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'Trained as illustrators, the Brothers Quay's films give greater attention to mise-en-scène and the marginal, and are more associative than narrative: "We demand that the decor act as poetic vessels and be foregrounded as much as the puppets themselves. In fact, we ask of our machines and objects to act as much if not more than the puppets ... as for what is called the scenario: at most we have only a limited musical sense of its trajectory, and we tend to be permanently open to vast uncertainties, mistakes, disorientations (as though lying in wait to trap the slightest fugitive encounter).
'Their films reveal the influence of Eastern European culture: whether inspired by animators, composers, or writers, a middle European esthetic seems to have beckoned them into a mysterious locus of literary and poetic fragments, wisps of music, the play of light and morbid textures. Certain films can be considered homages to filmmakers whose work they admire (The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer), others present their own intuitive and visionary encounters with authors, artists and composers whose writings and compositions are transformed into the cinematic medium: Street of Crocodiles, is loosely based on Bruno Schulz's short story, "Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies," and was inspired by a print by Fragonard.
'In scenes of elusive cinematic and literary reference which identify the Quays' films, one is obliquely reminded of silent filmmakers Kirsanov, Murnau, the surrealist Buñuel and the Russian film poet Tarkowsky; of Kafka (who was greatly influenced by Walser) and of essential myth and fairy tale. Continuing collaboration with the Polish composer Leszek Jankowski supports and counterpoints their careful visual choreography, whether of puppets, exquisite objects or actors. Like Lisa Benjamenta, the images are simultaneously fragile and immortal. The films evade a postmodern context or interpretation, and their epiphanic moments and dreamscapes provide a momentary orientation, but are themselves even greater enigmas within the film's poetic fabric.
'Seen as a whole, the Brothers Quay's works are independent of any definable genre; indeed, the imitation of their unique style which can be observed in films of other animators are a complimentary gesture to the auteur style they have developed. Throughout their opus, a continuity can be observed Quays' devotion to the marginal, the nobody and the unnoticed, elevated into the sublime.'-- Suzanne Buchan, Shifting Realities
Interview (3:51)
________________
from The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer (1984)
'The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer is the Quays most explicit interpretation of influence as it is a direct homage to the Czech master animator. Constructed as a sequence of nine lessons, the narrative features a puppet Svankmajer who teaches both a puppet child and the viewer “the importance of objects in [the animator's] work, their transformation and bizarre combination through specifically cinematic techniques, the extraordinary power of the camera to 'make strange', the influence of Surrealism on [his] work, and the subversive and radical role of humour”.' -- Senses of Cinema
_________________
The Epic of Gilgamesh, or This Unnameable Little Broom (1985)
'The film takes some of its key visual motifs and develops them into a series of complex constructions: the use of drawers and tables as devices and as mechanisms, the transformation of meaning within an object through juxtaposition and the influence of Surrealism to create a psychosexual drama. Unlike Svankmajer's ordered, clean white library of objects and meaning, the Quays describe Gilgamesh's kingdom as one that is “an entirely hermetic universe literally suspended out of time in a black void”. The pale yellow shadow-mottled walls are inscribed with calligraphic text and its seemingly vast expanse is randomly broken up by square holes from which medical hooks occasionally project. A table – a mechanism and a trap – concealing female genitalia within one of its drawers, stands at the centre of Gilgamesh's domain. High above this space are strung high-tension wires, vibrating in the wind, one caught with a broken tennis racquet.' -- Senses of Cinema
_________________
The Street of Crocodiles (1986)
'The Street of Crocodiles is a piece of unsurpassed filmmaking. Aside from the delicate and disturbing movements of this ghetto's inhabitants, it demonstrates the Quays' reflexive approach to the process of animation itself. Often referred to in articles and interviews as the liberation of the mistake (for example, in Suzanne H. Buchan's “The Quay Brothers: Choreographed Chiaroscuro, Enigmatic and Sublime”), the brothers developed a range of visual strategies which not only seek to complicate the physical space in which the characters move but also to extend the mise en scène of the narrative. The Street of Crocodiles develops their use of the camera as “the third puppet” by creating a parallel between the protagonist and the camera itself. Through a combination of macro lenses, shallow focal planes and fast pans, the majority of the images within the film appear as point of view shots. By allowing the camera to become the protagonist's vision, the environment and its inhabitants slowly shift into uneasy forms, where the furtive glance of the camera echoes the protagonist's sharp turns, catching glimpses of occurrences that hover on the edges of the frame: unsure of his – and, by implication, our – position within this darkened warren, the film has a palpable paranoia.' -- Senses of Cinema
__________________
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1988)
'As a subtle theme within the Quays' work, insanity quietly drifts through their narratives. Appearing in both a physical form, as in Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, and as source material itself, madness seems to further the emotive quality of their work. It almost appears as another texture, another layer in the abstraction of the images and the narrative. This is, perhaps, most evident in RfEA; the film is shot in a combination of black and white and colour, live action and animation, and features another lone figure, this time a woman who repeatedly writes a letter with a broken piece of lead. Outside her window, the constantly changing lighting conditions intimate her emotions. In conclusion, the Quays dedicate the film to "E.H. who lived and wrote to her husband from an asylum."' -- Senses of Cinema
_________________
Stille Nacht I, II, IV, V (1988- 2001)
'Of these works, the Quays have said that they are, in some way, connected to their personal output with “just the same dark drift, basically inscrutable. It's gently mysterious”. Michael Atkinson describes the Stille Nacht series of music videos as “shorts [which] seem to function as working junk drawers, using up whatever the Brothers couldn't squeeze into their larger films”. Atkinson continues by stating that the music video Can't Go Wrong Without You (Stille Nacht IV)“may be one of the Quay's most disturbing pieces, a bizarre Easter suite with the resourceful stuffed rabbit from Stille Nacht II battling the forces of evil (a pixillated human in horns and skullface) for the possession of an egg”.' -- Senses of Cinema
________________
The Comb (From The Museums Of Sleep) (1990)
'The Comb opens in the shadowy bedroom of a sleeping beauty and seems to enter her mind and burrow into her dreams. Based on a fragment of text by the Austrian writer Robert Walser, The Comb is an exploration of the subconscious visualized as a labyrinthine playhouse haunted by a doll-like explorer. A mesmerizing and resonant blend of live action and animation, The Comb is set to a sensuous score of violins, guitars and attic room cries and whispers, and bathed in a gorgeous golden glow.' -- Zeitgeist Films
____________________
The Calligrapher (1991)
an ident commissioned for the BBC2 television channel, but never broadcast
___________________
from Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995)
'For their first live-action film, the Quays adapted Robert Walser's novel Jakob von Gutten into Institute Benjamenta. Apart from the obvious relationship between Jacob's lessons and the physical act of animating an object for film, Institute Benjamenta's sublime moments once again play out the obsessions of the Quays. Like the Unnameable Little Broom, the Institute is a symbolic structure that is infused with latent sexual tension, most obviously, within the growing attraction between Jacob and Lisa Benjamenta. Further moments lie within a vial containing powdered stag semen and in the anamorphic representation of rutting deer on one of the Institute's walls. To return from the dead, to be reanimated, is the essence of the Quays' work. Taking found objects and constructing them into new forms with new meaning is only the beginning of their dark material. In their fictions narratives need not move as smoothly as we would like and nor should their imagery be as obvious. In all, these films are like their makers: identical enigmas, a life within a life, and a dream within a dream.' -- Senses of Cinema
___________________
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2006)
'Their second live action film, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005), satisfies this possibility in many ways. Like a true auteur, the Brothers consistently return to similar themes, similar narratives and to similar techniques, with each film not necessarily being different from but an extension of their primal narrative. For the Quays that primal narrative is tragedy, a failed attempt to escape from beautifully sinister and arcane mechanisms. When such a narrative is sited within a world constructed and populated by the lost, the lonely, the rejected and the damaged, then an intense melancholy descends and the dream becomes a complex shifting of realities: narrative is given over to imagery and story dissolves into timeless myth. It is here that The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes exists, a film that surrenders its narrative to the beauty of the image in order to create the mythical.' -- Senses of Cinema
___________________
Inwentorium śladów ('Inventorium of Traces') (2009)
'In the Renaissance castle of the Polish count - Jan Potocki - in Lancut, the modern traces of a past glory persevere and become visible again at the tones of Krzysztof Penderecki's music and Brothers Quay's imaginary animation.' -- ligotti.net
__________________
Wonderwood (2010)
'To mark the launch of the latest fragrance from Comme des Garcons, entitled "Wonderwood", the Brothers Quay have produced an exclusive short film.'
*
p.s. And today I'm on my way back to Paris, but not early enough to be able to do the p.s. Please make do with this older post regarding the films of the Brothers Quay. Thank you. I'll be back with a new post and a catch-up p.s. tomorrow. See you then!
'Trained as illustrators, the Brothers Quay's films give greater attention to mise-en-scène and the marginal, and are more associative than narrative: "We demand that the decor act as poetic vessels and be foregrounded as much as the puppets themselves. In fact, we ask of our machines and objects to act as much if not more than the puppets ... as for what is called the scenario: at most we have only a limited musical sense of its trajectory, and we tend to be permanently open to vast uncertainties, mistakes, disorientations (as though lying in wait to trap the slightest fugitive encounter).
'Their films reveal the influence of Eastern European culture: whether inspired by animators, composers, or writers, a middle European esthetic seems to have beckoned them into a mysterious locus of literary and poetic fragments, wisps of music, the play of light and morbid textures. Certain films can be considered homages to filmmakers whose work they admire (The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer), others present their own intuitive and visionary encounters with authors, artists and composers whose writings and compositions are transformed into the cinematic medium: Street of Crocodiles, is loosely based on Bruno Schulz's short story, "Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies," and was inspired by a print by Fragonard.
'In scenes of elusive cinematic and literary reference which identify the Quays' films, one is obliquely reminded of silent filmmakers Kirsanov, Murnau, the surrealist Buñuel and the Russian film poet Tarkowsky; of Kafka (who was greatly influenced by Walser) and of essential myth and fairy tale. Continuing collaboration with the Polish composer Leszek Jankowski supports and counterpoints their careful visual choreography, whether of puppets, exquisite objects or actors. Like Lisa Benjamenta, the images are simultaneously fragile and immortal. The films evade a postmodern context or interpretation, and their epiphanic moments and dreamscapes provide a momentary orientation, but are themselves even greater enigmas within the film's poetic fabric.
'Seen as a whole, the Brothers Quay's works are independent of any definable genre; indeed, the imitation of their unique style which can be observed in films of other animators are a complimentary gesture to the auteur style they have developed. Throughout their opus, a continuity can be observed Quays' devotion to the marginal, the nobody and the unnoticed, elevated into the sublime.'-- Suzanne Buchan, Shifting Realities
Interview (3:51)
________________
from The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer (1984)
'The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer is the Quays most explicit interpretation of influence as it is a direct homage to the Czech master animator. Constructed as a sequence of nine lessons, the narrative features a puppet Svankmajer who teaches both a puppet child and the viewer “the importance of objects in [the animator's] work, their transformation and bizarre combination through specifically cinematic techniques, the extraordinary power of the camera to 'make strange', the influence of Surrealism on [his] work, and the subversive and radical role of humour”.' -- Senses of Cinema
_________________
The Epic of Gilgamesh, or This Unnameable Little Broom (1985)
'The film takes some of its key visual motifs and develops them into a series of complex constructions: the use of drawers and tables as devices and as mechanisms, the transformation of meaning within an object through juxtaposition and the influence of Surrealism to create a psychosexual drama. Unlike Svankmajer's ordered, clean white library of objects and meaning, the Quays describe Gilgamesh's kingdom as one that is “an entirely hermetic universe literally suspended out of time in a black void”. The pale yellow shadow-mottled walls are inscribed with calligraphic text and its seemingly vast expanse is randomly broken up by square holes from which medical hooks occasionally project. A table – a mechanism and a trap – concealing female genitalia within one of its drawers, stands at the centre of Gilgamesh's domain. High above this space are strung high-tension wires, vibrating in the wind, one caught with a broken tennis racquet.' -- Senses of Cinema
_________________
The Street of Crocodiles (1986)
'The Street of Crocodiles is a piece of unsurpassed filmmaking. Aside from the delicate and disturbing movements of this ghetto's inhabitants, it demonstrates the Quays' reflexive approach to the process of animation itself. Often referred to in articles and interviews as the liberation of the mistake (for example, in Suzanne H. Buchan's “The Quay Brothers: Choreographed Chiaroscuro, Enigmatic and Sublime”), the brothers developed a range of visual strategies which not only seek to complicate the physical space in which the characters move but also to extend the mise en scène of the narrative. The Street of Crocodiles develops their use of the camera as “the third puppet” by creating a parallel between the protagonist and the camera itself. Through a combination of macro lenses, shallow focal planes and fast pans, the majority of the images within the film appear as point of view shots. By allowing the camera to become the protagonist's vision, the environment and its inhabitants slowly shift into uneasy forms, where the furtive glance of the camera echoes the protagonist's sharp turns, catching glimpses of occurrences that hover on the edges of the frame: unsure of his – and, by implication, our – position within this darkened warren, the film has a palpable paranoia.' -- Senses of Cinema
__________________
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1988)
'As a subtle theme within the Quays' work, insanity quietly drifts through their narratives. Appearing in both a physical form, as in Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, and as source material itself, madness seems to further the emotive quality of their work. It almost appears as another texture, another layer in the abstraction of the images and the narrative. This is, perhaps, most evident in RfEA; the film is shot in a combination of black and white and colour, live action and animation, and features another lone figure, this time a woman who repeatedly writes a letter with a broken piece of lead. Outside her window, the constantly changing lighting conditions intimate her emotions. In conclusion, the Quays dedicate the film to "E.H. who lived and wrote to her husband from an asylum."' -- Senses of Cinema
_________________
Stille Nacht I, II, IV, V (1988- 2001)
'Of these works, the Quays have said that they are, in some way, connected to their personal output with “just the same dark drift, basically inscrutable. It's gently mysterious”. Michael Atkinson describes the Stille Nacht series of music videos as “shorts [which] seem to function as working junk drawers, using up whatever the Brothers couldn't squeeze into their larger films”. Atkinson continues by stating that the music video Can't Go Wrong Without You (Stille Nacht IV)“may be one of the Quay's most disturbing pieces, a bizarre Easter suite with the resourceful stuffed rabbit from Stille Nacht II battling the forces of evil (a pixillated human in horns and skullface) for the possession of an egg”.' -- Senses of Cinema
________________
The Comb (From The Museums Of Sleep) (1990)
'The Comb opens in the shadowy bedroom of a sleeping beauty and seems to enter her mind and burrow into her dreams. Based on a fragment of text by the Austrian writer Robert Walser, The Comb is an exploration of the subconscious visualized as a labyrinthine playhouse haunted by a doll-like explorer. A mesmerizing and resonant blend of live action and animation, The Comb is set to a sensuous score of violins, guitars and attic room cries and whispers, and bathed in a gorgeous golden glow.' -- Zeitgeist Films
____________________
The Calligrapher (1991)
an ident commissioned for the BBC2 television channel, but never broadcast
___________________
from Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995)
'For their first live-action film, the Quays adapted Robert Walser's novel Jakob von Gutten into Institute Benjamenta. Apart from the obvious relationship between Jacob's lessons and the physical act of animating an object for film, Institute Benjamenta's sublime moments once again play out the obsessions of the Quays. Like the Unnameable Little Broom, the Institute is a symbolic structure that is infused with latent sexual tension, most obviously, within the growing attraction between Jacob and Lisa Benjamenta. Further moments lie within a vial containing powdered stag semen and in the anamorphic representation of rutting deer on one of the Institute's walls. To return from the dead, to be reanimated, is the essence of the Quays' work. Taking found objects and constructing them into new forms with new meaning is only the beginning of their dark material. In their fictions narratives need not move as smoothly as we would like and nor should their imagery be as obvious. In all, these films are like their makers: identical enigmas, a life within a life, and a dream within a dream.' -- Senses of Cinema
___________________
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2006)
'Their second live action film, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005), satisfies this possibility in many ways. Like a true auteur, the Brothers consistently return to similar themes, similar narratives and to similar techniques, with each film not necessarily being different from but an extension of their primal narrative. For the Quays that primal narrative is tragedy, a failed attempt to escape from beautifully sinister and arcane mechanisms. When such a narrative is sited within a world constructed and populated by the lost, the lonely, the rejected and the damaged, then an intense melancholy descends and the dream becomes a complex shifting of realities: narrative is given over to imagery and story dissolves into timeless myth. It is here that The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes exists, a film that surrenders its narrative to the beauty of the image in order to create the mythical.' -- Senses of Cinema
___________________
Inwentorium śladów ('Inventorium of Traces') (2009)
'In the Renaissance castle of the Polish count - Jan Potocki - in Lancut, the modern traces of a past glory persevere and become visible again at the tones of Krzysztof Penderecki's music and Brothers Quay's imaginary animation.' -- ligotti.net
__________________
Wonderwood (2010)
'To mark the launch of the latest fragrance from Comme des Garcons, entitled "Wonderwood", the Brothers Quay have produced an exclusive short film.'
*
p.s. And today I'm on my way back to Paris, but not early enough to be able to do the p.s. Please make do with this older post regarding the films of the Brothers Quay. Thank you. I'll be back with a new post and a catch-up p.s. tomorrow. See you then!