Quay Brothers

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darrick

Mystic
hey guys, i just pickep up November's Rue Morgue horror magazine. there's an interview with the Brothers Quay and wow... when they spoke it was like reading a Thomas Ligotti interview. the bleakness and absurdity of life, true fantasy/escapism lies in the dark regions beyond our perception, etc.
really great stuff. the Quays make those bizarre dirty, broken doll/puppet stop motion animated movies. they even have one inspired by the story/book: The Street of Crocodiles i've heard mentioned on this forum.

worth checking out.

DDD
666
 
If you have a broadband connection, you can view "Street of Crocodiles" and several others from within the Directors-->Brothers Quay section of VideoBox. Great stuff, I says.
 
Not sure if it's in the VideoBox, but I'm a big fan of "De Artificiali Perspectiva, or Anamorphosis." Fantastic viewing if you happen to have some psilocin coursing through your body.
 
I have the DVD collection (nice avatar ventriloquist) which contains all the famous shorts that these guys did. Really fascinating, eerie, creepy stuff, well worth purchasing (through Kino video if I'm not mistaken).

They were heavily influenced by the rather disturbing Czech animator Jan Svankmayer, on a side note, locate and watch Alice at least 3 or 4 times. This movie creeps my wife out so much that she won't even let me put it in the player when she's around.

I got the Quay brothers film Institute Benjamenta but I just can't friggin' get into it. I've started it at least five times but after 20 or 30 minutes I'm so bored I can't stand it. Maybe someday that movie will click for me.

Good suggestion.
 
I have the dvd collection too - outstanding.

I think they would make the ideal Ligotti film - all atmosphere, plot is secondary to the overall effect.

I'd love to see them make music videos for Current 93 - never happen.
 
I too was bored by Inst. Benja-whatever years ago, though I loved seeing the incredibly enticing beauty of Alice Krige. And last week I rejoiced to find Street of Crocodiles in the video store. I adored the book but couldn't get into the vid, was just appaled by my impatience. I can sit and listen to 3 albums one after another, but movies are somehow way less involving for me.
 
Not Available";p="3528 said:
I got the Quay brothers film Institute Benjamenta but I just can't friggin' get into it. I've started it at least five times but after 20 or 30 minutes I'm so bored I can't stand it. Maybe someday that movie will click for me.

Good suggestion.
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Yeah, Institute Benjamenta is kind of hit or miss. I love Robert Walser but filming his work really was an unenviable proposition. Some good visuals but too all over the place. I must say they have impeccable literary taste, though. Now if they'd only adapt Hermann Ungar's The Maimed my trifecta of central european modernists would be complete :D
 
I really like some of Robert Walser's work too. I haven't seen Institute Benjaminta, but I did enjoy the short novel that it was based on, "Jakob von Gunten." I came to Walser via Kafka who had a great respect for his work. He has some notable admirers in Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse, and W.G. Sebald, to name a few. Walser (1878-1956) is another writer whose coping mechanisms didn't fend off reality too well. In 1933 he admitted himself to a sanatorium. Initially, they were reluctant to admit him thinking that, as a writer, he just wanted a comfortable place to continue his craft. But he declared "I am not here to write, but to be mad." True to his word, he never wrote again. He never left the asylum. He died there more than 20 years later.

Some short stories that Ligotti fans might enjoy would be "Response to a Request" which reads like a combination of a short play by Samuel Beckett and a Gas Station Carnival performance, "Two Strange Stories" and "The Job Application."
 
Dr. Zirk,

I have never heard of this new film. If you get a chance to see it, I would be interested in a review. Thanks.
 
I'm a huge fan of Jan Svankmajer as well. His early works are just incredibly ahead of their time. Short films like "The Flat" and Lunch With (somebodyorother) are amazing and darkly humorous. I just rented his latest film, Little Otik, this weekend. It's like a more demented version of Little Shop of Horrors. It's really well done.
 
Unfortunately, the showing of The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes in Seattle this past Sunday sold out before I could get to the box office. So no review from me, but if anyone else sees this one, please post a review to TLO. I'm dying to know if this one lives up to the standard of The Street of Crocodiles, etc.
 
I have been watching the Quay brothers stop-motion animated shorts during the last two evenings and I am certain they are works of staggering artistry. To their influences already mentioned on this thread, I would add Escher, de Chirico, Freud, the German Expressionists, Russian Constructivism, Luis Buñuel, Arcimboldo and the baroque-era Wunderkammern. They excel at the use of typography, calligraphy and set design. It is insane how many art movements and sensibilities they have digested, even the shortest film- and they have films as short as one minute - is like a condensed art history lesson. And of course there is something simultaneously unnerving and pleasurable in their dark vision of chipped china dolls and frayed puppets enacting their hypnotic and incomprehensible dramas.

In chronological order, so you can experience the evolution of their work:

nocturna artificialia, 1979
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c98fOYDBwFg

Stravinsky - The Paris Years, 1983
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPMIZmEaTiY

Leoš Janáček: Intimate Excursions, 1983
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1jmqsb7UFo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8O77m2XWZI

The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer, 1984
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYFZ4kIRaNg

The Epic of Gilgamesh, or This Unnameable Little Broom, 1985
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeEqe1-EL30

Street of Crocodiles, 1986
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgqmXK1pf7Y

Stille Nacht I: Dramolet, 1988
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFYuqqhNGeM

Rehearsals For Extinct Anatomies, 1988
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhkTMZOb924

The Comb, 1990
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaIXG-YaZjw

De Artificiali Perspectiva, or Anamorphosis, 1991
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqsiLNxi4Sw

Stille Nacht II: Are We Still Married?,1991
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9uf25wHhs0

Stille Nacht IV: Can't Go Wrong Without You, 1993
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG_Npxq0kU8

Maska, 2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nQAgqyGVFE
 
the quay collection is well worth getting hold of, as is svankmejer's stuff. love alice. institute benjamenta is well weird and took me a long time to actually find, but don't let it put you off the book, which is brilliant.
 
Unmistaken Hands: Ex Voto F.H. (2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zql_lxCA6_k&ab_channel=GoneDawn

Inspired by the fiction of Uruguayan writer and pianist Felisberto Hernández, I found Unmistaken Hands to be an unnerving experience. There is a type of nightmarish recurrence of sound [a telephone rings, the song of the cicadas] and a bizarre looping of imagery which combine to create a very dislocating audiovisual experience.

I haven't read any fiction by Hernández, but I am sure I will. From Wiki:

What is interesting in Hernández’s fiction is the magic by-product of his anonymous first-person tales whose obsessive and deranged narrators have knocked down the wall between their minds and the empirical world and injected their obsessions into everyday life.
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