Quays bow ‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’ in Venice

Animation veterans Stephen and Timothy Quay return to feature films — and to the works of Polish Jewish writer Bruno Schulz — with Venice premiere “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.”

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They discovered Shulz back in the 1970s; incidentally, that’s also when Polish filmmaker Wojciech Jerzy made a film based on the same story.

“When we visited poster designer Andrzej Klimowski in Warsaw, he introduced us not only to Schulz, but also his contemporaries Gombrowicz and Witkacy, along with the music of Krzysztof Komeda and Ewa Demarczyk,” they recall, mentioning other important Polish artists. The Quay brothers prefer to be quoted together.

“Suddenly, the world of Bruno Schulz materialized into our psyches and into our hands. It was particularly through his ‘Treatise on Tailor’s Dummies’ that we found an entry point into what animation could bring to the world of Schulz and Schulz to the world of animation.”

Although it has been 19 years since their last feature “The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes,” they already adapted his “unadaptable” work in “Street of Crocodiles.” But they still won’t take credit for introducing him to a whole new audience.

“Unfortunately, a good majority of people didn’t know, or care, that it was based on Schulz’s short story. They thought it was nothing more than a bunch of gothic puppets caught in some labyrinthine maze,” they say.

Unable to separate Schulz’s life from his work — “This new feature is secretly, if not entirely, dedicated to his ‘J’: Józefina Szelińska, whom he’d been engaged to but never married” — they echo his pain, as well as his tragic end. In 1942, Schulz was killed by a Gestapo officer.

“Beyond all his slow accumulations of stories was the inevitable ruthless end to his life in that little town of Drohobycz [now in Ukraine] that he hardly ever left. That grief we hold to this day and still see in every sentence of his work,” they say. The Quay brothers were born in Norristown, Pa., only few years later, in 1947.

“We’ve been to Drohobycz in calmer times and it was impossible to feel that Schulz, his ghost, actually lived there, much less died there — even with a plaque that marked the very spot where he had been executed. We went to that vast desolate, unkept, cemetery where they believed his body was thrown into a pit and yet there was no hint he was beneath that earth.”

Combining puppetry with live action, they show a son coming to the Sanatorium somewhere in remote Galicia, trying to find his father. But it’s an odd, sleepy place and whatever is happening there seems to be highly contagious.

“Mystery is such a potent force and we’re drawn to it,” observe the directors.

“In our film, the Sanatorium is one vast, mysterious realm that Józef tries to navigate and ends up submitting to. He will find his father, then lose him in a dream. Józef himself will become multiple; one will die, another will be condemned to wander endlessly the Sanatorium’s corridors and the last one will board the very same train he arrived on.”

Just like the writer they love, they don’t have “the slightest hesitation about courting ambiguities between dreams and reality,” introducing a universe where two seemingly opposed universes “immaculately synchronize.”

The film was always supposed to be in Polish.

“We were compelled to hear all this in Polish and in Schulz’s Polish. Of course, the real test is whether the ‘Schulzologists’ and Polish audience accept our fictional perpetration or feel that we have trespassed.”

Tadeusz Janiszewski, Wioletta Kopańska, Andrzej Kłak, Allison Bell and Zenaida Yanowsky voice “Sanatorium,” produced by Lucie Conrad and Izabella Kiszka-Hoflik for Koninck Studios SpK Galicia and IKH Pictures Production. Viola Fügen and Michael Weber co-produce.

The Quay brothers’ disturbing, oneiric universe might be better suited for grownup viewers, but while “animation for adults” has become a buzzy term at animation’s biggest gatherings, they remain unimpressed.

“We’ve always done ‘animation for adults’ — for no other reason than we would probably be suspicious of Bruno Schulz for children. Otherwise, we never think in those terms,” they say.

“We used, very sparingly, texts from the ‘Sanatorium’ story, ‘The Comet’ and ‘The Republic of Dreams.’ The latter forms a coda to the entire film and announces, in a voiceover, an impossibly beautiful utopian vision, nameless and cosmic, and which is a colossal reproach to these violent times of ours.”

“His own words have the final word in our film.”