Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

Programme

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  Streets of Crocodiles (1986, 21')

  In this masterpiece by the Quay brothers, based on the book of the same title by Bruno Schulz, a museum director spits into the eyepiece of an old viewing machine, thereby setting the dusty kinetoscope in motion: a nightmarish underworld of bizarre puppet rituals is unleashed.

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  Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (2024, 76')

  Following a spooky train journey on a forgotten branch line, Jozef arrives to visit his dying father in a remote Galician sanatorium, where somehow the old man is still living – even though by all earthly measures he is dead. Jozef encounters a completely moribund place, run by the shady doctor Gotard – a ​​world caught half-way between sleep and waking, where time seems to be on intermittent repeat.
  
  Jozef finds a unique object: a wooden box containing seven lenses, which is also said to hold the dried-out retinas of its previous owner. On one day a year, when the light is right, these retinas become moist again, and if the owner of the box looks through these lenses he’ll see the seven last images printed on them.
  
  Twenty years on, the Quay Brothers made this follow-up to Street of Crocodiles, a dark fairytale based on the second novel by Polish writer Bruno Schulz. In this intoxicating dream landscape, time moves in more than one direction, in a maelstrom of memories and dark visions.
  
  The Quays’ animation style utilises all kinds of re-used materials: pebbles, pieces of blackboard chalk, birds’ feathers, organic material – a surreal world with nods to German expressionism, noir and silent film.
  
  Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass premièred last year in Venice. In 2014, Eye dedicated an exhibition to the Quay Brothers.