Winner of the Jury Price and nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, The Hourglass Sanatorium is, simply put one of the best and most influential films ever m...

I'm sorry, what? "How did it get to Cannes", you say, "given that the claws of the repulsively fundamentalist and contradictory Communist regime were banning worldwide masterpieces back then?" Oh, it's very simple... and very fun! The film was actually sent to Cannes secretly in film cans with false inscriptions in them. Oh yeah, you don't mess with the brilliance of Wojciech Has' mind.

Unfortunately, though, this resulted in a punishment against Has which forbid him to make films for the next eight years. But don't worry,…

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Often, films that are labeled as "dream-like" fail in actually representing the nature of the subject. Some would argue that a person awake and thinking about translating dreams into images can't fully comprehend what they experienced when they were asleep. Others might say that if we would take a dream and somehow encapsulate it into moving pictures, it wouldn't make sense, because we are aware of the divide between reality and the dream-world. The Hourglass Sanatorium is brilliant precisely because it does neither. Instead, it attempts to emulate the *structure* rather than the dreams themselves - anything that might relate to the accuracy of the dream-world is incidental. Its surrealism is shaped out of a necessity of not just…

the chief characteristic of our modern experience of time is the discontinuity of memory -- in the classical world, one could conceivably obtain most known historical knowledge within her lifetime; the gap between the ancient heroes and the current polis was vast, but wistful orators told stories around the campfire, rituals to the gods kept the legends in close proximity, and mankind was not divorced from its initial conceptualization of its own origins. yet in the modern age, with the arrival of the printing press, mass communication, and industrial society, time has become an intolerable surplus of forgotten memories -- instead of the past being invoked by an intimate storyteller, it is now kept prisoner in libraries and wikipedia articles,…

Death and decay, whichever comes first. Death and decay of the body, the soul, of memory, culture, ancestral roots, even the perception of time. Machines break down, walls crumble, food seized by mold, cobwebs commanding furniture, vines dominating buildings, the discoloration of faces, the immobilization of eyes, and the loss of youth. Death and decay as a cycle..? The dead, recognized by the foreboding candle lantern hanging on their waists, eyes white as ghosts, a figure that is blind and fair, guides others to eventually take their place until the next candidate arrives, and what is the most suitable location to confront this truth, if not a quiet, ruined sanatorium?

Then the world stood motionless for a while, holding its…

Getting it out of the way, no, I have no idea what most of it was all about. And glad I am not the only one, but I am sure it had to do with politics and religion AND death. Can you tell I am such a Captain Obvious?

But also, like many have pointed out, the vibes here are so immaculate that you can’t help but go with the flow. Whatever wavelength you get yourself into the moment you press play, you either resist or go with it. What you will find yourself in is one of the most stunning, most haunting and most immersive experiences you will ever have. The cinematography with the green-blueish tint paired with the…