Phantom Museums

The Short Films of the Quay Brothers

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Distributed by Zeitgeist Films 2007

The Zeitgeist website

The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer

Gorgeously incomprehensible, The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, along with Street of Crocodiles, is Quay Brothers at their best. Nominally the story of an apprentice who comes to study with the master, the piece is staggeringly beautiful and breathtakingly bizarre. The master (Svankmajer, one must assume), has an open book embedded in his head and his first task is to empty his youthful ward’s head of its boyish concerns and childish frivolities—literally fluff and toy cars and spinning tops—as he settles down to teach him the alchemy of animation. Elaborate sets made of paper with obsessive-compulsive etched black lines (with an occasional “10” buried in the pinstripes) are filled with untold drawers of natural wonders. The piece is broken (arbitrarily it

seems) into movements or chapters and follow the training of the young apprentice in a picaresque manner, although the only lesson that makes sense is one dealing with the fundamentals of stop motion animation—illustrated in a delightfully self-referential manner. At the end of his training, the boy gets his own little book-head. Set—almost arbitrarily so—to modern middle-European jazzy Stravinsky wannabe chamber music, the soundtrack to Svankmajer's own The Flat. Wondrous and enthralling.

The Unnameable Little Broom

Otherwise known as Little Songs of the Chief Officer of Humar Louse, “being a largely disguised reduction of the Epic of Gilgamesh”. Largely disguised, indeed. Another aggressively bewildering Brothers Quay classic. A gorgeously ghoulish bird-headed being—all spindly like the Crocodiles guy— is seduced by an anamorphicly drawn babe with a disturbingly livery-looking vagina in a secret drawer. Unfortunately for him, it’s a fiendish trap set by Gilgamesh himself an Birdy is soon impaled and imprisoned . Gil, a madly tricycling jestery-suited puppet with grotesquely cubist face who keeps getting a wheel stuck in the croquet wickets placed around the “room”, wraps the bird creature up in cloth and cuts off his wings. Or something like that.

Street of Crocodiles

My first exposure to the Brothers Quay (thanks to Alive from Off Center) and their undisputed masterpiece. Apparently after The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, the Brothers Quay were...um...encouraged by the British Film Institute to adapt an existing piece of literature on account of their sense (or non-sense) of narrative. So, of course, they picked one of the least narrative authors to adapt, Poland’s Bruno Schulz. Like other Quay pieces, the story is not as important as the mise-en-scene. Gorgeous decay pervades the “zone”, an odd idea of a “freak” 13th month developed by Schultz—kind of a proto-Twilight Zone where the normal rules are suspended. An “explorer” (one of their patented weathered puppets), brought to life by a drop of spit and cut free from his

strings, wanders a dirty and decrepit urban landscape that screams Eastern European entropy, especially when accompanied by the odd dissonant music of Polish composer Leszek Jankowski. Street of Crocodiles, like much of the Quay’s work, is largely a series of vignettes with some unforgettable imagery. The screws coming out of a dusty floor. The regeneration of a dandelion head (a recurring motif). The grotesque use of glistening meat, shockingly incongruous in the dusty, glass-enclosed urban world of the zone. The beautiful ballet of the half-headed dolls in their long Victorian dresses. Street of Crocodiles is one of the most disturbingly beautiful things I’ve ever seen. A gorgeous, distressing, unsettling, and, ultimately, unforgettable dark dream. A masterpiece.

Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies

A step down from the spectacular opening trifecta, but no less weird. Black and white, largely graphic landscape with twitching things and highly complex rack-focus effects. Seems to concern a wirey (literally) character with a misshapen head—somewhat like a bandaged trauma victim—with one vibrating eye (that time-intensive Everybody Wang Chung Tonight effect) who rubs his pineal gland and makes the vibrating UPC symbols grow and run free, striping the landscape. Completely incomprehensible. Much more about focus and camera movement than the earlier pieces. There’s comething very Vaughen Oliveresque about their fascination with the juxtoposition of obscure decay, Victorian artifacts, and elaborate typography. Very 80’s, in a way. Features similar ball bouncing down stairs as in The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer.

Stille Nacht I

Commissioned by MTV (boy, those were the days), this short (two minute) piece features iron filings, a typically degraded doll eating swirling iron-filing soup, and a bunch of spoons coming out of the wall (like the keys in Door (BAC 1). The iron filings, draped on everything “outside”, resembles a curious kind of negative snow, which is fitting as the piece is supposed to be about things that happen in the dark corners of a mysterious room on Christmas Eve. Typically, the commentary only serves to obfuscate the material further.

The Comb

In a black and white world—shot and treated to look sort of like a moving daguerreotype—a woman twitches with sleep on a bed. In her dream world, her weathered doll avatar travels through a multi-level interior world (mostly red and green) by way of ladders. Sometimes, the dolls hands travel up the ladders alone, sometimes the ladders grow thorns, which the hands flutter over. Some events in the dream world are echoed in the twitching form of the sleeping woman. Eventually, she awakens and combs her hair. Did she dream the world, or did the world dream her? Not one of their better efforts.

Anamorphosis

Here’s something you wouldn’t think possible—a documentary by the Brothers Quay. This film, made in conjunction with art historian Roger Cardinal, explores the minor phenomenon of anamorphosis, that peculiar type of forced perspective in which incomprehensible shapes resolve themselves into recognizable forms when viewed from a particular oblique angle. A fitting subject for the Quays, with guest appearances by one of their rotting puppets, this time in a strange square proto diving bell helmet—to symbolize the restricted point of view required to make sense of anamorphosis? Some nice examples—including a Hans Holbein portrait with an anamorphotic skull on the floor and a mural of St. Francis of Assisi painted on a wall in Italy.

Stille Nacht II

Commissioned by His Name is Alive and 4AD—who originally wanted to recut Street of Crocodiles to fit the song. The Brothers Quay thought that was a bit crass and built a new piece for the song. 4AD is the perfect label to commission something from the Quays, as there is a similar fascination with arcane and beautiful decay in their go-to graphic designer, Vaughen Oliver. A faceless girl with a contagiously thorny paddle teaches a rabbit (shades of Alice) to relevé, then plays ping pong while a wooden hand pounds frantically at the door. Terrible song.

Are We Still Married?

Stille Nacht III

Reportedly inspired by a footnote on an exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology (if ever a place was designed for the Quays, it is the Museum of Jurassic Technology), to the effect that the reason some deer antlers are asymmetrical is because the deer was shot in the testicle as it turned and ran from hunters. This infinite loop of emasculation and deformation is replayed eternally by an anamorphotic deer table in a small, dark, “provincial” museum. The bullet flies like a bumblebee through the forest in slow motion—chipping a tree and getting caught in a pinecone (which apparently symbolizes the testicle) to be caught by the world’s longest spoon. Great soundtrack of indistinct multi-lingual shortwave chatter mixed with schmaltzy waltz vienna sausage music.

Tales from the Vienna Woods

Stille Nacht IV

The further adventures of Relevéing Alice and her pal, the stuffed rabbit. After Alice opens an artery and starts bleeding, the rabbit hides from the devil, who is sneaking about on an apartment building landing, peaking in keyholes and stealing eggs. All manner of perplexing activities is going on in the other apartments. The rabbit manages to save his egg (by biting through a rope that is unraveling the crib where the egg is kept) and throws it for safekeeping to his upside doppelganger on the ceiling. That rabbit puts the egg in a glass, which spins around to the annoying music. And everybody lives happily ever after.

Can't Go Wrong Without You

In Absentia

The exploration of animate sunlight crawling through the Brothers Quay studio folded into an homage to Emma Hauck, a crazy woman who wrote dense layers of graphite scrawls to her husband from the asylum where she was incarcerated. Her work was collected by Hans Prinzhorn, who gathered together the definitive collection of “outsider” art, or art by crazy people (Adolph Wölfli, et al). The music is by Stockhausen. Most action takes place either in an abstract Lynchian murkscape or concerns the obsessive details of writing with a pencil—endless shots of tips breaking and pencils being resharpened in macro detail. Floor is covered with shavings. She gets two pencils a day (a detail from Wölfli’s life) and mails her illegible letters in the grandfather clock, which runs backwards.

The Phantom Museum

Subtitled Random Forays into the Vaults of Sir Henry Wellcome’s Medical Collection. Very straightforward (for the Brothers Quay) exploration and demonstration of late 19th century medical paraphernalia and teaching aids. Some wonderful handcrafted oddities—especially the intricate wooden woman you can open up and take apart (including realistically shaped, hand-carved wooden organs) all the way down to a tiny foetus, enclosed in her uterus. Lots of long walking shots and shots of concentric stairways going eternally up and flourescent lights flickering in an electric ballet while our fearless guide in white gloves shows us around.

Nocturna Artificialia

The oldest existing Brothers Quay films (other, earlier pieces were accidentally destroyed). They wanted this on a different disc than the other films (disc one is subtitled “The Films”, while this second disc is subtitled “The Footnotes”), and with reason. Although a lot of the themes and motifs they would explore later make their debut in this film, it is slow and boring and lacks the breathtaking detail and mindbending surealism of the their later work. A beaten-up puppet/doll travels through a series of dreamy nighttime vignettes, then falls of his chair. Fairly uninteresting, but nice wallpaper.

The Calligrapher

Rejected BBC 2 idents. Black and white playing card style calligrapher writes with a blue quill. Best section has him drawing a line and having clones of his hand and quill appear, making elaborate ink loops on paper.

The Summit

A pilot (rejected) based on a performance piece by Ralf Ralf (Barnaby and Jonathon Stone) concerning lawyers. Their interpersonal behavior is acted out as a body language ballet, with occassional outbursts of gibberish. Low-rez video pitch piece, only really interesting for the great gibberish duet the two sing after the credits. There must be some odd language close brothers develop, that the Brothers Quay recognize and celebrate. No animation at all.

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