The Quay brothers come to IndieMovies!

We have a treat in store for our UK readers today: fifteen frightening, freaky, funny shorts from the brothers Quay. (Apologies for the shut-out to the peeps of other territories: it’s simply a licensing issue and we do not like getting letters from lawyers.) (Apologies to lawyers, but it’s true: no-one likes hearing from you.)

We’ve each provided a little intro to the films we watched because these must surely be some of the most unusual films we’ve had the privilege of hosting.

Angela: Stephen and Timothy Quay are American identical twins, born on June 17, 1947 in Pennsylvania. Like a modern brothers Grimm (or perhaps just grim), they produce psychologically deep, dark little fairy stories. In a bleak and gritty world covered with dust and cobwebs, where decay is the prominent factor, the brothers offer a gateway into their surreal imaginations through their disjointed short films. Full of creepy broken toys brought to life via stop-motion with props ranging from bones and meat to magnets. With a powerful (yet creepy) vision, their plots are minimal yet their messages bountiful. Renowned for their craftsman-like methods and unusual sources of inspiration – preferring old toys abused by many generations of children – they construct their own sets, arrange the lighting and operate the cameras. The Stille Nacht series I - Dramolet, II - Are We Still Married?, III - Tales From Vienna Woods and IV - I Can't Go Wrong Without You perfectly exemplify their style.

Street of Crocodiles was selected by Terry Gilliam as one of his top ten animated films of all time. Inspired by the novel of the same name by Bruno Schulz, the Quay brothers used the story’s mood and psychological undertones as inspiration for their most famous stop-motion short. In this macabre take on the Pinocchio story, a puppet is freed from his strings to find his surroundings disappointing. Life and vitality are stripped away to reveal the cold cycle of reality.

Emma: Having never seen the Quay brothers’ work before, the first short hit like a punch to the gut. Initial distaste was swiftly followed by fascination – it was like discovering David Lynch or David Cronenberg’s work for the first time.

Anamorphosis might be a good place for the wary to start. Although it’s in their distinctive style, it is a beautiful exploration of the painterly art of anamorphosis – the use of perspective to hide secrets or slowly reveal the true meaning of an artwork.

This Unnameable Little Broom is characteristic of their work. A retelling of the story of Gilgamesh’s capture of the wild man Enkindu from Sumerian myth, the story is acted out by two grotesque characters made from animal remains and scraps. The huge epic is transferred into a small, box-like room over a void, where Gilgamesh traps the bird-like Enkindu and then spins his wheels for eternity.

Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies is (to my mind at least) one of their most disturbing short films. It is set to a musical arrangement by Leszek Jankowski - but what, in the world of the film, is producing the sounds we hear? A strummed barcode, a series of calligraphic lines and a hideous puppet …

The Summit is an unusual Quay brothers short in that it’s both overtly comic and live-action. It features two men negotiating a significant international treaty – with much posturing and paranoia before they find common ground. It’s a ‘pilot’ for the 70-minute piece of performance art by Barnaby and Jonathan Stone, who star.

The Calligrapher is a series of three idents which BBC2 commissioned for its 1991 rebrand – but then never used. Why? We have no idea. Personally, we’d love a Quay brothers ident but we might as well wish for a flying car. (Okay, we'd like one of those too.)

Paul: Five short films from the Quay Brothers and The Falls sticks out like a sore thumb. Not because it is in any way less esoteric than the other four – quite the contrary in fact, it is as opaque as anything you could ever wish to see – but because it is not actually directed by the Quays; their involvement instead being restricted to appearances before the camera. The Falls shown on IndieMovies is not a full film. Rather it is an excerpt from Peter Greenaway's 1980 debut feature; four-and-a-bit minutes extracted from a near-three-hour opus. Depicted only via stills, the Quays play twins affected by the mysterious catastrophe that runs through Greenaway's film – the VUE, or Violent Unknown Event.

Following their appearance in The Falls, Greenaway asked the Quays to play the identical zoologist twins in his A Zed & Two Noughts. They declined and in 1984 they delivered The Cabinet of Jan Švankmejer, named jointly in tribute to the famed Czech animator and Robert Weine's influential silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Co-directed with Keith Griffiths, Švankmejer feels like quite a traditional animation by the Quays' standards, as two anthropomorphic patchwork characters interact in a playfully expressionistic Prague. One of those two characters, a white-faced porcelain doll, seems to recur in The Comb (1990). Black-and-white live-action footage depicts a woman slumbering, apparently dreaming of an animated, full colour other-world where the sentient doll roams, and ladders appear in the oddest of circumstances.

Made in 2000, In Absentia cursorily appears a different kind of work, being more of a mood piece, relying less on obvious characters. It retains a noctambulist feel though, evoking a nightmarish quality in the starkness of some of its imagery, as well as the coiled aggression exhibited in the accompanying score by avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Significantly less intense is The Phantom Museum from 2003, in which the Quays lead a foray into the medical collection of pharmaceutical entrepreneur Sir Henry Wellcome. As the museum closes for the night, the implements and instruments amassed by Wellcome unfold themselves and offer a glimpse of the state of medical science a century previously. 

We hope you enjoy and are geniunely curious as to what you think, so let us know in comments. You can find all of the Quay brothers’ films mentioned here in our listings, under BFI shorts.