Dream team: the Brothers Quay

ArtForum, April, 1996 by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

The animated-puppet worlds of the Brothers Quay have entranced art cinephiles since 1979. Seemingly made by miniature shadow-fairies rather than the actual tall humans the Quays are, their films - Nocturna Artificialia, 1979, The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, 1984, Street of Crocodiles, 1986, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, 1987 - and music videos, including the award-winning "Sledgehammer" for Peter Gabriel, take us eyeball and eardrum through fantastically handcrafted architecturally impossible visions of lost modernity. Deeply intellectual, their work is suffused with moodiness, patterned after the writers who inspire them: Franz Kafka, Bruno Schultz, and the Swiss novelist Robert Walser, whose Jakob von Gunten, 1908, served as the armature for their first live-action and full-length feature film, Institute Benjamenta, which premiered at New York's Film Forum in March.

Institute Benjamenta - the Institute is a school for servants - is smart and beautiful. Each shot is its own still; each edit, a dazzling transformation of narrative space. As such, Institute Benjamenta is as much a foray into the memory of film itself, a sensuous evocation of the cinema of the miraculous (Jean Cocteau, Luis Bunuel, Maya Deren, Sergei Paradjanov), as it is a fairy tale of spirits crushed by the soul-killing monotony of rules, repetition, and subordination.

In reputation the Brothers Quay are wrapped in mystery, including whispers about their dense and dark London atelier (Koninck studios, which they founded in 1980 with their producer, Keith Griffiths), rumored to be crammed with such things as antique dolls in bell jars and stacks of crumbling insect wings. I half expected to find them a pair of wizened gnomes with rusty screws, butterfly dust, and cobwebs dangling from their hair. Nothing so exorbitant - only two disarmingly friendly, whirling personas of elegantly rumpled charisma, who just happen to have turned their accidental birthright as identical twins (born outside Philadelphia in 1947) into one of art's most ingenious and visionary collaborations. The following conversation took place amidst New York's blizzard of '96, as though the environment were duplicating the atmospheric wonder that the brothers' films so effortlessly provoke. - TNG

THYRZA NICHOLS GOODEVE: A beautiful quotation opens Institute Benjamenta:

Who dares it - has no courage To whom it is missing - feels well Who owns it - is bitterly poor Who is successful - is damaged Who gives it - is as hard as stone Who loves it - stays alone

What is "it?"

THE BROTHERS QUAY: "It" is the riddle, the enigma. The quote isn't from Robert Walser's novella but from an anonymous folktale, a conundrum, that Carl Orff set to music and that we've had a cassette of for 19 years. Our initial ravishment was the music; we'd never had the text translated. Yet it utterly intrigued us and so we began corresponding with the Orff foundation to trace the text's origin - which of course remains unsolved.

TNG: Music seems almost as primary as the visual for you. You once described it as "just the darkest blood imaginable."

BQ: Actually, we're failed composers. What we try to do is create a visualization of a musical space - we want you to hear with your eyes and see with your ears. It's like saying, What kind of decor, in what parallel world, would evoke that music? So Lech [Jankowski, composer for many of the Quays' films including Institute Benjamenta] wrote the music before the film was shot. He read the book and wrote suites, which he gave mysterious titles - not "Jakob's Theme," or "Lisa's Theme," but "Chorale," and "Waltz Z. K. Minor." He made no direct reference to the book whatsoever, at least to our knowledge.

TNG: Filmmakers are often interested in character, but what's most alive for you is the depth or "animation" of sets and objects. Humans seem like an afterthought.

BQ: Not exactly. It's just that they're no more important than anything else. In Institute Benjamenta, what is most magnetized is the space itself. The Institute is the main actor, or the main character, and as a character it exerts a dominion and sway. We wanted it to carry the essential mysterium of the tale, as though it had its own inner life and former existences, which seemed to dream upon its inhabitants and exert its conspiratorial spells and undertows on them. We were looking for that Walserian notion of a world half awake, half asleep, in between.

TNG: Could you map the Institute for me? I mean, does it really exist as phenomenal space, or is it more a miraculous space?

BQ: With the puppet films, we came to terms with conceiving of space: whether it was to be stylized (the great privilege of animation) or realistic, a metaphysical space or a fantastic, nongeographical space, a mental configuration. There could also be analogic spaces, created in the editing process, or abstract spaces, created by massive close-ups and deficient depths of focus - by violations of scale. Whatever form the space took, it was always firstly a poetic vessel through which the fiction would course.