Tag Archives: Quay Brothers

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS (2024)

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“Perhaps we were misled by skillful advertising when we decided to send Father here. Time put back – it sounded good, but what does it come to in reality?”–Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium pod Klepsydra, 1937

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DIRECTED BY: ,

FEATURING: Tadeusz Janiszewski, Wioletta Kopanska, Allison Bell

PLOT: An auctioneer witnesses the activation of a sepulchrum for a deceased retina while Jozef visits his dead/dying father in the titular sanatorium.

Still from Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: A film adaptation of the titular surreal short story by Bruno Schulz already earned a place on the List. Is another deserving? This version boasts the -esque animation stylings for which the Quay Brothers are rightfully renowned (with the technique utilized more heavily than in their Certified Weird feature Institute Benjamenta). ‘ Hourglass Sanatorium exploited the dream logic of the story, with events frenetically shifting from scene to scene. The Quays, in contrast, excavate the idea of time held back for an unspecified interval, its “limbos and afterbreezes,”i creating a somnolent Sanatorium of vague and enigmatic impressions.

COMMENTS: Like many films by the Brothers Quay, Sanatorium is difficult to summarize. A seven part structure forms less a coherent story than a series of tableaux nested within each other. The perspective shifts among dutiful son Jozef, an auctioneer, and a mysterious female patient, J. Jozef’s visit to his father, at the sanatorium where the dead still live because time is arrested, serves as a frame narrative within a frame narrative, within which isolated occurrences taken from a selection of Schulz’s collected writings appear.

We first meet an auctioneer on a rooftop, beneath a sky of swirling clouds, soliciting bids for unusual and impossible items like the thirteenth month and exotic birds’ eggs (recalling Father’s ill-fated menagerie in Schulz’s story “Birds”). His audience consists of only two chimney sweeps, and when neither makes a bid, he lets them to get back to work.

In the house below, a maid prepares for the auctioneer’s arrival. As he enters the room, she removes the dust cloth from an object perched on a table : a pyramidal box with oculus windows in its sides and a little drawer which opens to display the glassy retina of an eye. The auctioneer explains the mystery of this rare sepulchrum—at a propitious moment the eye will liquify and shed seven tears, and the preserved sights contained within will become Jozef’s dreams as he succumbs to the sanatorium’s will to sleep.

The auctioneer’s frame is live-action, filmed in the gauzy black and white style of Institute Benjamenta, as is J.’s (and a few scenes where an actor, and not a puppet, portrays Jozef). When the scene cuts to Jozef’s ominous train trip (he’s uncertain whether or not his father lives, and this uncertainty will persist), we enter the Quays’ puppet theater. Their minutely detailed miniature sets, to use Schulz’s words, “exude an air of strange and frightening neglect.” The sanatorium setting, its vaguely nineteenth century atmosphere with faintly Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS (2024) →

Canonically Weird (The List), Shorts

337. STREET OF CROCODILES (1986)

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Must See

Weirdest!

“Late one night, down in my parents’ split level suburban basement, channel-surfing the old-fashioned way, I hit my first taste of Quay— like an electric shock—like nothing I’d ever seen. The mystery of the Quay Brothers got its hooks into me. I spent two years wondering what the hell I’d seen.”–Christopher Nolan on his first viewing of “Street of Crocodiles”

DIRECTED BY: Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay

FEATURING: Feliks Stawinski

PLOT: Eerie reminiscences unfold when a gaunt man is brought to life after a globule of spittle activates a machine. He explores dusty, encrusted back streets and shop fronts teeming with rusted machines while being followed by a young boy. At length, a quartet of funereal tailors offers him a refashioning of uncertain merit.

Still from Street of Crocodiles (1986)

BACKGROUND:

  • “Street of Crocodiles” is inspired by a short story (and story collection of the same name) by Bruno Schulz. It was financed by the British Film Institute, which produced and distributed the Quay’s early works. The BFI insisted that the film be based on a literary source as a condition for funding.
  • The final (and only) narration in “Street of Crocodiles” is voiced by Leszek Jankowski, the film’s composer and a collaborator of the Quays.
  • Film-maker Terry Gilliam regards “Crocodiles” as one of the ten best animated films of all time; film critic Jonathan Romney one ups him, saying it’s one of the ten best films of all time. [efn_note]By complete coincidence, last week’s Certified Weird choice, Hellzapoppin’ (1941), also made Romney’s top ten all-time list.[/efn_note]
  • The Quay Brothers style in general, and “Street of Crocodiles” in particular, influenced many music videos; for example, Nine Inch Nails’ Closer (directed by ).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: During the twenty-one minutes of the film, the only “disposable” image is perhaps that of the live actor entering the opening frame and counting some unseen items on the ceiling. Virtually everything else sticks out like a rusty thumb. Forced as I am to choose, I’ll plump for the “memory inducement” sequence during which everything goes backwards as the protagonist (played by a marionette) peers through a square peephole. Ice cubes rise from a trapdoor, having un-melted; whispering seeds of a ripe dandelion reassemble into their fragile orb; and even the pointless workings of the rubber-band “Bachelor Machine”[efn_note]The Quay Brothers employed many futilely active machines in their short films; the term stems from Duchamp’s sculpture, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even.[/efn_note] flip into reverse.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Life-giving luminescence; skittering screws; meat map, mapped meat

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Street of Crocodiles checks off a lot of boxes for a general “weird” survey: creepy visuals, stop-motion, dissonant score, defiantly vague plot-line, and pirouetting tailors. It’s hard to put it in words, as you might have guessed, but this is a Weird one. If you’ve seen anything like it since you first watched it, it’s probably because you just re-watched it.

Brief clip from Street of Crocodiles

COMMENTS: The difficult task of capturing a memory becomes Continue reading 337. STREET OF CROCODILES (1986) →

Capsules, Shorts

CAPSULE: THROUGH THE WEEPING GLASS (2011)

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On the Consolations of Life Everlasting (Limbos & Afterbreezes in the Mütter Museum)

DIRECTED BY: ,

FEATURING: (narration)

PLOT: This brief film essay contemplates various medical misfortunes and wonders in the framework of an often unsettling visit to the Mütter Museum. Exploring conditions ranging from Fibrodysplasia Ossificus Progressiva to conjoined twin-hood, Through the Weeping Glass examines anomalous conditions, creepy medical devices, and the sometimes unnatural nature of being human.

Still from Through the Weeping Glass (2011)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: As documentaries go, this is an unnerving one whose subject matter is investigated with hazy-to-sharp focus, super-imposition, and eerie recreations of the backstories. However, the movie maintains a disciplined technique, providing a glimpse at the nastiness of medical phenomena through history that is easy to follow—as unpleasant as that proves to be at times.

COMMENTS: “No child ever imagines the unimaginable: that he will end up as a skeleton.” So begins our visit to Philadelphia’s museum of medical oddities. The sweet, soft-spoken narration provided by Derek Jacobi (“I, Claudius,” “Brother Cadfael”) sets things up with a twist: naturally everyone becomes a skeleton eventually, as death comes to us all. However, the seemingly mundane words quickly get sinister when the case of Harry Eastlack is explored. Harry injured himself as a child, fracturing his leg while playing with his sister. The bone healed, and then kept growing. Ultimately, his skeleton developed a further skeleton around itself, and we are informed, “in the end, [he] could only move [his] lips.”

By the beginning of the past decade, the Quay brothers had long established themselves as the wizards of stop-motion animation. One of their passions, however, has always been “exotic arcana” (so sayeth the pamphlet accompanying their recent anthology), and their piece on the Mütter Museum and its contents marks the first time the brothers ever made a movie stateside. “Weeping Glass” features few of the otherworldly flourishes that mark their main body of work—most notably altering of portraits’ eyes by giving them an ominous, forlorn sheen—but the camera technique and soundscape summon the unsettling vibe that permeates their oeuvre. Focus on objects shimmers from sharp to blurry, tracking shots are choppy and often pursued at unlikely eye levels, and an animation of sorts is provided by the super-imposition of hands when pre-16th century texts and pre-20th century medical devices are displayed.

The oddest achievement the brothers can claim with this documentary is their uncanny knack to ride on the darker side of the line separating creepy and cheesy. The jump cuts between alarming images are often accompanied by the dissonant, clanking score one would expect to find in the lazier varieties of horror movie. Though they are no doubt helped by the fact that what’s on display would be unsettling no matter how presented, the Quays still impress by forcing the viewer to realize, “oh, I know they’re just trying to make me addled. Dear Lord, it’s working.”

By the end of “Through the Weeping Glass,” you will not only learn about the tragic case of Harry Eastlack, but also catch glimpses of a man with a pillow-sized tumor, get a peak at both the Hyrtl skull collection (139 specimens, each with a brief history of the owner written thereon) and Dr. Chevalier Jackson’s collection of swallowed objects (over 2,300 pins, game pieces, and even a “Perfect Attendance” badge), and finish off with a couple exchanging their “…’til death do us part” wedding vows in the presence of the plaster cast bodies of the famed “Siamese” twins, Chang and Eng. “Through the Weeping Glass” is a disquieting piece, but the Quays’ direction and Jacobi’s nuanced voice-over inject it with a subversive sense of humor. This late example of the Pennsylvania boys’ work is very informative, highly watchable, and delightfully grotesque.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…rare is the non-fiction film that through its style, design and intent properly matches the tropes of the fictional horror flick. And perhaps this creature is so rare that only one exists: Through the Weeping Glass…”–Mike Everleth, Underground Film Journal (contemporaneous)

List Candidates, Shorts

LIST CANDIDATE: THE COMB (1990)

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AKA The Comb: From the Museums of Sleep

DIRECTED BY: ,

FEATURING: Joy Constaninides, Witold Scheybal

PLOT: A mysterious faceless figure thwarts a man’s efforts to reach a sleeping woman within her dream.

Still from "The Comb" (1991)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Cleverly combining live-action film with their signature superpowered stop-motion animation, the constructed this cheerfully cryptic little vignette. Using skillful in-camera effects, the viewer travels from the outer world into the inner one with ease, shifting from blurry black-and-white to pixie-ish color. Dream logic prevails, but in this movie the Quay brothers temper any bleakness with a refreshing sense of wonder.

COMMENTS: Inside the dreams of a slumbering woman, a lively little hero pursues a sleeping heroine, maneuvering through narrow passages, a stylized woodland, and inside (perhaps?) an impossibly high passageway tucked into an improbably small cottage. Outside the dream, the woman on the bed tosses and turns as she sleeps. The intermittent twiching of her fingers is doubled by the blurry twitchings of the dream’s antagonist—or is that cloaked figure the antagonist? Could he be the protector of the sleeping woman within her dream? A few intertitles give the place and time (“edge of the forest” and “Autumn”) and then set off the starting gun: “…suddenly the air grew hard.” What exactly is happening in “The Comb,” however, is probably impossible to know.

Of course, that is neither a hindrance to its quiet grandeur nor a disappointment to the open-minded viewer. Half a decade after “Street of Crocodiles,” the Quay brothers had broadened their horizons (becoming involved in a documentary as well as some music videos). Their creativity is undulled, however, and in many ways “The Comb” is harder to probe than any of their work that had come before. There is a rough flow of events, and a fairy-tale mood set up in the opening credits. Indeed, the dream is full of fairy-tale tropes: Autumn, “the woods”, an inaccessible heroine, ladders, mysterious menace. It’s all there, put together with a logic that, though consistent within itself, is some levels removed from our own workaday thinking.

The cinematic tricks in “The Comb” stand as the brothers’ greatest achievements up to that point. While I was trying to figure out a sense of scale as the camera moved from the forest backwards into the cottage, my efforts were disrupted when the camera dropped through an opening in the floor. The visual sleight-of-hand involved to compact a larger area into the smaller one is amazing, and there are several shots where one sees ever-climbing ladders, arranged in dreamy haphazardry. Driving the point home, the Quays even had a little traveling ladder in the background of this runged chasm. Suffice it to say, the brothers captured the dream milieu very handily, leaving the Comb‘s poor protagonist with plenty of space to cross before he could find the sleeping woman.

The most satisfying artifice of the Comb is how the (blurred) real-world is combined with the (sharp) dream-world. During the course of the movie, the camera travels between them, seemingly through a mirror (or shadow-box?) above the woman’s bed. The swaying objects within the dream are used by its figures to calm the dreamer when she is fitful in her real-world sleep. Finishing off the piece, the woman wakes up and does the normal stretching that is so enjoyable after a little sleep. Reaching to her nightstand, she shakes off the final vestiges of sleep, with close-up shots interspersed with shimmers of the dream. She pauses while combing her hair, and clicks her thumbnail down the comb’s teeth. The clicking resurrects, oh-so-briefly, the little hero from before. She remembers and smiles.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I would endorse the verdict of Slarek, whose DVD Outsider website, reviewing the Quays’ short films DVD, sums up the film as ‘divinely baffling.’”–Claire Kitson, Close-up Film Centre (DVD)

List Candidates, Shorts

LIST CANDIDATE: STREET OF CROCODILES (1986)

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DIRECTED BY: ,

FEATURING: Feliks Stawinsky

PLOT: After being brought to life by a spit-and-blood activated machine, a gaunt puppet explores a dreary landscape of smeared windowpanes, cryptic machines, and wraith-like tailors, simultaneously observing and observed by a young boy.

Still from Street of Crocodiles (1986)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Not content simply to be staggeringly creepy, the Quay brothers imbue this masterpiece of decayed memory with a great deal of pathos and philosophy. From any given screen-capture, it’s easy to see why this movie would be considered weird—watching this cloud of nightmare in motion is simultaneously unnerving, moving, and awe-inspiring.

COMMENTS: This stop-motion film opens with the unlikely use of a lecture hall and an actor counting ceiling lights before activating an apparatus. Drawing up a globule of spit, he lets the liquid drop inside the machine, setting off the first of the unsettling devices found throughout Street of Crocodiles. The film’s protagonist, a shabbily well-dressed man, begins bound by the wrist to a cord attached to a bell before the actor uses a pair of scissors installed in the converted kinetoscope. Once loosed from the ties that bind him, the suited puppet begins navigating his dark surroundings.

Like a reticent explorer, he warily observes machines, gated pathways, and windows to bizarre figures. Behind one is a barely humanoid figure that emits one of the few bright lights in the movie. Judged by his design and actions, this automaton seems to be an inventor of some sort, and he labors away. As the man continues to explore, his environment slowly starts dismantling itself. Screws come undone from the paneling and begin moving across the floor. A young boy, perhaps representing the man’s childhood, merrily travels around the dank cityscape, harnessing the inventor’s light with a pocket mirror, bringing objects to life with its beam. Things come to a muted crescendo when the man comes across a tailor’s shop along the dim street below a crocodile skeleton.

The Quay brothers capture so much in this tiny but unlimited world. The viewer sees things in frame, only to find a moment later that what he is seeing is a reflection (in some cases, a reflection of a reflection). The micro-cosmos created here is both stifling and vast, as if no matter how far the man may explore, he is still trapped, unable to break free and get a larger picture of the mystery around him. Eventually he discovers where his life went sideways after a literally transformative encounter with the tailors, the only entities who seem at home in this murky subconscious. Through them, we see the allure of a commercial world and the high price paid for succumbing to it.

Stephen and Timothy Quay interpret Bruno Schulz’s gritty memoir “Street of Crocodiles” with a combination of smeared perspective and macro-lensed attention to detail. Schulz’s source material is filtered through the Quay’s vision of pervasive but fungible memory. Much is explored during the scant 21-minute run-time, but its brevity is wholly counter-balanced by its depth, both literally and metaphorically. As the man’s world in the movie is folded uncomfortably on itself, Street of Crocodiles explores its subject matter with a compact precision that belies its length. After watching this, I felt that the twenty minutes may well have been hours. So goes time in the dream world. This film must be seen to be believed: my words are almost utterly incapable of parlaying the direct line the Quay brothers have with the subconscious world.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… an ambient horror film in the vein of Eraserhead.”–Jake Cole, Movie Mezzanine