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\b\fs72 The Brothers Quay \par
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"Street of Crocodiles"\par
\fs32 The thirteenth freak month.\fs20\par
\i\fs24 The influence of Bruno Schulz on the Brothers Quay\par
-Taken from Kinoeye.com\i0\fs20\par
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Although US-born and now based in London, the Brothers Quay have long been inspired by the absurdist art of Mitteleuropa, including Franz Kafka, Jan \'8avankmajer and particularly Bruno Schulz, the "secret catalyst" to their work. James Fiumara looks at the Polish writer's influence on the Brothers' stop-motion animations.\par
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Filmmakers Stephen and Timothy Quay (collectively, the Brothers Quay) are identical twins born in 1947 in the working class Philadelphia suburb of Norristown, Pennsylvania. The twins attended art school at the Philadelphia College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London studying illustration and later filmmaking. The uniqueness of their un-uniqueness (ie, their "twin-ness") coupled with their solitary, ex-pat existence in London obsessively toiling away at their puppet films for their own company Koninck Studio, and their uncanny habit of speaking as one, has gone a long way to position the Quays as "exotic." The Quays themselves, however, both perpetuate and critique this tendency to think of them as a freakish Chang and Eng without the shared living tissue by mocking their own exotic image in interviews while also shrugging their shoulders at their blue-collar American origins.[1]\par
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Although the Quay's working-class American upbringing and subsequent art school education were clearly important to their creative development, it is their immersion in European art, literature, and culture (particulary that of Mitteleuropa during the years between the World Wars) which has had the most obvious influence on their work\emdash the diaries of Franz Kafka, the writings of Robert Walser, the animations and films of Wladyslaw Starewicz, Walerian Borowczyk and Jan \'8avankmajer. But perhaps the most significant influence on the Quays is that of Polish writer and artist, Bruno Schulz. The Quays' 21-minute-long animated film Street of Crocodiles (1986) adapted from ("inspired by" is, perhaps, a more accurate description) the short story of the same name by Schulz, was their first film shot in 35mm and is widely regarded as their masterpiece.\par
The mythological ascension of the everyday\par
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Street of Crocodiles, as well as most of the Quays' short films, conjures up a world of aberrations existing just beneath the fa\'e7ade of our everyday reality where myth and pathology intertwine. The use of the term "conjure" is deliberate as it implies both a magical incantation and alludes to a process of alchemy whereby common objects are transformed into something magical or mysterious. Discarded and decayed puppets reassembled from disparate parts and objects like Frankenstein's monster, glass-eyed dolls, rusted screws, dust, string, scissors, hair, metal shavings, pins, and other everyday detritus are infused with secret life through a process not unlike alchemy\emdash the process of cinematic stop-animation.\par
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The idea of alchemy is crucial not only as the Quays create a magical existence for ordinary inanimate objects, but also because a Brothers Quay film created digitally is unthinkable. The material qualities and processes of photographic-based filmmaking are essential to the creation of the Quay's cinematic world. Unlike the encoded bits and bytes of digital filmmaking, photographic film relies on a transparent plastic material (such as celluloid or acetate) coated with a light-sensitive chemical (called emulsion) which when subjected to exposure to light forms a latent image of whatever is placed before the camera's lens. The actual physical presence of an object before the lens and the chemical processes of film developing help to give the entire mise-en-scene of a Brothers Quay film an alchemic materiality\emdash or, if you will, a life.\par
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The unfortunate reality of the Quays' primary creative influence, Bruno Schulz, is fairly well known. In November 1942 at the age of fifty, Schulz was shot dead by a Gestapo officer while walking home in the Jewish quarter of Drogobych, Poland. His apparent offense, other than his Jewishness, was that the murdering officer had a grudge against another Nazi officer who liked Schulz's paintings and served as some sort of protector for Schulz (the tragic irony here borders on the absurd). Schulz's corpse was buried in a nearby cemetary which no longer even exists.\par
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If not for his only two publications, Ulica krokodyli (The Street of Crocodiles, 1934) and Sanatorium pod klepsydr\f1\'b9 (Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, 1937)\emdash the latter of which was adapted for the screen by Polish director Wojciech Has in 1973 and both texts have inspired theatrical productions\emdash both Schulz's life and creative genius might be unknown to the world. Like the Brothers Quay (minus the twin of course), Schulz lived a solitary but creative existence teaching art at a boys' school and writing, painting and drawing in his spare time.\par
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Schulz's father was a shopkeeper and both his father and the family mercantile business would become central figures in his creative resurrection of childhood memories through a mixture of autobiography and myth. Schulz describes his stories as "true" in as much as they "represent my style of living...[t]he dominant feature of that lot is a profound solitude, a withdrawl from the cares of daily life. Solitude is the catalyst that brings reality to fermentation, to the precipitating out of figures and colors."[2]\par
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Schulz's mythmaking served as a rebellion against the banality of the everyday, searching for a truth which underlies appearances, or as Jerzy Ficowski puts it, "the mythological ascension of the everyday."[3] This mythic existence which is hidden in the cracks of our reality, in the subjective time of what Schulz calls the"thirteenth freak month" that grows on the calendar, is at the heart of the cinematic world of the Brothers Quay.\par
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The film Street of Crocodiles begins with a close up of a street map illuminated through a magnify glass. A wooden Kinetoscope peepshow sits upon a small stage in an empty museum. An old man, perhaps the museum caretaker, peers into this antique forefather of our contemporary cinema and then spits into the eyepiece setting into motion a hidden mechanized world of decayed puppets, ambulatory objects, and repetitive fetishistic rituals.\par
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In Schulz's short story, as in the Quays' version, the large old map of the city (Drogobych) serves as the entry point into the narrative\emdash the Quays, however, appropriately incorporate the additional element of the Kinetoscope referencing their own cinematic take on Schulz's tale. Unlike the baroque detailing of the rest of the map, the area representing the part of town called the Street of Crocodiles is marked by predominantly white, empty space. Schulz then fills in this empty space with descriptions of a corrupt, decaying, dirty industrial city space where "the scum, the lowest orders had settled\emdash creatures without character, without backround."\par
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However, Schulz is not morally condemning this area or its inhabitants. On the contrary, these are Schulz's people and he instead attempts to mythologize this run down part of the city celebrating its impure hopes, secret conspiracies and "tawdry charms." But, even Schulz's mythmaking can't last as the banality of the everyday quelches the imagination returning the city to its status as merely a "paper imitation, a montage of illustrations cut out from last year's moldering newspapers" conceding to the corruptions of modernity.\par
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The Quays' film attempts to render visual this Schulzian universe while simultaneously exploring their own imaginative obsessions. The protagonist of the film (if such a term even makes sense in a Brothers Quay film), is a seemingly male puppet with long delicate limbs, large moldering head, gaunt, hollow cheeks and angular face, glazed eyes, and dark, threadbare attire barely concealing its armature.\par
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This description is not unlike one of Bruno Schulz himself and an interpretation of this figure as the Quays' puppet version of Schulz wandering through the hidden subterranean streets of Drogobych\emdash through the decayed, grotesque fa\'e7ades of the Street of Crocodiles\emdash is not unwarranted. We first see the main puppet when the hidden world inside the Kinetoscope creaks into life as a series of rusted, grime covered gears, pulleys, and pistons connected by ever-so thin string are set into mechanized motion by human saliva. The puppet is initially held fast by a string tied to its wrist, but is liberated by the old man with a snip of a pair of rusty scissors granting it freedom to explore its habitat of urban decay and existential dread.\par
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The Quays' use of puppets has a long lineage including the theatrical Punch and Judy puppet shows and the stop-animation of, among others, Jan \'8avankmajer (the Quays' indebtedness to the work of \'8avankmajer is evidenced in their 1984 film The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer which pays homage to the influential Czech animator). However, the realization and reverential treatment bestowed on the puppets by the Quays stems directly from the work of Schulz, in particular, his Treatise on Tailors' Dummies included in The Street of Crocodiles collection of writings. In these stories the manic, maddened Father (the mythologized version of Schulz's own father) raves about the spiritual essence of mannequins, dummies, and waxwork figures demanding that they be treated with human respect and professing a demuirgic desire to "create Man a second time\emdash in the shape and semblance of a tailor's dummy."\par
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The Quays realize this desire by cinematically breathing life into their puppets and freeing them from the tyranny of human domination just as the old man in the film frees the puppet from its stringed constraints (like the controlling strings of the marionnette). This action sets the film narrative into motion, but also metaphorically represents the underlying purpose of the Quays' entire creative project.\par
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The Quay puppets have a vitality and yet they are marked by a creaking, faint- breathed existence exuding a certain stoicism while simultaneously ready to concede at any moment to the forces of entropy. Although resigned to their fate, the puppets make and remake themselves from mismatched doll parts, exchanging heads, replacing stuffing\emdash all life is simply a shifting of matter. Once brought to life they become self-creators, like the Monster without a Dr Frankenstein, no longer needing human intervention. The ranting demiurgic Father in Schulz's story proclaims that he is not interested in\par
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    long-winded creations, with long-term beings. Our creatures will not be heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise [...] Sometimes, for one gesture... we shall make the effort to bring them to life. We openly admit: we shall not insist on either durability or solidity of workmanship; our creations will be temporary [...]\par
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Puppets, toys, and dolls with missing limbs, mismatched parts, or metal armatures showing through their torn and frayed clothing like some macabre version of the Land of Misfit Toys perform seemingly meaningless ritual tasks such as perpetually jerking their one arm in an offbeat rhythmic motion, or abruptly clashing cymbals at a blurringly fast speed as performed by a tattered toy monkey. Another group of puppets perform a mad scientist surgery on the Schulz puppet, switching heads and stuffing the replacement empty doll skull with cotton pulled through its facial orifices all the while surrounded by displays of hair, slabs of meat, needles and thread, and anatomical drawings of parts of the human body\emdash skull and mouth, arms, pelvic cavity, genitalia\emdash in a fetishized taxonomy of anatomy and form. These same dolls shortly thereafter witness one of their own\emdash made of scrap metal limbs with a lightbulb for a head\emdash lie motionless in the arms of another puppet who tenderly places a black hood over its head while a procession of screws and bolts march along as if to a funeral dirge.\par
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Here all matter, organic and inorganic alike, may be infused with life and spirit, but it is always bound by a temporality and subject to the laws of decay and entropy. In the Quays' cinematic world, not only do the anthropomorphous puppets possess life, but the entire mise-en-scene pulsates with movement. Rusty screws unscrew themselves from their dirt covered graves, perambulate to a new resting place, and screw themselves back into rotten wood at will. Dust, dirt, and dandelion pollen all move with rhythmic life; ice cubes melt into liquid state and reform repeatedly. As Schulz's fictional Father states, "There is no dead matter, lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life." It is as if some unseen force lurks behind the puppets and dolls, the self-moving screws and dust, and the repetitive movements of mechanized apparatuses with no apparent purpose\emdash a secret interconnectedness of all things; a conspiracy of objects.\par
The aesthetics of degraded reality\par
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If this cinematic act of mythopoeism is the central project of the Brothers Quay, it is the aesthetic realization of this project where their true genius and influence lies. The Quays' command of visual design, cinematogrpahy, and mise-en-scene displays both the genesis of their artistic, literary and cinematic influences while simulatenously revealing a breathtaking originality.\par
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In addition to the Mitteleuropa literary and cinematic influences, their aesthetic style combines the existential expressionism of Edvard Munch, the painted contortions of Francis Bacon, the juxtaposed montages of the Surrealists, the stylistics of early silent cinema including the "actualities" of Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers, and the landscapes of industrial decay and pathological anomalies found in David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) and The Elephant Man (1980). Despite their formidible list of influences, the sum total is greater than the parts as the Quays' aesthetic style is unmistakably original.\par
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In many ways the Brothers Quay aesthetic finds a kinship with artists such as David Lynch, Tod Browning, Alejandro Jodorowski, and Francis Bacon (among others) in the sense that for these artists what is typcially considered "ugly," decayed, degraded and deformed is precisely that which becomes "beautiful." This is an anti-Kantian aesthetics for in Kant's influential aesthetic theory that which is ugly by definition cannot be beautiful. On the contrary, the Quays' "aesthetics of degraded reality" finds beauty in industrial decay, moldering fabric, rust, dirt, grime, the discarded, the broken, the derelict, the deformed, human and non-human abnormalities, pathologies, and anomalies. Beauty lies precisely in that which contemporary mainstream society neglects and discards.\par
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The Quays' formidable visual style stems from their masterful use of color, lighting, and texture as well as their cinematographic manipulations of camera movement and focus. The Quays' style is not that of disembodied sight, but rather consists of a visuality that is also haptic or tactile. Incorporating our bodily sense of touch into our experience of the mise-en-scene, the Quays represent a variety of textural images such as frayed cloth, rotten wood, dirt, metal shavings, cotton, meat, ice, dandelions, moldering ceramic or plastic, dirt-covered glass, hair, bone, and rusted metal\emdash all filmed with an eye towards grain, muted color, expressive light and shadow.\par
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We don't just see the objects depicted on the screen, but can almost feel them, smell them, and taste them. The Quays' aesthetics are one of synesthesia\emdash we see the music and felt textures, and we hear and feel the visuals. The appeal to all of our senses\emdash sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell\emdash creates an aesthetic experience designed to sensually envelope and overwhelm.\par
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The use of a macro lens allows the Quays to film small objects in close-up capturing all of their textural detail, but it also creates a shallow depth-of-field causing the middle and background spaces to be rendered severely out of focus. Unlike much stop-animation which uses a static camera, the Quays put their camera into motion dynamically exploring the spatial dimenstions of their created sets. Refusing to maintain a continuous diegetic space, the camera abruptly re-focuses, tracks, zooms, and pans through multiple layered spaces without supplying the conventional and redundant cinematic cues which typically allow the spectator to orient the spatial relations of the profilmic space.\par
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As the Schulz puppet wanders lost through this labyrinth of existential space, the spectator is also rendered lost in the Quays' cinematic world. The Quays play with these shifting focuses and spaces as both a way to complicate our sense of spatial relations and depth fully immersing the spectator within the film, but also as an aesthetic in-and-of itself. For the Quays, the out-of-focus, blurred and shadowed spaces become both meaningful and elusive, beautiful and degraded, creating what the Quays call a "world as seen through a dirty pane of glass."[4]\par
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The Quays take us through this dirty pane of glass down the rabbit hole into a subterranean mythic world existing just beneath the surface of our own reality where decayed and discarded puppets, objects and matter are rendered beautiful and infused with a secret life. The Quays' aesthetic project maps quite nicely onto the textual framework and the obessive mythologizing of reality laid out by the writings of Bruno Schulz\emdash so much so that the Quays have called Schulz "the secret catalyst of [all] our work." The colloborative collision of aesthetics and creative Weltanschauung between Bruno Schulz and the Quay Brothers has produced one of the most extraordinary and original films (if not total body of work) not just in animation but in all of cinematic history.\par
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\i\f0\fs44 -\f1 James Fiumara\i0\fs20\par
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About the author\par
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James Fiumara earned his Master's degree in literature and film studies from Temple University. He has contributed film writing to the TLA Film, Video & DVD Guide 2004 and has done freelance writing and research on two recent film textbooks. James currently works and studies at the University of Pennsylvania.\par
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Footnotes\par
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1. For example, see Michael Atkinson, "The Night Countries of the Brothers Quay", Film Comment, 30, September/October 1994, p 37.return to text\par
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2. All text quotes are from Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (New York: Viking Penguin, 1977).return to text\par
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3. From Jerzy Ficowski's "Introduction" to The Street of Crocodiles (New York: Viking Penguin, 1977), p 22.return to text\par
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4. Brothers Quay quotes taken from "Through a Glass Darkly-Interview with the Quay Brothers" by Andre Habib in Senses of Cinema.return to text\par
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  Copyright \'a9 Kinoeye 2001-2008\par
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\b\fs52 Tales from the Brothers Quay\par
\b0\i\fs32 By Jonathan Marlow\par
\i0\fs20 November 17, 2006 - 10:50 AM PST\par
\f0 Taken from GreenCine.Com\f1\par
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\i\fs32 "It was contact with a living tradition that really pushed us."\i0\fs20\par
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Stephen and Timothy Quay's first live-action feature in eleven years, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, is, among many things, "a tragic fairy tale drenched in otherworldly visual splendor," as Nick Schager has put it for Slant. Jonathan Marlow spoke with the Quay Brothers at their London studio in February; this is the first part of their conversation. As Piano Tuner opens wider, more will follow.\par
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As I understand it, your escape from America was not a thing that was necessarily planned but something that evolved.\par
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Timothy Quay: We were at the Philadelphia College of Art and a visiting professor asked what we were doing after we graduated. He said that we should apply to the Royal College of Art in London to get a Masters degree and venture into more film work and animation. He said, "They have a film department and you can apply as illustrators," which we were, "and then transfer." We were accepted but the film school wouldn't let us in. They wouldn't let anybody else transfer into the department. As we hung around with other filmmakers, they would loan us their cameras on the weekend. That's when we shot a couple of our animated films on the fly.\par
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You were using a 16mm Bolex?\par
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Timothy Quay: Yes. We were creating cut-out collages. We set up two lights on our kitchen table and just shot it that way on the weekend. Then we came back to America after those three years to pay off our debt and ended up completely unemployed. We were dishwashers and waiters in a caf\'e9 in Philadelphia and we said, "We've got to get out of here and get back to Europe." So we took all of our savings, thinking that it had to be better over here.\par
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Was it during this time that you became familiar with [Jir\'ed] Trnka and other puppet animators?\par
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Timothy Quay: We first started seeing those people at the end of 1968 or '69 at a festival in Philadelphia. It was much easier to see them over here.\par
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You were initially interested in cut-out animation?\par
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Stephen Quay: I think that we had a hankering for it. I think we probably felt more at home with cut-out.\par
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In any case, it's definitely design-based...\par
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Timothy Quay: Having come from illustration, we did a lot of collage work. The first couple of films that we made were all collage cut-out animation. I think that we ended up getting frustrated with the "frozen image" when we did our drawings and paintings. I think what we really needed was depth, to make use of light, sound, music. I think that's what really pushed us towards puppets, having seen a few puppet things. When we came back to Europe, we were living in Holland and we went down to Belgium to see the Toone Marionette Theater. That really galvanized us. Although we had seen a fair bit of puppet work by then, I think that it was contact with a living tradition that really pushed us. We then applied to the British Film Institute to do experimental films, but our idea was to make a puppet film. Keith [Griffiths], who was at the Royal College with us, was at the BFI at that point and we were living in Holland. He called us back and told us that we got a grant, so we returned [to London] in 1978 and we've been here ever since.\par
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Several of your films from this period were documentaries.\par
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Timothy Quay: There was Punch and Judy [subtitled Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy], [The Eternal Day of] Michel de Ghelderode - he wrote for the Toone puppet theater and that all very neatly tied itself up. And we did a 55-minute documentary on [Jan] Svankmajer for Channel Four [more].\par
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I had no idea that it was originally quite that long.\par
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Stephen Quay: Nobody knew. It was very interesting because we used a lot of extracts.\par
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What happens to these early films? The Jan\'e1?ek [Leo? Jan\'e1?ek: Intimate Excursions] appears on a Japanese laserdisc collecting some of your work - that's the only way that I've ever seen it - but what of the Stravinsky [Stravinsky: The Paris Years], Ghelderode and Ein Brudermord?\par
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Stephen Quay: We didn't get the music rights for Brudermord. Ghelderode was just rejected out of hand.\par
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Timothy Quay: Well, it was rather long. It was a 28-minute piece.\par
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That's not a problem for me.\par
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Stephen Quay: They were really apprehensive of us trying to work out how the puppets would do things. We were still a little intimidated by these techniques. I think, for us, it really started with the little Svankmajer film.\par
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You were able to lose a certain level of tentativeness with the way that you were working?\par
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Stephen Quay: Exactly. Going to Prague to make a documentary which talked a lot about the tradition of Czech surrealism, as opposed to French surrealism, and [we] gave Jan's world a context and a lineage, following through from the earliest days of the Czech surrealists [and the Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group]. It's a good history lesson, too. We're trying to get Keith to put it out as an extra because the BFI are releasing the films on DVD, over here, for the first time [on November 20]. And I think Zeitgeist will be putting out a new edition that will have In Absentia and The Phantom Museum and the two dance films [Duet and The Sandman]. We remembered this the other day and suggested to Keith, since Channel Four own it, that they should just give us the rights to the full 55-minute Svankmajer film. It is great because it shows clips of Svankmejer - we're familiar with him now but, in the beginning, nobody was.\par
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The exchange of Q's and A's with Jan Svankmajer that Jonathan Marlow and the Quays are referring to here took place during a roundtable discussion at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in early 2006.\par
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You can read that conversation about Lunacy and Svankmajer's other work here.\par
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Was it always the case, when you were preparing for the Svankmajer film, that you would use the music of [Zdenek] Liska?\par
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Stephen Quay: We thought that it was necessary to have his music [since Liska scored many of Svankmajer's short films]. Keith had bought the rights to these films so we were able to use it. Through a friend, we were able to get tapes of Liska's music from other films. We cut The Phantom Museum to this music and then his widow said, "No." We were all prepared. "We'll pay. We'd be happy to pay." But she said no.\par
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What was her issue with the use of his music?\par
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Stephen Quay: We don't know. She said that apparently people had ripped her off, and we said, "We have every intention of paying you properly." We had it beautifully cut to the music but then we had to suppress it and get somebody else [Gary Tarn] to compose the music. He did a nice job but, of course, it's not Liska.\par
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So you have a "subversive" version of the film?\par
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Timothy Quay: Terry Gilliam was telling us that it could be an egg.\par
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An Easter egg.\par
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Timothy Quay: Yes, a hidden thing, and we thought, "Let's go for it." Let's do it. Knowing Keith, he'll be against it.\par
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Particularly if Madame Liska got a hold of it.\par
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Timothy Quay: And, you know, it's to the benefit and glory of Liska as a composer.\par
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It's very sad because I've hunted for little pieces of his music here and there. One small company in the Czech Republic has released a few pieces of his music for television, for instance. He is absolutely deserving of a relatively complete release of his work.\par
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Timothy Quay: It's easy to be obsessive about these things, actually. Was that you who asked the question of Svankmajer [about Liska in Rotterdam]?\par
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Yes, yes.\par
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Timothy Quay: Brilliant, because we were going to corner you afterwards.\par
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Well, I was going to corner you afterwards!\par
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Timothy Quay: He really took some recompense and agreed, with his head down slightly, that he overlooked that major little detail.\par
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Stephen Quay: It was very generous of him. We've always pursued him about Liska and he doesn't want to talk too much about Liska with us. \par
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\f0\fs32 -PART 2-\par
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\i\fs28 "'Portrait of a Nobody.' That's for us."\i0\fs20\par
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More than anyone, I wager, you've exposed audiences to the exceptional work of Bruno Schulz and Robert Walser. You've found a great opportunity to take all of the things that you are passionate about and put them on the screen. In what way did you approach The Street of Crocodiles? In which way did you say, "This is something that we have to do?"\par
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Timothy Quay: I think it's because we made an application to the British Film Institute and they said, "Oh, your wayward narrative in Nocturna Artificialia," our first film, "won't do. We insist that you adapt something with a more literary foundation."\par
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Stephen Quay: To lead you more down the straight-and-narrow.\par
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Timothy Quay: So we proposed Bruno Schulz. They said, "Great." They had never heard of him. But the mere fact that we were hooking the film onto something tangible meant that they didn't bat an eye and we just got on with it.\par
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Stephen Quay: What his own work proposed was to push us in that domain of the "thirteenth freak month" and the whole notion of the poetic ascendancy of the every day, degraded with reality...\par
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Timothy Quay: ... all the sorts of themes that were already in us but seemed more systematically organized by Schulz. The story is really like a poetic essay about matter. We just said, "It's not much of a narrative, but it's enough." It was a real discovery for us. It was the first time we shot in 35mm.\par
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Was it your first shoot with an actor?\par
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Timothy Quay: I guess it was the first time properly. [Feliks Stawinski] was someone that knew and that we just felt comfortable with.\par
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You tend to use unconventional armatures. Were you building the puppets yourselves?\par
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Timothy Quay: For the first time [on Crocodiles], they're actually quite severely good armatures, compared to the earlier films. That's not entirely true. All along we were using ball-and-socket puppets.\par
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Stephen Quay: Olivier [Gillon] was making them. Our first professional armature was made for Ein Brudermord.\par
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Timothy Quay: With a lot of the other objects you might create a little armature made out of wire, depending on how small it has to be.\par
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It was around the time that Street of Crocodiles was completed that your work began to be seen really widely in the States. Zeitgeist screened them in art houses around the country as a self-contained package.\par
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Timothy Quay: What happened, first of all, was the TV program with Laurie Anderson [Alive from Off Center].\par
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This was shortly before your spot for MTV?\par
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Timothy Quay: That came a little bit later, around 1988.\par
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Stephen Quay: After Crocodiles, we went straight into Rehearsals [for Extinct Anatomies].\par
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Timothy Quay: Or we did Peter Gabriel [Sledgehammer], then we did Rehearsals. After we premiered Crocodiles, we got a call the next morning to do the Peter Gabriel video. We kind of looked at each other and said, "It's come to this."\par
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Stephen Quay: We thought, "It's all downhill from here."\par
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Timothy Quay: We also got our first commercial.\par
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Stephen Quay: Actually, Sledgehammer was a very nice occasion to work with the Aardman boys. We were hired as animators, art directors and the whole thing. It was a really intense ten days all together and then we did our first commercial. Then we went straight underground for nearly a year, making Rehearsal. Then the MTV thing popped up, which also gave us a bit of the Stille Nacht.\par
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That was the first of the Stille Nacht series.\par
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Timothy Quay: Yes. That was for Robert Walser, where he went mad in the asylum. We put that in the credits. We're always trying to sneak in our little hobbies.\par
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When you do the shorter pieces, do you animate them here?\par
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Timothy Quay: Everything is done here! We had a studio just down the road. In fact, I think we did the first Stille Nacht there and Rehearsal we did there.\par
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Even the live action parts were done here?\par
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Timothy Quay: For In Absentia, all of the live action was done here. Everything.\par
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This studio has become many different places.\par
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Timothy Quay: In a way, it's like you don't know where you're heading. You just adapt and say, "Okay, we've got to build a wall here. Let's do it."\par
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With the larger pieces, do you bring in other people to help construct the sets?\par
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Timothy Quay: One guy is a drinking partner who is a great carpenter and repairs antique furniture. Ian Nicholas. He's just a gloriously nice guy and that's about the only help we ever get. He's always in the credits.\par
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We're gradually working our way up to your features but I definitely wanted to understand how you can balance your music video work, commercial work and work for the stage with everything else that you do.\par
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Timothy Quay: It's almost always because a hole opens up in the schedule. A commercial or a theater piece arrives and we say, "We're not doing anything. Let's do it." A guy from the theater got us interested. He'd known our animated films and he said simply, "I don't want you to think any differently than when you're making an animated film. Make your same model and I'll take care of the rest."\par
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So you do the drawings and then build a miniature set...\par
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Timothy Quay: ... and they scale it up. That is the way we've always worked in the theater. It's actually like making a puppet film. We do it with all of the attention to detail that we give to our own films. Working in the theater and the opera led us towards being around actors. Suddenly, you see one of your sets populated by a chorus of 80 people. Just working with singers - even if you're not literally working with them but merely up on stage when they're working around the sets - made us relax. We felt like we were halfway there; we just had never talked to them personally.\par
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Was it difficult to cast Benjamenta? Did you have a pretty good idea of the actors that you wanted when you began?\par
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Stephen Quay: It was dead easy.\par
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Timothy Quay: Actually, we were really focused about it. We actually had Charlotte Rampling on board and, at the last minute, Channel Four refused to insure her because she had walked off a French feature film. They panicked. Even her husband put down 30,000 pounds cash...\par
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Stephen Quay: More than that, he said that he was going to put up a million or whatever, which all seemed so bizarre at the time.\par
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Timothy Quay: They still rejected her so we ended up using Alice Krige and it was the best thing to ever happen to us.\par
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An excellent choice.\par
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Timothy Quay: It was a casting agent who proposed her and said, "She's wonderful, trust me." That's how it happened.\par
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Stephen Quay: Gottfried [John] we knew from the Fassbinder...\par
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Timothy Quay: We just dove into the deep end and said, "Let's go for him." We flew to Munich and met him and his wife for dinner one night. It was wonderful. Occasionally he'd become really silent and we'd both look at each other. "Oh god, we've blown it already."\par
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Stephen Quay: And then he'd say, "What if you did this?" He was already working on it.\par
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Had he read the book?\par
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Timothy Quay: Yes, and he'd looked at the script as well. He really shaped the role very much for himself. We were so intimidated...\par
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Stephen Quay: I think he's just one of those natural animal actors.\par
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Timothy Quay: I don't think he's intellectual in the way that certain others might be, but he approaches a part from the gut with the animality of it all.\par
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It's hard to imagine another actor that could pull off the role because the audience has to identify with a seemingly horrible person.\par
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Timothy Quay: Exactly. There is that one sequence [spoiler removed] in the forest. And we just went over and over and watched it over and over. The only thing that we didn't give him was a tattoo on his chest. He got to put lipstick on.\par
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Stephen Quay: That was his idea.\par
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Timothy Quay: We all thought that it was very beautiful because there is a homoerotic side to Herr Benjamenta. He followed that through.\par
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Stephen Quay: The other was Daniel Smith from Heimat. We had to write to Edgar Reitz to ask if we could have his address. It turns out Daniel was married to Edgar Reitz's daughter.\par
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That made it easy.\par
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Timothy Quay: They were living in Amsterdam and so we called one night. We spoke to her for 45 minutes, talking about the role, and finally she said, "Okay, Daniel's here," and gave him the telephone. We just chatted and he said, "Yeah, I'd love to do it."\par
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Stephen Quay: We told him there was almost no dialogue. Here was a guy who could speak thirteen languages and gets virtually no dialogue at all, but he went for it.\par
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Was it odd that, at the same time you were making Benjamenta, Guy [Maddin] was doing Careful about a butler school for boys?\par
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Timothy Quay: We didn't know.\par
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Stephen Quay: We had no idea.\par
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Timothy Quay: When we did Crocodile, Keith asked, "Have you guys ever thought of doing a feature?" And we thought, "No, why?" But then I remember we were reading Benjamenta at that point and it's actually a beautiful chamber piece for four main actors and seven "dwarves" - or rather, seven or eight students. And then we went to Keith and said, "Actually, we do have an idea. It'd be great to do the Walser piece." We started working on the scenario way back in the late 80s, applying to Channel Four.\par
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Stephen Quay: The man who owned the rights in Switzerland to Walser said, "I'd like you to do for Walser what you did for Bruno Schulz and The Street of Crocodiles."\par
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Timothy Quay: We first discovered Walser actually back in America. It was part of the TLS [Times Literary Supplement] article that said "Portrait of a Nobody." That's for us.\par
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The characters that appeal to you, literarily speaking, are outsiders...\par
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Timothy Quay: Losers.\par
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Stephen Quay: Absolutely.\par
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\i\fs28 To be continued...\i0  \par
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\fs48 REVIEW | \par
Obscure Object: The Brothers Quay's \par
"The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes"\par
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\fs32 by Jeff Reichert (November 14, 2006)\fs20\par
\i\fs28\par
[An indieWIRE Review from Reverse Shot.]\i0\fs20\par
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The degree to which you're able to fully invest in the Brothers Quay's new full-length "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes" may well depend on your relationship to their earlier works. Quay regulars will probably look past the general opacity of "Piano Tuner"'s narrative, which is simple in its arc but generally inscrutable from moment to moment, and the often inanimate performance style adopted by its handful of characters, in favor of those sequences in which the twin filmmakers unleash their trademark mastery of miniatures and puppetry.\par
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There is much to like about "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes," though an already existing predilection greatly helps. Even though the story of an opera singer, Malvina van Stille (porcelain Amira Casar from Breillat's underrated "Anatomy of Hell"), kidnapped by adoring fan cum mad scientist composer, Dr. Emmanuel Droz ("Institute Benjamenta"), and the piano tuner Felisberto (Cesar Saracho) who attempts her rescue, evokes familiar mythology like Orpheus and Eurydice or the Phantom of the Opera, the pieces used to string the story out come wrapped in a gauzy haze, both visually (the images conjure a blurred de Chirico) and logically. By the end of the film, the Quays haven't injected their material with any real sense of mounting suspense around Malvina's rescue--the more collegial relationship between the antagonists coupled with the gradually ebbing narrative largely short circuits the kind of conventions filmmakers of a less, well, European bent would wring from this material.\par
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"Piano Tuner" manages to walk a line between fable-like simplicity and complex avant-garde storytelling--seen here as perhaps not the oddest of bedfellows after all. A few nighttime segments of the film by the seashore that directly evoke silent filmmaking (reversed motion shot by an upside-down camera, in black-and-white, recalling Murnau) make this linkage most clear. It's in their play with the cinematic apparatus itself which finds the Quays most successful; occasionally the incorporation of Dr. Droz's intricate and strangely whimsical automatons (Felisberto's been called to the doctor's private island to tune them), is a tad forced, following a similar schema: a pair of characters walk up to a structure, look at it, cut to the miniatures. They're often beautiful to look upon, but never affect as powerfully as one of the Quays' hugely disorienting trick lens shots, or a particularly memorable lingering POV of the sea as seen through a silk veil.\par
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"Piano Tuner" resembles most the hazy, indistinct quality of earlier Sokurov like "Whispering Pages" or "Stone," but with an eye towards the operatic (the score is peppered with sweeping glissandos). As in those films, emphasis isn't placed so much on airtight narrative as in providing an enveloping experience, and if you'd consider yourself someone willing to accept a thin wisp of story in exchange for potentially rapturous imagery, then you might just love "The Piano Tuner Earthquakes." The Quays definitely push this construction as far as it can go--any less beautiful and it'd be dull (even still, it can be at times), any more story removed and it'd be completely without momentum. But in the wake of last year's similarly executed (in some ways) "Mirrormask," "Piano Tuner"'s almost refreshing. It'd completely cross that gap if only it weren't so still.\par
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\i\fs28 ABOUT THE WRITER: Jeff Reichert is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot. He currently works for Magnolia Pictures.\par
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