The Brothers Quay Returning To Feature Film With SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS

Bank on this: If the proposed new feature from iconic animators The Brothers Quay gets the green light to move ahead it will be very strange indeed.

The proposed film is a homage and adaptation of Bruno Schulz s novella: SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS  and will be set squarely within the enigmatic realm of a ghostly Sanatorium and a 13th freak month. The main subject of the narrative is a journey through a somnambulistic world by the son, Jozef, to visit his purportedly dying Father in a Sanatorium. Once there, Jozef reports on the confusions and horrors of this ever shifting Limbo. Little by little the tissues of reality loosen around Jozef; he becomes subject to a different clock and to the peculiar experiments with Time presided over by a mysterious Dr. Gotard[and a ventriloquizing Auctioneer]: "......here, we are always late by a certain interval of time of which we cannot define the length. Your Father 's death, the death that has already struck him in your country, has not yet occurred. ". This certain interval  will give rise to the eerie phantasmatic ir-reality of the Sanatorium as a result of the contamination and rapid decomposition of time. Through these morphined  and labyrinthine corridors Jozef will vainly pursue and hunt for his Father, or rather, versions of his Father. A Father seen in different guises: incorrigible fantasist, shop owner, the lonely hero who becomes prey to the aberrations of this realm. Jozef will always arrive too late to discover only the fading ghostlike husk of his Father' s being- a mere hand gripped to a stairway door [and to the repeated sound of his feeble coughs].  The Sanatorium's corridors will multiply and double, sometimes as rooms, sometimes becoming streets which give onto town squares and will perpetrate corporeal and psychic memories upon these spaces[both Jozef's, his Father, and that of others, all overlapping].Thus, no centre will ever be reached. Within the Sanatorium's labyrinthine corridors parallel tracks of time,- represented by both a live-action realm and a puppet/object realm [each one secretly mirroring the other] will be traversed simultaneously.

I expect the finished film to make about as much logical sense as that pitch paragraph does - which is to say, not much - but also be pretty much brilliant.