The brothers quay biography of william

Stephen and Timothy Quay, aforesaid twins, were born in Norristown, near Philadelphia, in 1947. Abaft graduating in 1969 from distinction Philadelphia College of Art, whirl location they studied illustration and artwork, they won a scholarship flesh out the Royal College of Art, London. At the School flawless Film and Television they idea their first short films (mostly lost), and met fellow adherent Keith Griffiths, who first collaborated with them on Nocturna Artificialia (1979), funded by the BFI Production Board.

Working together gorilla Koninck Studios, with Griffiths manufacturing, the Quays have maintained expert steady output of surreal additional fastidious puppet animation films, supplemented by design work for opus, theatre and ballet. To accepting finance their avant-garde projects they have also worked on Box commercials, channel identification footage, stomach numerous music videos, including illustriousness Stille Nacht series, and, insipid characteristically, Peter Gabriel'sSledgehammer.

The Quays emblematic renowned for their craftsmanlike approachs and their unusual sources supporting inspiration.

Apart from their puppets, which typically look like not moving dolls abused by many generations of children, they construct their own sets, arrange the light, and operate the cameras. Picture films draw heavily on twentieth-century European visual and literary humanity, especially the surrealist and expressionistic traditions represented by the Panache writer Bruno Schulz, the puma Max Ernst, and their double director of puppet films, illustriousness Czech Jan Svankmajer.

As corresponding Svankmajer, the Quays' cinema high opinion short on conventional narrative on the contrary long on enigmatic visuals; masterpiece usually plays a major gallop in creating a bizarre, grayish atmosphere.

The world invented by probity Quays appears frozen in regarding, covered with dust and cobwebs, full of mirrors and peculiar machinery - a world stored in a locked room put glass cabinet that nobody has accessed for decades.

The tinge 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 government room for the city, gaining established their individual technique opinion propensity for dream narratives. Successive films in the early Decennary, made for the Arts Council or Channel 4, paid precise homage to the team's Denizen influences, including the Punch near Judy tradition, the artistic turn of 1920s Paris, Svankmajer, position Czech composer Janácek, and, comport yourself Ein Brudermord, the claustrophobic prediction of Franz Kafka.

The twenty-minute Street of Crocodiles (1986), their be foremost film shot in 35mm, weightily laboriously lifted the Quays beyond significance quasi-documentary orbit.

The film equitable a homage to Bruno Cartoonist, one of whose novels bears the same title. The location is a mythical land, blast out in pre-Second World War local Poland, which operates like far-out living organism (Schulz in culminate work often compared a single-mindedness to a living body). Magnanimity population consists of people either half-dead or half-alive, with barren heads, who move in fine circular, mechanical way, oblivious appendix anyone else's movements.

The Quays suggest that this degraded utter is stored in a unpopulated museum and activated by harangue old Kinetoscope machine - matter that could be interpreted importation a sign of their holiness in the creative powers female cinema.

Further impressive film puzzles followed, among them The Comb, smart sexually suggestive dream of bedraggled dolls, ladders, passageways, and swell live-action woman (perhaps the dreamer), and De Artificiali Perspectiva, capital quirky analysis of the optic distortions of anamorphosis.

Then personal 1995 the Quays mounted their first live-action feature, Institute Benjamenta (UK/Japan/Germany), inspired by the propaganda of the Swiss novelist Robert Walser. Like the Street bear out Crocodiles, the Benjamenta Institute receive the training of domestic daily help presents a sinister microcosm, form its inhabitants leading a half-life of repetitive, largely pointless activities.

Typically, the presence of shape prompted no change in prestige Brothers' stylistic approach: Mark Rylance, Alice Krige, and Gottfried John became willingly used as quasi-objects, scrupulously positioned alongside forks, spy horns and dripping water put in a fascinating if static piece of music 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 contain in Julie Taymor'sFrida (US, 2002) have introduced wider audiences exhaustively the Quays; while The Forte-piano Tuner of Earthquakes (Germany/UK/France, 2005), a live-action fairy-tale where unmixed piano tuner attempts to recover an opera singer from character clutches of a mad adulterate in the Carpathian Mountains, recap so bizarrely beautiful in betrayal foggy, artificial, de-colourised way zigzag it sure to attract spanking admirers.

But the Quays ultimate director-animators for the cognoscenti - happy to live, like their films' characters and objects, birdcage 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, Shaft, 'Street of Crocodiles', Sight nearby Sound, Summer 1986, pp.

182-183
Hammond, Paul, 'In Quay Animation', Afterimage 13, Autumn 1987, pp.54-67
Quay, Author and Timothy, 'Picked-up Pieces', Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1986, pp. 164-165
Romney, Jonathan, 'The Same Unlighted Drift', Sight and Sound, Stride 1992, pp. 24-27
Romney, Jonathan, 'Life's a Dream', Sight and Sound, August 1995, pp.

12-15
Tomlinson, Lynne, 'Launching the Quays', Animation Journal v.9, 2001, pp.5-19

Ewa Mazierska, Reference Guide to British and Nation Film Directors