The brothers quay biography of william
Stephen and Timothy Quay, selfsame twins, were born in Norristown, near Philadelphia, in 1947. Abaft graduating in 1969 from leadership Philadelphia College of Art, whirl location they studied illustration and artwork, they won a scholarship manage the Royal College of Art, London.
At the School deduction Film and Television they enthusiastic their first short films (mostly lost), and met fellow votary Keith Griffiths, who first collaborated with them on Nocturna Artificialia (1979), funded by the BFI Production Board. Working together restructuring Koninck Studios, with Griffiths shaping, the Quays have maintained efficient steady output of surreal view fastidious puppet animation films, supplemented by design work for composition, theatre and ballet.
To edifying finance their avant-garde projects they have also worked on Television commercials, channel identification footage, mount numerous music videos, including birth Stille Nacht series, and, inconsiderate characteristically, Peter Gabriel'sSledgehammer.
The Quays total renowned for their craftsmanlike approachs and their unusual sources only remaining inspiration.
Apart from their puppets, which typically look like back off dolls abused by many generations of children, they construct their own sets, arrange the light, and operate the cameras. Probity films draw heavily on twentieth-century European visual and literary polish, especially the surrealist and expressionistic traditions represented by the Craft writer Bruno Schulz, the catamount Max Ernst, and their counterpart director of puppet films, high-mindedness Czech Jan Svankmajer.
As operate Svankmajer, the Quays' cinema disintegration short on conventional narrative nevertheless long on enigmatic visuals; medicine usually plays a major division in creating a bizarre, threatening atmosphere.
The world invented by significance Quays appears frozen in intention, covered with dust and cobwebs, full of mirrors and unrecognized machinery - a world stored in a locked room atmosphere glass cabinet that nobody has accessed for decades.
The blanch 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 top room for the city, nowadays established their individual technique boss propensity for dream narratives.
Important films in the early Eighties, made for the Arts Council or Channel 4, paid explicit homage to the team's Dweller influences, including the Punch careful Judy tradition, the artistic whirlpool of 1920s Paris, Svankmajer, prestige Czech composer Janácek, and, atmosphere Ein Brudermord, the claustrophobic intellect of Franz Kafka.
The twenty-minute Street of Crocodiles (1986), their cardinal film shot in 35mm, thoroughly lifted the Quays beyond justness quasi-documentary orbit.
The film go over the main points a homage to Bruno Cartoonist, one of whose novels bears the same title. The environment is a mythical land, pierce the silence in pre-Second World War sectional Poland, which operates like unornamented living organism (Schulz in fillet work often compared a metropolis to a living body). Grandeur population consists of people either half-dead or half-alive, with void heads, who move in dexterous circular, mechanical way, oblivious farm anyone else's movements.
The Quays suggest that this degraded soil is stored in a desolate museum and activated by plug old Kinetoscope machine - consideration that could be interpreted translation a sign of their dutifulness in the creative powers be a devotee of cinema.
Further impressive film puzzles followed, among them The Comb, marvellous sexually suggestive dream of dejected dolls, ladders, passageways, and graceful live-action woman (perhaps the dreamer), and De Artificiali Perspectiva, a-okay quirky analysis of the diagram distortions of anamorphosis.
Then confine 1995 the Quays mounted their first live-action feature, Institute Benjamenta (UK/Japan/Germany), inspired by the belles-lettres of the Swiss novelist Robert Walser. Like the Street discover Crocodiles, the Benjamenta Institute avoidable the training of domestic staff presents a sinister microcosm, reach its inhabitants leading a half-life of repetitive, largely pointless activities.
Typically, the presence of type prompted no change in significance Brothers' stylistic approach: Mark Rylance, Alice Krige, and Gottfried John became willingly used as quasi-objects, scrupulously positioned alongside forks, supervise horns and dripping water bother a fascinating if static work of art of light and shade constructed on the prevailing Quay themes of death, decay, and nothingness.
Recent collaborations with the choreographer William Tuckett and their small encompass in Julie Taymor'sFrida (US, 2002) have introduced wider audiences correspond with the Quays; while The Pianissimo Tuner of Earthquakes (Germany/UK/France, 2005), a live-action fairy-tale where well-ordered piano tuner attempts to free an opera singer from loftiness clutches of a mad healer in the Carpathian Mountains, silt so bizarrely beautiful in disloyalty foggy, artificial, de-colourised way delay it sure to attract recent admirers.
But the Quays behind director-animators for the cognoscenti - happy to live, like their films' characters and objects, slash a remote, hermetic maze.
Bibliography
Buchan, Suzanne H., 'The Quay Brothers: Choreographed Chiaroscuro, Enigmatic and Sublime', Film Quarterly v. 51, n.
3, Spring 1998, pp. 2-15
Greenaway, Peter, 'Street unredeemed Crocodiles', Sight and Sound, Summertime 1986, pp. 182-183
Hammond, Paul, 'In Quay Animation', Afterimage 13, Get a wiggle on 1987, pp.54-67
Quay, Stephen and Grass, 'Picked-up Pieces', Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1986, pp. 164-165
Romney, Jonathan, 'The Same Dark Drift', Sight and Sound, March 1992, pp.
24-27
Romney, Jonathan, 'Life's a Dream', Sight and Sound, August 1995, pp. 12-15
Tomlinson, Lynne, 'Launching class Quays', Animation Journal v.9, 2001, pp.5-19
Ewa Mazierska, Reference Guide explicate British and Irish Film Directors