Background

Stephen Quay was born on June 17, 1947, in Norristown, Pennsylvania, the United States. He has an identical twin brother, Timothy. Their father was a machinist for Philadelphia Electric and their mother was a homemaker.

Education

After graduating in 1969 from the Philadelphia College of Art, where they studied illustration and graphics, Quay brothers won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, London. They graduated un 1972.

Career

At the School of Film and Television, Quay brothers made their first short films (mostly lost) and met fellow student Keith Griffiths, who first collaborated with them on Nocturna Artificialia (1979), funded by the BFI Production Board. Working together as Koninck Studios, with Griffiths producing, the Quays have maintained a steady output of surreal and fastidious puppet animation films, supplemented by design work for opera, theatre, and ballet. To help finance the avant-garde projects they have also worked on TV commercials, channel identification footage, and numerous music videos, including the Stille Nacht series, and, less characteristically, Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer.

The Quays are renowned for their craftsmanlike methods and their unusual sources of inspiration. Apart from their puppets, which typically look like old dolls abused by many generations of children, they construct their own sets, arrange the lighting, and operate the cameras. The films draw heavily on twentieth-century European visual and literary culture, especially the surrealist and expressionist traditions represented by the Polish writer Bruno Schulz, the painter Max Ernst, and their fellow director of puppet films, the Czech Jan Svankmajer. As with Svankmajer, the Quays' cinema is short on conventional narrative but long on enigmatic visuals; music usually plays a major part in creating a bizarre, sinister atmosphere.

The world invented by the Quays appears frozen in time, covered with dust and cobwebs, full of mirrors and strange machinery - a world stored in a locked room or glass cabinet that nobody has accessed for decades. The color scheme often suggests the hues of old photographs: sepias, browns, and dirty yellows predominate. Nocturna Artificialia, describing the cataleptic hero's adventures when he leaves his room for the city, immediately established their individual technique and propensity for dream narratives. Subsequent films in the early 1980s, made for the Arts Council or Channel 4, paid specific homage to the team's European influences, including the Punch and Judy tradition, the artistic vortex of 1920s Paris, Svankmajer, the Czech composer Janácek, and, in Ein Brudermord, the claustrophobic imagination of Franz Kafka.

The twenty-minute Street of Crocodiles (1986), their first film shot in 35mm, decisively lifted the Quays beyond the quasi-documentary orbit. The film is a homage to Bruno Schulz, one of whose novels bears the same title. The setting is a mythical land, somewhere in pre-Second World War provincial Poland, which operates like a living organism (Schulz in his work often compared a city to a living body). The population consists of people either half-dead or half-alive, with empty heads, who move in a circular, mechanical way, oblivious to anyone else's movements. The Quays suggest that this degraded land is stored in a deserted museum and activated by an old Kinetoscope machine - something that could be interpreted as a sign of their faith in the creative powers of cinema.

Further impressive film puzzles followed, among them The Comb, a sexually suggestive dream of damaged dolls, ladders, passageways, and a live-action woman (perhaps the dreamer), and De Artificiali Perspectiva, a quirky analysis of the optical distortions of anamorphosis. Then in 1995, the Quays mounted their first live-action feature, Institute Benjamenta, inspired by the writings of the Swiss novelist Robert Walser. Like the Street of Crocodiles, the Benjamenta Institute for the training of domestic servants presents a sinister microcosm, with its inhabitants leading a half-life of repetitive, largely pointless activities. Typically, the presence of actors prompted no change in the Brothers' stylistic approach: Mark Rylance, Alice Krige, and Gottfried John became willingly used as quasi-objects, scrupulously positioned alongside forks, stag horns and dripping water in a fascinating if static symphony of light and shade constructed on the prevailing Quay themes of death, decay, and nothingness.

In 2000, the Quay brothers’ film In Absentia debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. The twenty-minute film, which features the music of avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, was shot in black and white and color. With the use of both animation and live-action, the Quays portray a woman alone in a room, writing a letter, while the altering light outside her window imparts her changing emotions. Since its debut, the film has been shown in areas of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Collaborations with the choreographer William Tuckett and their small insert in Julie Taymor's Frida have introduced wider audiences to the Quays; while The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, a live-action fairy-tale where a piano tuner attempts to rescue an opera singer from the clutches of a mad doctor in the Carpathian Mountains, is so bizarrely beautiful in its foggy, artificial, de-colorized way that is sure to attract new admirers.

The Quay Brothers have produced over 45 moving image works, including two features, music videos, dance films, documentaries, installations, and live events. In 2006 The Quay brothers presented Dormitorium at the Holland film festival.

Achievements

• The Brothers Quay are among the most accomplished animation artists to emerge in recent years. Their fantastic decor and Kafkaesque puppets, attention to the liberation of the mistake and their casual and lingering close-ups combine in an ingenious alchemy of unconscious, metaphoric vision.
  
  They are influential stop-motion animators. They are also the recipients of the 1998 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for their work on the play The Chairs. In 2012-2013, they were the subject of a gallery exhibition Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets and accompanying film retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 2013-2014 EYE, the national museum for film in the Netherlands curated The Quay Brothers’ Universum.
  
  

Works

More photos

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  • Stille Nacht II

    (With a typically eccentric cast of a ragged doll, a white...)

    1992
  • Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life

    (Presented in a gorgeous new director-approved transfer, T...)

    1995
  • In Absentia

    (In Absentia combines live-action and animation with dazzl...)

    2000
  • The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer

    (This early film by renowned animators Stephen and Timothy...)

    1984
  • The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer

    (This early film by renowned animators Stephen and Timothy...)

    1984
  • Anamorphosis

    (Stephen and Timothy Quay's interest in esoteric illusions...)

    1991
  • The Phantom Museum

    (Random forays into one of the world's most extraordinary ...)

    2003
  • Stille Nacht I

    (The first film of the series (initially commissioned as a...)

    1988
  • Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies

    (Oscillating hands each hold a pen; a man-made of wire has...)

    1988
  • This Unnameable Little Broom

    (Gilgamesh, a grotesque fascist hydrocephalic child despot...)

    1985
  • Stille Nacht III

    (The third film of the Stille Nacht series is an excursion...)

    1992
  • The Comb

    (The film opens in the shadowy bedroom of a sleeping beaut...)

    1990
  • Street of Crocodiles

    (A museum keeper spits into the eyepiece of an ancient pee...)

    1986
  • The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes

    (The breathtakingly beautiful and long-awaited second feat...)

    2005
  • Nocturna Artificialia

    (A dreamer is seduced by the mystery of the city at night....)

    1979

Views

Whether working in animation or live-action, the Quays choose to use what they call a lateral hierarchy of cinematic formal aspects; unlike conventional films, in which the hierarchy is vertical, topped by a script and narrative, the Quays cast the Institute before the actors. "We wanted the film to move more in the direction of the fable or the fairy tale (or at least a notion of it), as Walser did obliquely. He didn't walk in the front door, he came through the roof, so to speak. Thus, in order to, score something off, as Walser called it, the 'senseless but all the same meaningful 'fairy tale," we started by casting the decor as the main actor. We felt that the essential 'mysterium' of the film should be the institute itself, as though it had its own inner life and former existence which seemed to dream upon its inhabitants and exert its own conspiratorial spell and undertows. That time and space should be ambiguous, that the locale of the film would be less geographical than spiritual, all to score that particularly Walserian half-waking, half-sleeping 'world in between.' And, since we've always maintained a belief in the illogical, the irrational ... and the obliqueness of poetry, we don't think exclusively in terms of narrative, but also the 'parenthesis' that lay hidden behind the narrative." A gesture to their loyalty to puppet film aesthetics, the Quays' remarked that they "treated the actors with as much respect as we treated our puppets."

In scenes of elusive cinematic and literary reference which identify the Quays' films, one is obliquely reminded of silent filmmakers Kirsanov, Murnau, the surrealist Buñuel and the Russian film poet Tarkovsky; of Kafka (who was greatly influenced by Walser) and of essential myth and fairy tale. Continuing collaboration with the Polish composer Leszek Jankowski supports and counterpoints their careful visual choreography, whether of puppets, exquisite objects or actors. Like Lisa Benjamenta, the images are simultaneously fragile and immortal. The films evade a postmodern context or interpretation, and their epiphanic moments and dreamscapes provide a momentary orientation but are themselves even greater enigmas within the film's poetic fabric.

Quotations: "What happens in the shadow, in the grey regions, also interests us - all that is elusive and fugitive, all that can be said in those beautiful halftones, or in whispers, in deep shade."

Personality

Although Quay brothers were born in the United States, they prefer to say, that they are "Europeans by choice", stating that it would be totally impossible for them to have done what they've done in America.

Hollywood director Christopher Nolan revealed himself to have been an admirer of the Quay Brothers' work since coming across their films late at night when they were originally screened on TV.

Interests

• Opera, ballet

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Franz Kafka

• Writers

  Stanisław Lem, Bruno Schulz, Robert Walser, Michel de Ghelderode, Emma Hauck, Lewis Carroll

• Artists

  Max Ernst, Walerian Borowczyk, Jan Švankmajer, Jan Švankmajer

• Music & Bands

  Leoš Janáček, Zdeněk Liška, Antonio Vivaldi, Arvo Pärt, Krzysztof Penderecki, Sergei Prokofiev

Connections

Brother:

Timothy Quay

When Quay brothers were asked about their decision to work together, they said: "For us it's invisible, we don't even notice it. You're only reminded that you're a twin when you walk down the street together and people stare at you. Actually, we passed two old women today, identical twins, probably in their seventies, and immediately we thought "Jesus, will we look that bad when we get old?", "Why don't they just part?", and we had to admit that they were slightly freaks. People, of course, expect us, as well, to eventually part and to become normal people, to have an individual life, but we find that being twins insulates us quite nicely from the demands of reality."

colleague:

Keith Griffiths

colleague:

Jan Švankmajer

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 189
  2001
• Quay Brothers on Facebook
• Best Film You've Never Seen
  2013