“Exquisitely crafted and exquisitely boring.” “Disgusting.” A source of motion sickness. And for one fan, revelatory.
Such were the reactions of the participants in the New Haven Free Public Library’s ongoing Animation Celebration series to four short works by the Quay Brothers — one of the most influential and also most divisive teams in animation history, whose works are perhaps uniquely suited to the run-up to Halloween.
The Quay Brothers have been making films, from features to shorts to music videos to commercials, since their student days in the early 1970s, and as a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art put in 2013, they are “internationally renowned moving image artists and designers…. For over 30 years, they have been in the avant-garde of stop-motion puppet animation and live-action movie-making in the Eastern European tradition of filmmakers like Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Svankmajer and the Russian Yuri Norstein, and have championed a design aesthetic influenced by the graphic surrealism of Polish poster artists of the 1950s and 1960s.” Their influence spreads far and wide across the arts, from fellow animators and filmmakers to photographers and musicians.
But that doesn’t mean that everyone has to like them.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Animation Celebration has been meeting one Monday a month over Zoom — a practice that persists — and while it always welcomes newcomers, there is now also a crew of faithful participants who show up every month, united by a love of animation, an interest in being challenges, and the freedom to speak their minds.
“Good to see the usual cast of suspects,” said one participant as host Haley Grunloh, library technical assistant, convened the meeting. Grunloh explained that “this month it’s Halloween season so the films I picked are four short films directed by the Brothers Quay.” Out of the dozens of works the brothers have produced, there were four short films in particular — In Absentia, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, Street of Crocodiles (perhaps the brothers’ most famous work) and The Comb.
In Absentia
This film (the above clip is an excerpt) consists of a series of unnerving scenes in a woman frantically scribbles unintelligible lines on paper, gripping pencils at the very point with graphite encrusted fingers. As with all four short films, In Absentia is more about mood than plot, and in this particular case, it is suffused with the sense that something terrible is about to happen, or perhaps is happening, without our ability to see it.
Grunloh gave some biographical information about the brothers — Stephen and Timothy — to start things off. To begin with, they were born outside of Philadelphia in 1947. “People seem to think they’re European, which makes sense because they both went to graduate school in London and have lived in Europe for a while, and their studio is in London. They’re American expats,” Grunloh said. “A lot of their work is influenced by literature and film from Eastern Europe.” She also gave a hint of the critical reception to the brothers’ work, quoting one reviewer who called a particular film “Toy Story-esque as told by Kafka’s personal taxidermist.” Grunloh continued: “Like a lot of arty filmmakers they’ve followed their own visions and done projects to make money for their artier films.” Among many other things, they’ve done a commercial for Rice Krispies Treats.
But on to In Absentia. “I thought it was kind of nightmarish, like a really bad dream, or a serious case of writer’s block,” one participant said. Another participant felt it “was a visceral description of the experience of insanity and having delusions, and being lost in your own head and in your own nightmares.”
The participants also zeroed in on the experience of watching. “There was something about having the hands be so close to the tip of the pencil,” said one. “And the graphite on the hands, the closeup of the hands was pretty spectacular,” said another.
“The word visceral and the word tactile get used so often” when talking about the Quay Brothers, Grunloh said. “They’re trying to evoke a sensation rather than tell a story.”
At the end of the film, the brothers reveal that it’s dedicated to a certain E.H.; that would be Emma Hauck, a woman who was admitted to an asylum at the turn of the 20th century and wrote to her husband a series of unintelligible letters that are now regarded as artwork. “I thought it was interesting that they chose to put the dedication at the end instead of the beginning,” Grunloh said. “Do you think this film works without the dedication at the end?”
“I’m not sure that it works with the dedication to the film,” said one participant. Everyone laughed. “I ended up watching this on fast forward sometimes.”
“I think it was trying to make you feel like what it may have been like to be in an asylum,” said another participant.
“It may have succeeded,” said the first.
In Absentia made Grunloh “sad,” she said. “She just makes this letter that doesn’t mean anything, and then she just puts them in a clock…. I wish someone would help her.”
The discussion turned to the accompanying soundtrack. “I find most of the music kind of unpleasant, though it’s a matter of taste,” Grunloh said.
“The laughing and chatter in this very first one was very grating. It was a hard audio. But then you get into these very interesting uses of instruments in the others. Something about discordant instruments is easier to take than discordant voices,” said a participant.
“ Knowing Emma’s story, I’ll have to take another look,” said another.
Rehearsals For Extinct Anatomies
Film distributor Kino Lorber describes the film thusly: “In the fragile immobility of a room a couple wait, as twilight advances, alternately oblivious to and made anxious by presentiments of some brutal destruction being remorselessly rehearsed outside their door.”
“This is the one with the guy rubbing his forehead, which is the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever seen on film,” Grunloh said.
“Disgusting,” a participant agreed.
“I looked at quite a few reviews of this film,” Grunloh said, and shared some choice lines: “Don’t watch this film before you go to the doctor”; “brain damage on film”; “watching this will give you tetanus.”
“It was really hard for me to watch. It was like motion sickness,” said another participant. “Even looking at the still shot is bringing back that feeling of motion sickness.”
“I think going into this coming from the first one, I wanted there to be something of a story. I kept wanting to figure it out and I couldn’t. It was too symbolic or metaphoric and it tripped me up. It was visually really interesting but mentally really frustrating,” said another.
“I think that’s part of the experience — you’re supposed to be frustrated,” Grunloh said.
Another participant focused on the visual motifs of the film. “In this one a fan keeps oscillating. I couldn’t put it together. I knew it was important because they put it in time after time, but I didn’t know why.”
Here Grunloh produced a quote from the brothers themselves about their films: “If you go with it, you’ll discover something. If you resist it, then they’ll fail you, and they’ll fail you if you keep asking ‘what is it about?’”
Everyone laughed. ”I kept focusing on the shape of the door in the room with the two dolls,” said one participant about the scene in the excerpt above “The window is something you’d see in an institution. But the lock is on the inside.”
“They’re trying to keep the forehead-rubbing guy out,” Grunloh said. Another participant mentioned how the female character in the film first has an egg between her legs, and then she seems to give birth to a machine. “Oh, my Lord,”she said.
Grunloh reveals that the Quays said one inspiration for the film was a work called The Bolt, by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. It depicted a scene very different from anything that appeared in the Quays’ film.
“This looks like lovers locking the rest of the world out,” said one participant of the Fragonard piece. “Her husband is probably out making lots of money. Standing along, this looks like lovers locking themselves away and having their heigh-ho.”
“Maybe the film is the otherworld, opposite version” of The Bolt, suggested another participant.
One person who had been quiet all along spoke up about the Quays’ statements about their own work. “‘If you don’t get it, you’re overthinking.’ That’s an easy out for every bad artist.” Everyone laughed again. Among the participants, the jury was still out on the Brothers Quay, but it wasn’t looking good.
Street of Crocodiles
The Quay Brothers’ most famous film is based on a short story of the same name by Bruno Schulz, who, Grunloh explained, “lived in Poland in the 1930s and was murdered by the Nazis.“ The story is “basically a weird description of a magic-realism version of a street in Poland.” She revealed that the Quay Brothers got interested in his writing because ‘his works has themes about finding the sublime in trash, in what the world casts off,” though she also noted that one description of the film described it as “a puppet is released from his strings and explores. He becomes ensnared by baby-faced dolls.”
She continued: “The bits where they animate the raw meat is my second-least favorite thing I’ve seen on film.”
One participant had done some digging of her own, finding reviews of Schulz’s stories. “One person said about Schultz’s writing, ‘again and again, reality disintegrates and is replaced by dreams, fantasies and myths.’ It occurred to me that you could say the same thing about the Quay Brothers…. There’s a character in a story but the reality of the story just merges into this very dark fantasy-ness.”
“Why do you think the puppets all have hollowed-out heads?” asked one viewer.
“They were rubbing their foreheads too long,” said another.
“It makes it creepier,” said another.
“We have our skinny puppet guy, and he goes through this transformation,” Grunloh said. Even as she acknowledged the admonition from the Quay Brothers themselves, she asked: “What is it supposed to mean? Is it about assimilation?”
“I thought someone discovered an ancient scissor factory. The dolls find pieces to put themselves into shape, and then they take over the factory,” one participant said.
Another participant noted that there was a quote about “the nothingness of society…. That’s not a very satisfactory thing to work away with, but nothingness is a central theme of the works,” he said.
The Comb
The final film discussed has been described as what happens when a porcelain doll and a sleeping woman interact in their dreams. “I got the sense that this one was about the unconscious and dreaming,” said one participant. The overt reference to dream logic made the film work for her a little more.
“It gives you something to stand on,” Grunloh agreed. “What do you think of the subtitle in the beginning that mentions fairytales, and uses this old-fashioned font, like a storybook? Were you getting a fairytale vibe?”
“The Dr. Seuss trees,” another participant said. “The landscape was very surreal.” Another viewer noted the fade from color to black and white toward the end, “like she’s waking up, and can’t remember the dream anymore. You accept the dream logic, but as soon as you wake up, you put it in the context of real-life logic,” and that changes everything.
“Where do you think the doll is trying to get with the ladders?” Grunloh said of one of the more arresting images in the film.
“I thought maybe all the critters with the ladders were in the comb” the woman brushed her hair with, one participant said.
“Oh no!” another said, laughing with horror.
“Those are some pretty developed lice,” said another.
Finally one person who had been quiet for the entire hour spoke up. “I just love all their work. I know everyone hates them, but I am a die-hard Goth girl at heart. These guys have influenced everyone from Marilyn Manson to Nine Inch Nails, and Joel-Peter Witkin.” She went on to explain that her love for the Quay Brothers’s films was deep and abiding, since she saw them in college. (Confession time, reader: this person spoke for your correspondent.)
“There are so many artists making more digestible material who list them as influences,” Grunloh said. Among them, she said, was blockbuster filmmaker Christopher Nolan.
“Really?” said one participant, in disbelief. But another said, “Oh, wow, that makes sense.” She went on to describe how, watching the four films, she felt she’d seen their visual style before; now she realized that she was seeing their influence in many other works that she liked.
Grunloh said the brothers had been asked why their work has been so influential. “We aren’t very funny so people assume that we must be saying something pretty profound,” one of them apparently replied. Everyone laughed. “I wouldn’t say their films are completely devoid of humor,” Grunloh added. “I guess it depends on what sense of humor you have.”
“We’re learning to appreciate it,” said one participant.
“Happy Halloween everybody!” said another.
The Quay Brothers’ collected works are available on Kanopy, which is free for streaming with a public library card.