Directed by: Edward Żebrowski
Starring: Piotr Dejmek, Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Wojciech Pszoniak, Gustaw Holoubek
Turning Stanisław Lem’s visionary and utterly sarcastic prose into a animated feature, even with unlimited resources, can be a herculean task, let alone into live action. Israeli director Ari Folman made a stab at it combining the two techniques in his very liberal adaptation of Lem’s science-fiction novel The Futurological Congress. Edward Żebrowski got around the problem in the Seventies by adapting one of the few non-science fiction novels ever written by his fellow countryman.
Szpital przemienienia (Hospital of the Transfiguration) recounts a fictional slice of the mass murder campaign by involuntary euthanasia conducted by Nazis during World War Two. “Aktion T4” resulted in the death of thousands of patients who were put down in psychiatric hospitals across Central European countries, Germany included. Żebrowski’s second feature-length film was made under the wing of Krzysztof Zanussi, a representative figure in the cinema of moral anxiety in the second half of the Seventies.
The Polish director presented the film as cinematic critique of the institutional abuse against mentally ill persons tout court. The topic is explored through the character of Stefan (Piotr Dejmek) a young and idealistic doctor hired in a psychiatric hospital on the verge of being liquidated by the Nazis in occupied Poland. After assisting to a number of cruel medical experiments on the cases under the care of ruthless Dr Rygier (Zbigniew Zapasiewicz), Dr Stefan soon realizes which way the wind blows in the asylum.
The clinicians in the hospital lives a monastic-like regimented communal life, eat common meals and even raise pigs for self-sufficiency. Oblivious to the fate awaiting them, they discourse about ethical theory in the presence of their patients. Topics such as the red tape and wordiness of intellectual elite in the countries from the Soviet Bloc, often dealt with satirically in Lem’s writings, emerge through the film, regardless of Żebrowski’s initial intentions.
Fortunately the Polish director did not sugarcoat the storyline which looks even more dramatic after the cinematography switches to black and white in the ending scenes. Partially filmed on the grounds of Tworkowski psychiatric near Warsaw, Hospital of the Transfiguration is a sombre but convincing piece of cinema in which there is no room for Schindler-like WWII rescuers to keep the tragedy at bay.
Film Reviewed by Giuseppe Sedia
Published by Kino Mania on August 3, 2023