Polish director Wojciech Has (born 1925) is perhaps best known in the U.S. for The Saragossa Manuscript (1964) (see Saturday, June 21). The Sandglass recently had its U.S. premiere, seven years after its release in Poland.

Based on “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” by Polish writer Bruno Schulz, The Sandglass takes the viewer on a tour through a dazzling cinematic landscape in which the uneasy protagonist encounters both a personal and cultural past in constant combination with surrealistic premonitions of future events.
Bruno Schulz, relatively recently “discovered” by American readers, was murdered in 1942 by the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of Poland. “Today our late initiation into the mysteries of Bruno Schulz is attended by a profound shock, for here is a writer comparable to the very greatest modernists. Isaac Bashevis Singer has observed that Schulz ‘wrote sometimes like Kafka, sometimes like Proust, and at times... succeeded in reaching depths that neither of them reached.' ...Schulz's two slender volumes (are) limit-texts that map the Polish city of Drogobych where the author spent most of his life. For Schulz, the city dissolves into its nightside, a mental labyrinth, an oneiric terrain.... ‘(At night) the streets multiply, becoming confused and interchanged. There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, make-believe streets. One's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps....'

“...(Wojciech Has') shrewd cinematic ‘reading' of Schulz somehow manages to exteriorize - to make concrete - the ephemeral, poetic, interior world constructed in the fictions, and to do so without destroying it. The Sandglass is to be valued for its dense pictorial compositions - its Romantic ruins and entropic vistas - as well as for its manipulation of cinematic space.”