TheStreet of Crocodiles is a 21-minute-long stop-motion animation short subject directed and produced by the Brothers Quay and released in 1986.
The Street of Crocodiles was originally a short story written by Bruno Schulz, from a story collection published under that title in English translation. Rather than literally representing the childhood memoirs of Schulz, the animators used the story’s mood and psychological undertones as inspiration for their own creation.
Inside a box full of curio, a puppet who is recently freed from his strings explores a dusty and forlorn commercial area. The explorer becomes ensnared into miniature tailor shop by baby-faced dolls.
Directed by Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay, and Weiser Quay.
A three-minute animated choreography with an ethereal pop soundtrack by the remarkable band called His Name Is Alive. With a typically eccentric cast of a ragged doll, a white rabbit and a manic ping-pong ball, the Quays construct a hypnotic, beguiling, and vaguely menacing balletâsomething like a music video made by Max Ernst. In beautifully textured black & white, ARE WE STILL MARRIED? is a small work, but it is as accomplished and unforgettable as their very best.
The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer is a 1984 British surreal short stop-motion film by the Quay Brothers, an homage to the influential short filmmaker Jan Ć vankmajer.
This early film by renowned animators the Quay Brothers is structured as a series of little lessons in perception, taught by a puppet simulacrum of Jan Svankmajer, whose head is an opened book, to a doll whose head the master empties of dross and refills with a similar open book. Each of the nine segments or chapters ârefers variously to the importance of objects in Svankmajerâs work, their transformation and bizarre combination through specifically cinematic techniques, the extraordinary power of the camera to âmake strangeâ, the influence of Surrealism on Svankmajerâs work, and the subversive and radical role of humor. Taken out of the context of the original Visions television documentary on Svankmajer, for which they served as illustration/commentary, these vignettes might at first sight seem a trifle bewildering. They ideally need to be viewed more than once before they begin to work effectively as quirky introductions to the Svankmajer universe. Then, however, they emerge as surprisingly charming and delightful excursions into this astonishing (and often deeply disturbing) directors work.â âJulian Petley
LeoĆĄ JanĂĄÄek: Intimate Excursionsis a short experimental documentary that attempts to find visual references in the correspondence of Leos Janacek, the Czechoslovak composer.
LeoĆĄ JanĂĄÄek was a Czech composer, musical theorist, folklorist, publicist and teacher. He was inspired by Moravian and other Slavic folk music to create an original, modern musical style.
Until 1895 he devoted himself mainly to folkloristic research. While his early musical output was influenced by contemporaries such as AntonĂn DvoĆĂĄk, his later, mature works incorporate his earlier studies of national folk music in a modern, highly original synthesis, first evident in the opera JenĆŻfa, which was premiered in 1904 in Brno. The success of JenĆŻfa (often called the “Moravian national opera”) at Prague in 1916 gave JanĂĄÄek access to the world’s great opera stages. JanĂĄÄek’s later works are his most celebrated. They include operas such as KĂĄĆ„a KabanovĂĄ and The Cunning Little Vixen, the Sinfonietta, the Glagolitic Mass, the rhapsody Taras Bulba, two string quartets, and other chamber works. Along with AntonĂn DvoĆĂĄk and BedĆich Smetana, he is considered one of the most important Czech composers.
Following Punch and Judy from their malevolent medieval personas through their much-mollified assimilation into English folklore, this film finally restores the odd couple to their rightful roles as hair-raising anarchists. It is a stunning mixture of mime, mask, painting, crudely animated documents and mischievously reanimated newsreels, as well as the demonic atonalities of a modernist opera by Harrison Britwistle brought to “life” in a puppet fantasy/nightmare.
A dreamer is seduced by the mystery of the city at night. He leaves his room and goes into the street, where a tram-car carries him away. âAs with much of their later work, itâs impossible to provide a coherent synopsis of the earliest surviving film by the Quay Brothers, as NOCTURNA ARTIFICIALIA defies attempts at verbal encapsulation at every turn. The Quays themselves acknowledged this when they said âas for what is called the scenario, at most we have only a limited musical sense of its trajectory, and we tend to be permanently open to vast uncertainties, mistakes, disorientations, as though lying in wait to trap the slightest fugitive âencounterâ. âShot on 16mm and funded by the British Film Institute’s Production Board, NOCTURNA ARTIFICIALIA is a remarkably confident piece of work, the Quays surmounting obvious technical and budgetary limitations to create a private universe entirely out of their own recurring obsessions. Their later films may be more assured, but their roots are clearly visible here.â
â Michael Brooke
Quay Brothers
âMasters above all of an unusually entrancing form of stop motion animation… Fraught with unresolved dreamlike narratives and psychosexual tensions, these works draw on the Surreal, the Gothic and the Victorian and also reflect the Quaysâ deep attachment to the literature, graphic arts, animation and music of Eastern Europe, which they have cultivated since their art school daysâ
â Roberta Smith, The New York Times.
The extraordinary Quay Brothers are two of the worldâs most original filmmakers. Identical twins who were born in Pennsylvania in 1947, Stephen and Timothy Quay studied illustration in Philadelphia before going on to the Royal College of Art in London, where they started to make animated shorts in the 1970s. They have lived in London ever since, making their unique and innovative films under the aegis of Koninck Studios.
Influenced by a tradition of Eastern European animation, the Quays display a passion for detail, a breathtaking command of color and texture, and an uncanny use of focus and camera movement that make their films unique and instantly recognizable. Best known for their classic 1986 film Street of Crocodiles, which filmmaker Terry Gilliam selected as one of the ten best animated films of all time, they are masters of miniaturization and on their tiny sets have created an unforgettable world, suggestive of a landscape of long-repressed childhood dreams. In 1994, with Institue Benjamenta, they made their first foray into live-action feature-length filmmaking.
The Quays have also directed pop promos for His Name is Alive, Michael Penn, Sparklehorse, 16 Horsepower, and Peter Gabriel (contributing to his celebrated âSledgehammerâ video), and have also directed ground-breaking commercials for, among others, MTV, Nikon, Murphyâs beer and Slurpee.
The Quaysâ work also includes set design for theatre and opera. In 1998 their Tony-nominated set designs for Ionescoâs The Chairs won great acclaim on Broadway.
In 2000 they made In Absentia, an award-winning collaboration with Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as two dance films, Duet and The Sandman. In 2002 they contributed an animated dream sequence to Julie Taymorâs film Frida.
In 2003 the Quays made four short films in collaboration with composer Steve Martland for a live event at the Tate Modern in London and in 2005 premiered their second feature film, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, at the Locarno Film Festival.
In 2012 the Quay Brothers were honored with a career retrospective gallery exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Keep an eye out for the Brothers Quay newest short film, A Doll’s Breath, coming 2018.
âTo enter the impossible, haunted night of a Quay Brothers film is to become complicit in one of the most perverse and obsessive acts of cinema.â
â Michael Atkinson, Film Comment.
âThe twins work almost entirely by themselves: one positions the puppets, the other holds the camera. It would seem monkish if the results werenât so often charming, sexy and just deeply odd.â
â Jesse Doris, Time.
âThese astonishing artists, working in an unlikely form, awaken our senses. They combine a demiurgic, Caligari-like mastery over their creations with the gentle dream archeology of Joseph Cornell: their puppets look less like things invented than like things discovered.â
