Adaptation from novel to film is not a parallel transplant, but a translation - it involves the transformation of media, grammar, and the old problem of information that is visible in one style becoming invisible in another . After all, words rely on imagination, while movies are mainly used to "read" and listen. Schultz's main occupation was a painter, which helped him escape the Stalin era, when he painted Stalin for two years. He has also illustrated his own work, The Sanitarium with the Hourglass as its Signboard, and published The Book of Idolatry, a Munch-Masoch style. This does not guarantee that the difficulty of translating his work into film will be reduced. On the contrary, because Schultz's imagination mainly relies on the synthesis of multiple senses, especially the aspects of things that are difficult to present visually, such as the critical state of life and death, the transition of color, the spatialization of time, and the confusing illusion. As a result, the film must reconstruct the plot to achieve the same effect as the novel. Plus, nearly all of Schultz's signature metaphors, and his attempts to break with language conventions, are difficult to render in cinematic footage. For example, when he compares the night sky to a "dark cathedral," how do we capture such a picture? Just as when Shakespeare compared the dawn to a "red cloak," he presented what the painter was powerless to do, so Schultz often presented, not depicted; he evoked the imagination, but did not give exactness to the imaginary Definition. In the article "Mythification of Reality", Schultz mentioned: "The life of the word exists in a tendency to connect, like the severed snake in the legend, the fragments in the darkness seek each other, the word is directed towards a Thousands of associations tighten and stretch themselves.” This kind of attraction and organic trend between words is difficult to present visually, and it sometimes presupposes a visual short-circuit of current. Polish director Wojzig Haas' film Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą, 1973) provides a good "translation" of Bruno Schultz's original text. The novel of the same name is a short story with only 30 pages in Chinese, but the film is two hours long. Perhaps to better grasp the "Schultz sense", Haas also collages certain plots from Schultz's other novels, such as "The Book" and "Father's Last Escape," into the film. The film begins in a train car that is going slower and slower. Haas captures the pre-modern vibe of Schultz's novel so well that even an iconic product of the industrial age, like the train, is associated with gypsy wanderlust in the film and betrays a sense of clunkiness, It looks like a creature with no obvious sense of aggression sighing, and the passengers inside are as lazy as in a carriage carriage, in a roaming and distracted state. From this beginning, we inadvertently slip into "hourglass time" rather than "clock time", the former being a more natural timekeeping tool, associated with natural rhythms and artificial roughness. The reality in Schultz's world is always full of omissions, a fragment of something that has disintegrated, as if in the twilight of things. The hourglass is an archetypal symbol, and as a measure of time, it can only be presented in space. At the same time, it is always in a state of wear and tear after fullness, in other words, a state in which the beginning of a thing has passed, and a large part of it is difficult to recover, a state of "less than". The hourglass means that when the story begins, we are not at the beginning; and when the story ends, we are not at the end. The instrument of timing has to be longer than the story, and we can only start in the middle or "late". The moment the train came to a standstill and stopped, we were at the nursing home, a claustrophobic space like cinnamon-colored shops and Crocodile Street. But everything there had already begun, "my" father was dying, and had been in this dying state for a long time. Broken cobwebs hang from the windows, dust on the floor, and on the bedside table there are medicine bottles and a cup of cold coffee made from God knows it's the Year of the Monkey, alluding to an "old" world. "I" will soon discover that "seems to have been here before". There is no significant difference in themes between the film and the novel. Both tell the narrator's farewell to his dying father. But this farewell lasted for a long time. It was originally a critical state, but after many "playbacks", the time was in a state of freezing but close to fragmentation, as if it solidified at the moment when the glass was blown by the cold wind, and then in the The broken glass is refracted back and forth at the lowest speed. We can sum up this bizarre phenomenon with a passage from "Father's Last Escape": "This At this point, my father was indeed dead. He has died many times, always in a mess, always leaving some doubts that force us to re-edit his death. This also has its benefits. Turning our own death into instalments, Dad got us used to his departure. We have been indifferent to his return, each time getting shorter and more pathetic. Both Haas and Schultz are often considered surrealists, but unlike the usual surrealist emergy game, both Haas and Schultz try to have something to say. Behind the adjectives and the feast of color, both the director and the writer have something to say calmly. The sanatorium is the place where death occurs, but the "father" has been in the inventory time when the body has not yet cooled down, like the rich and knowledgeable rich Nei Si, in the dream-like environment, his body is getting weaker and weaker, as if he will fall into the soil when he walks, he continues to set up a stall beside a glasses shop, selling his goods along the street, happily. "To be imprisoned in this near-death cycle, and ultimately to discover that it's all falsehood that doesn't live up to its name... Of course, the meaning of "falsehood" here in Schultz has been reversed. There are several minutes of puppet character scenes in the movie, "I" saw a man collapse mechanically in it, his face broken to reveal plastic eyeballs and black spring tabs under the earthen shell. For Schultz, who is obsessed with appearance, this may be easier than nothing. Acceptable. Another Haas work, "The Zaragoza Manuscripts" (Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie, 1965) also deals with the metaphysics of this "appearance": a young man encounters several women claiming to be Muslims in a cave, and a "Wandering to the Cave"-esque story takes place, which the film tells at the time It also shows a pagan tolerant gesture. As a meta-referential of creation is also well understood, Schultz's life and works have undergone a process of archaeological and rediscovery by the poet and scholar of Gypsy life Jerzy Fikovsky, while Schultz himself has more He compared his writing for the second time to an archaeological study of childhood memories. “We usually think of the word as the shadow of reality, its sign. It would be more correct to flip this statement: reality is the shadow of the word. Philosophy is really historical linguistics, a deep, creative exploration of the word.” In his view, writing is akin to witchcraft, or mythology, by which he can recall his childhood, the moment when time had not yet disintegrated, when the universe was in its primordial fermentation and consummation, a This ordinary calendar book can be read over and over again as the only book of the world, from which a child can peek into all the secrets of the world, more than the adult world combined. Everything after childhood is no longer fresh, and tends to decline infinitely. The organic grasp of things in the origin of life is gradually sealed by age. Adulthood is like a ruin, and the writer can only find clues of the past on the ruins with his own pen.
To visually express this empty, disintegrating time, show its wear and tear and sieve riddled with holes, or the character's day and night slumber, as Schultz shows with the alchemy of words In that case, of course, Schultz's own vocabulary could no longer be used. Haas tries to open up the heterogeneous spaces in his shots, to achieve the dizzying effect Schultz creates between two adjacent words. For example, there are many times in the film that the protagonist gets under the bed in the bedroom (looking for something or to hide), temporarily saying goodbye to the conversation in the bedroom, but encounters an old book or someone under the bed that he has been looking for for a long time; Crawling out from the other end of the bed, it is another world, where there are often singing and dancing. As a result, the stories inside, outdoors, under the bed, and on the bed acquire a "next door feeling", which is also the sense of next door that Schultz successfully established between words.
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