Time Out of Mind: On the Ahistorical Cinematic Adaptation

It is virtually impossible to watch writer-director Wojciech J. Has’s 1973 film The Hourglass Sanatorium and not think of the Holocaust and the events that led up to it in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. This is an especially impressive feat on the part of Has and his collaborators, considering that the work they are adapting, Bruno Schulz’s novel-in-stories Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, was first published in 1937.

Distributor Yellow Veil Pictures recently released a deluxe Blu-Ray of Has’s film—one of several of his works to receive that treatment—and its dreamlike qualities, bravura use of color, and inherently cinematic qualities make it an immersive viewing experience. But Has’s film goes beyond that; in some ways, it’s an eminently faithful adaptation of Schultz’s book, with certain moments that play like a direct translation of his prose onto the screen. (Both works follow a man named Józef as he visits his father in a sanatorium and is overwhelmed by visions and memories.) In other ways, Has’s film is a relatively loose adaptation of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass—which makes sense, given that the episodic nature of Schulz’s original work wouldn’t lend itself well to a traditional adaptation.

The Hourglass Sanatorium is in a small but fascinating group of films that both faithfully adapt acclaimed novels while simultaneously incorporating elements that took place after the novel’s publication. Ben Wheatley’s 2015 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise, with a screenplay by Amy Jump, is one example of this; so too is writer-director David Cronenberg’s 1991 take on William S. Burroughs’s 1959 novel Naked Lunch. A similar, albeit reversed, feat is accomplished by writer-director Edward Norton’s 2019 adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 Motherless Brooklyn.

Tonally, these four films are wildly disparate. (They’d probably make for a great run of programming at a repertory cinema, though.) What unites them are the ways the filmmakers use extratextual elements to enhance the themes of a given work. In the case of High-Rise, this is made most clear at the film’s conclusion. Wheatley and his collaborators opt for a setting roughly contemporaneous with the novel’s release—all of which creates a dissonance from the outset, as the futuristic elements of Ballard’s premise collide with the period stylings of props and wardrobe.

Both novel and film tell the story of a luxury high-rise that acts as a microcosm of society—and which eventually implodes in a kind of class war. (The novel’s opening sentence is an all-time great one: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”) At the end of the film, audio taken from a real-life speech is played over footage of the buildings in the aftermath of this societal collapse.

As Andrew Hulktrans pointed out in a review of the film for Artforum, the speaker is Margaret Thatcher, making the case for unfettered capitalism—a series of comments that plays like an ironic punchline to the film we’ve just watched. Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, suggesting that the inhabitants of the film’s high-rise are about to witness a replay of the same conflicts they just lived through, but on a nationwide scale.

In the case of Norton’s adaptation of Motherless Brooklyn, he takes the opposite approach. Lethem’s novel is set in Brooklyn at around the time it was published, although it takes its cues from classic noir fiction. Norton opted to bump the setting of the film back several decades, turning a work that was a kind of homage to mid-century detective stories into an example of the form. Classic cars and dapper suits aren’t the primary reason why Norton took the rare step of pushing the setting of the film back, however. Instead, it has to do with a historical figure who looms as large above mid-century New York City as Thatcher did above the late-20th century UK.

That would be Robert Moses, the urban planner who reshaped large chunks of both the city and state of New York. In a Hollywood Reporter interview about his choice to change the timeframe of the story, Norton said, “I have always wanted to look at what happened in New York in the mid-’50s. I felt like that was the period when a lot of enormous institutional corruption and racism essentially baked itself into the fabric of modern New York permanently.”

Fictional detectives from Lew Archer to Easy Rawlins have a long history of going up against systemic injustice and powerful people, and the presence of a Robert Moses-like figure in Norton’s film—Moses Randolph, played by Alec Baldwin—is in keeping with this tradition. (Notably, Randolph isn’t present in Lethem’s novel; then again, a Robert Moses-like figure would have been out of place in 1990s New York.) The characters in Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn live in the city Moses shaped; in the case of Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn, that version of the city is still being born.

Perhaps the most bizarre case of a film adaptation of a novel borrowing historical elements is Naked Lunch. David Cronenberg told Entertainment Weekly that his approach to adaptation boiled down to a simple maxim: “Throw the book away.” That said, it seems curious that in adapting the novel for the screen, Cronenberg made novel protagonist William Lee more like Burroughs—including having Lee shoot and kill his wife in a game of William Tell gone wrong, something Burroughs himself did in real life, killing Joan Vollmer in Mexico in 1951 and promptly fleeing the country.

That overlap of an author’s life and a film adaptation of their work is most deeply felt in The Hourglass Sanatorium. Contrary to Naked Lunch, the overlap with the life of the author of the source material is very different; the film adaptation of Burroughs’s novel is haunted by something terrible the author did, while the film adaptation of Schulz’s is haunted by something terrible that was done to the author.

The Blu-Ray of The Hourglass Sanatorium includes essays by several film scholars, including Annette Insdorf, whose books about films and filmmakers include a 2017 study of Has, Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has. Insdorf’s essay provides an excellent overview to the ways in which Has’s film does and does not adapt Schulz’s novel—including pointing out the heavy debt the film owes to the “Spring” section of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.

“The deletions and amplifications of the prose suggest an even darker labyrinth than Schulz created,” Insdorf writes. To cite one example, the scenes in which the film’s protagonist Józef (played by Jan Nowicki) wanders through scenes evoking pre-World War II Jewish life in Europe are one of many ways in which the film builds on the foundation of the novel to create both a sense of lingering sorrow and menace lurking just out of sight.

For all that Has does alter parts of his film’s source material, this heightening of the temporal contrasts is still in keeping with Schulz’s book. The whole reason Józef has traveled to the sanatorium that gives book and film their titles is to look in on his father. And when he does meet with his father’s doctor, what the doctor describes to him is a kind of state of being unmoored in time. (The translation here is by Celina Wieniewska.)

You know as well as I that from the point of view of your home, from the perspective of your own country, your father is dead. This cannot be entirely remedied. That death throws a certain shadow on his existence here.

He subsequently describes it more succinctly, albeit in a way that still defies the laws of cause and effect: “Here your father’s death, the death that has already struck him in your country, has not occurred yet.”

That sense of the Sanatorium as a place somehow outside of time is crucial to both novel and film. The decades’ worth of history that passed between Schulz’s book being published and Has making his film adaptation of it heightened both an awareness of death and a sense of all-encompassing mourning. But then, when did any meditation on history, whether national or personal, not involve some awareness of mortality—and some hastening sense of dread?