrinthine corridors objects and events will roam with a force all their own. An eerie half-reality will set in, and Jozef will find himself caught in a disturbing web of memories, fantasies and visions to which he can only submit. He will find his Father, lose him in a dream, discover several at once, then lose him forever. Even Jozef himself will become multiple; one will die, another will be condemned to wander endlessly the Sanatorium's corridors, and the last will board the very same train he arrived on. Presented by Quay uberfan Christopher Nolan, SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS beckons audiences to get lost in its world on the big screen. Not to be missed!