Tag Archives: quay brothers

THE QUAY BROTHERS — ON 35MM

Christopher Nolan and the Quay Brothers will join forces at Film Forum for a special week-long presentation (Quay Brothers photo © Robin Holland)

Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
August 19-25
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

In such films as Memento, Inception, and Interstellar, British-American writer-director Christopher Nolan has shown a flair for unusual storytelling devices and complex narratives. “I decided to structure my story in such a way as to emphasize the audience’s incomplete understanding of each new scene as it is first presented,” he said about his debut feature, 1998’s Following, and a similar aesthetic can be applied to the works of the Quay Brothers. Pennsylvania-born, England-based twins Stephen and Timothy Quay have been making complex narratives for three dozen years, short films and feature-length tales that push the boundaries of storytelling conventions. In hypnotic films such as In Absentia, The Comb (From the Museums of Sleep), and their universally acclaimed masterpiece, Street of Crocodiles, they use fragile dolls and puppets, psychologically tantalizing Expressionistic imagery, and experimental music to draw viewers into their Gothic, industrial, dreamlike fantasy world. In fall 2009, their mind-blowing sets were on display in the exhibit “Dormitorium: Film Décors by the Quay Brothers” at Parsons the New School for Design, and the brothers were justly celebrated in the wide-ranging 2012-13 MoMA retrospective “Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets.” Now they have joined forces with Nolan for a special traveling program that debuts August 19-25 at Film Forum, consisting of the abovementioned three shorts, all restored in 35MM, and the world premiere of Nolan’s documentary about the brothers, simply titled Quay.

The meditative, mesmerizing In Absentia, dedicated to a woman “who lived and wrote to her husband from an asylum,” boasts a gorgeous minimalist score by Karlheinz Stockhausen. The Comb (From the Museums of Sleep) is a fabulously layered film that switches back and forth between color and black and white, live action and stop-motion animation, as a woman has a remarkable dream. And Street of Crocodiles is an award-winning adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s story told the Quay way, with eerie dolls and puppets, ominous screws, and various machine parts come to life. In the three works, light, shadow, and repetitive movement create a dark but compelling mood while providing no easy answers for what is actually occurring onscreen. “That’s the question nobody’s ever asked us: ‘What are you doing?!’ or ‘What are you doing to us?’” Stephen and Timothy told Senses of Cinema in a 2001 interview. Thus, it is no surprise that some of the their major influences are Franz Kafka, Jan Švankmajer, and Leoš Janáček. Nolan and the brothers, who look rather amazing at the age of sixty-eight, will be at Film Forum on August 19 for Q&As after the 7:00 & 9:30 screenings, and the Quays will be back August 20-22 to talk about their work at the 7:00 show each night. In addition to making astonishing, hallucinatory films, they are fun to listen to, so don’t miss this opportunity that we cannot recommend highly enough.

THE CONTENDERS 2012: THE METAMORPHOSIS BY FRANZ KAFKA

The Quay Brothers adapt Franz Kafka’s THE METAMORPHOSIS as only they can

LIP-READING PUPPETS: THE CURATORS’ PRESCRIPTION FOR DECIPHERING THE QUAY BROTHERS: THE METAMORPHOSIS BY FRANZ KAFKA (The Quay Brothers, 2012)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Monday, January 7, 4:30
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

The magnificent Quay Brothers survey exhibition at MoMA, “Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets,” comes to a close today with the third and final screening of their latest masterpiece, a forty-minute adaptation of Franz Kafka’s seminal novella The Metamorphosis. In the 1970s, Philadelphia-born twins Stephen and Timothy Quay made a series of pencil drawings based on Kafka’s 1915 story about a traveling salesman named Gregor Samsa who wakes up one morning to find he has been transformed into a giant insect. In 1980, the Quays made the rarely shown six-minute short Ein Brudermord, inspired by the Kafka short story that translates as “A Fratricide.” So they jumped at the chance when Russian-born concert pianist Mikhail Rudy asked them to make a film set to a score he had put together featuring the music of Kafka’s fellow Czech artist, Leoŝ Janáček, as part of a special program for Paris’s Cité de la musique. “The images need to float independently from the music to allow one to better ‘see’ the music and ‘hear’ the moving image,” the twins wrote in a correspondence with Rudy. Black, white, and gray dominate the screen as Gregor’s parents, small puppets whose heads slightly bobble when they walk, have great difficulty dealing with their son’s new form. But Gregor’s sister, Greta, shows compassion for him, playing the violin and bringing him food; her humanity is emphasized in that she is portrayed by an actual living, breathing woman, not a puppet, a rarity in the Quays’ oeuvre. The only color comes from bloodred streaks on the insect Gregor and the pieces of apple his father throws at him. The music, performed live by Rudy — his piano was supposed to be onstage, melding with the visuals, but MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater cannot accommodate that — includes Janáček’s Piano Sonata 1.X.1905, “On an Overgrown Path,” and “In the Mists,” adding haunting beauty to the heartbreaking story, which the Quays and Rudy infuse with powerful emotion. This North American premiere — the project has been performed only once before, at Cité de la musique last March — reveals the Quays to once again be unique and exceptional interpreters of classic literature and music, resulting in another film that dazzles the senses. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is screening January 7 at 4:30 not only as part of MoMA’s “Lip-Reading Puppets: The Curators’ Prescription for Deciphering the Quay Brothers” but also in the annual series “The Contenders,” consisting of exemplary films the museum believes will stand the test of time; upcoming entries include Sally Potter’s Ginger and Rosa, Raoul Ruiz’s Night Across the Street, and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

QUAY BROTHERS: ON DECIPHERING THE PHARMACIST’S PRESCRIPTION FOR LIP-READING PUPPETS

Career retrospective offers a dazzling look into the surreal world of the Brothers Quay (still from STREET OF CROCODILES, 1986)

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday–Monday through January 7
Museum admission: $22.50 ($12 can be applied to the purchase of a film ticket within thirty days)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

When MoMA Film associate curator Ron Magliozzi first approached twins Stephen and Timothy Quay about putting together a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the brothers weren’t sure why people would be interested in delving into their history and working process, but they opened their London studio to Magliozzi and helped design the appropriately strange and wonderful exhibit “On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets.” Similar in concept to the “Tim Burton” blockbuster a few years back, the Quay Brothers show is filled with paintings and drawings, film and video, early self-portraiture, photographs, collages, book and album covers, etchings, engravings, commercials, and other fascinating paraphernalia associated with their rather eclectic career, spread across several floors. Born in rural Pennsylvania in 1947 to a machinist father and homemaker mother, the Quays were heavily influenced by illustrator and naturalist Rudolf Freund, whom they met in the late 1960s; Polish poster art from the 1960s, which they saw in a 1967 exhibition at the Philadelphia College of Art; and avant-garde, experimental shorts by Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk.

Quay Brothers, detail, “O Inevitable Fatum, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, décor,” wood, fabric, glass, metal, 1987 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The MoMA show is set up like a labyrinth, with treats around every corner, from oil snowscapes done when the brothers were still in single digits to short films made when they were in school, from the creepy Black Drawings of the mid-1970s and stage designs for opera, theater, and dance by Béla Bartók, Eugene Ionesco, Molière, Sergei Prokofiev, Georges Feydeau, E. T. A. Hoffman, and others to their British television documentaries, made with longtime producer Keith Griffiths and including the absolutely insane documentary Igor, the Paris Years Chez Pleyel, in which paper cut-outs of Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, and Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky hang out and do rather odd things in Paris. All of these works lend intrigue and insight to the primary sections of the exhibition, dedicated to the marvelous short films the Quays are renowned for, dark, dazzling stop-motion animations with puppets that relate mesmerizing tales set in a mysterious world of dreams and nightmares that delve into the subconscious. The Quay Brothers’ breakthrough came in 1986 with Street of Crocodiles, adapted from a Bruno Schulz short story, starring eyeless puppets with open heads and taking place in a Kinetoscope, featuring themes and elements that appear in many of their films, including machines, thread, scissors, repetitive movement, screws, bones, metal shavings, and aching, experimental music. Getting its own room, the film is followed by a two-minute outtake that has never been shown before. Among the many other classic Brothers Quay shorts on view in the galleries are In Absentia, The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, The Sandman, and the dazzling color films This Unnameable Little Broom and The Comb (from the Museums of Sleep). Downstairs outside the Titus Theaters is “Dormitorium,” a terrific collection, previously seen at Parsons the New School for Design in 2009, of film décors, glass-enclosed sets from many of the above-mentioned films as well as many others. And on the first floor by the up escalator you can find “Coffin of a Servant’s Journey,” a short film inside a coffin that can be watched by only one person at a time.

Quay Brothers, “Quay Brothers self-portrait,” photographic enlargement (Atelier Koninck QbfZ)

“On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets” is a magical trip inside the bizarre, surreal world of the Quay Brothers, an exhibition that was a long time coming and has been handled splendidly. It’s also an exhibition that requires a lot of time to be properly enjoyed, so don’t rush through it or you’ll miss so many of its myriad hidden treasures. And as far as the title itself goes, we’ll leave that to the Quays to describe themselves, as they do in the catalog in a faux interview with sixteenth-century composer Heinrich Holtzmüller: “In our mind it’s more of a teasing inducement for a journey. Not a grand journey but a tiny one . . . around the circumference of an apple. We’re no doubt gently abusing the anticipation that the prescriptive side is courting both a rational illegibility as well as an irrational legibility. Hopefully the intrigued will engage with the ambiguity. And besides, the prescription is only mildly inscrutable and one certainly won’t die from it, considering that thousands of people a year reportedly die from misread prescriptions.” You were expecting anything different?

(MoMA will be screening the Quay Brothers’ latest full-length film, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, on January 6-7 in Titus Theater 1, with a live musical score performed by Mikhail Rudy. Also on January 7, “The Essential Shorts, Part 2” will screen six shorts in the Education and Research Building, including Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, Nocturna Artificialia, Ex Voto, This Unnameable Little Broom: Epic of Gilgamesh, Maska, and Bartók Béla: Sonata for Solo Violin.)

DORMITORIUM: FILM DÉCORS BY THE QUAY BROTHERS

STREET OF CROCODILES comes to life in Quay Brothers exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Parsons the New School for Design, St. Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery
2 West 13th St. at Fifth Ave.
Through Sunday, October 4, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
Admission: free
212-229-8919
www.parsons.newschool.edu
dormitorium slideshow

It’s been a banner year for fans of the Brothers Quay, the identical twins who were born and raised in Philadelphia, work in London, and have spent thirty years creating a Gothic, industrial, dreamlike fantasy world in creepy, unforgettable short films and full-length features. In March they made a rare public appearance at SVA, discussing their career. And now they have lent eleven of their bizarre miniature sets to Parsons for “Dormitorium: Film Décors by the Quay Brothers,” which lends further insight into their fascinating working process. For those familiar with such films as THE COMB, THE CABINET OF JAN SVANKMAJER, THIS UNNAMEABLE LITTLE BROOM, and the award-winning STREET OF CROCODILES, it will be a tremendous thrill to see the strange, intriguing doll characters up close and personal in dioramas as if in a natural history museum.

Quay Brothers characters populate creepy Parsons exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

We actually let out a gasp when we came upon one of the sets for STREET OF CROCODILES, in all its dark, foreboding beauty. Several of the figures are in boxes equipped with a magnifying viewer, giving the scene impossible depth. As an added bonus, Parsons is screening several of the Quays’ films, so you can actually watch them while also examining the specific décor at the same time, which is absolutely awe-inspiring and breathtaking.