Stephen Quay and Timothy Quay ( ; born June 17, 1947) are American identical twin brothers and stop-motion animators who are better known as the Brothers Quay or Quay Brothers. They received the 1998 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for their work on the play The Chairs.
Careers The Quay Brothers reside and work in England, having moved there in 1969 to study at the Royal College of Art, London after studying illustration (Timothy) and film (Stephen) at the Philadelphia College of Art, later the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. In England, they made their first short films, which no longer exist after the only prints were irreparably damaged. They spent some time in the Netherlands in the 1970s and then returned to England, where they teamed up with another Royal College student, Keith Griffiths, who produced all of their films. In 1980, the trio formed Koninck Studios, which is currently based in London's Old Street area of Hackney.
Style The Brothers' works from 1979 to the present show a wide range of often esoteric influences, starting with the Polish animators Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica and continuing with the writers Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Robert Walser and Michel de Ghelderode, puppeteers Wladyslaw Starewicz and Czech Richard Teschner and Czech composers Leoš Janáček, Zdeněk Liška and Polish Leszek Jankowski, the last of whom has created many original scores for their work. Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, for whom they named one of their films (The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer), is also frequently cited as a major influence, but they actually discovered his work relatively late, in 1983, by which time their characteristic style and preoccupations had been fully formed. In a panel discussion with Daniel Bird and Andrzej Klimowski at the Aurora festival in Norwich, they emphasized that a more significant influence on their work was Walerian Borowczyk, who made both animation shorts and live-action features.
Most of their animation films feature puppets made of doll parts and other organic and inorganic materials, often partially disassembled, in a dark, moody atmosphere. Perhaps their best known work is Street of Crocodiles (1986), based on the short story of the same name by the Polish author and artist Bruno Schulz. This short film was selected by director and animator Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time, and critic Jonathan Romney included it on his list of the ten best films in any medium (for Sight and Sounds critics' poll of 2002). They have made two full-length live action films: Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1996), produced by Keith Griffiths and Janine Marmot, and The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005), produced by Keith Griffiths. They also directed an animated sequence in the film Frida (2002).
With very few exceptions, their films have no meaningful spoken dialogue (most have no spoken content at all, while some, such as The Comb (From the Museums of Sleep) (1990) include multilingual background gibberish that is not intended to be coherently understood). Accordingly, their films are highly reliant on their music scores, of which many have been written especially for them by the Polish composer Leszek Jankowski. In 2000, they contributed a short film to the BBC's Sound On Film series in which they visualised a 20-minute piece by the avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Whenever possible, the Quay Brothers prefer to work with pre-recorded music, though Gary Tarn's score for The Phantom Museum had to be added afterwards when it became impossible to license music by the Czech composer Zdeněk Liška.
They have created music videos for His Name Is Alive ("Are We Still Married", "Can't Go Wrong Without You"), Michael Penn ("Long Way Down (Look What the Cat Drug In)") and 16 Horsepower ("Black Soul Choir"). Their style has been mimicked to the point that audiences mistakenly believed that the Quay Brothers were responsible for several music videos for Tool but those videos were created by Fred Stuhr and member Adam Jones, whose work is influenced by the Quay Brothers. Although they worked on Peter Gabriel's seminal video "Sledgehammer" (1986) as animators, the project was directed by Stephen R. Johnson in order for the brothers to continue to support their personal projects.
Before turning to film, the Quay Brothers worked as professional illustrators. The first edition of Anthony Burgess' novel The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End, included their drawings before the start of each chapter. Nearly three decades before directly collaborating with Stockhausen, they designed the cover of the book Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer (ed. Jonathan Cott, Simon & Schuster, 1973). After designing book covers for Gothic and science fiction books while in Philadelphia, the Quay Brothers have created suggestive designs for a variety of publications that seem to reflect not only their own interests in particular authors, covers for Italo Calvino, Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Mark le Fanu's study of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, but also in themes and motifs that these authors develop. Literary texts are inspirational sources for almost all of their film projects, whether they serve as a point of departure for their own ideas or as a textual basis for filmic scenarios, and not as scripts or screenplays. The prowess in illustration and calligraphy seeps increasingly into many formal elements in their later films, evident as graphic embellishment in the set decoration, or their particular use of patterns in the puppets' costume design. Titles, intertitles and credits appear in a variety of handwritten styles.
In an interview with Robert K. Elder for his book The Best Film You've Never Seen, the Quay Brothers discuss their creative process, stating: "If [a] project does eventually get approval, then we almost invariably chuck [the] original proposal out, not out of any cavalierness, but simply because we know that, as we start building the decors and the puppets, the script begins to grow and evolve very organically."Elder, Robert K. The Best Film You've Never Seen: 35 Directors Champion the Forgotten or Critically Savaged Movies They Love. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review, 2013. Print.
The critical success of Street of Crocodiles gave the Quay Brothers artistic freedom to explore a shift in subject matter, in part originating in literary and poetic sources that led to exploration of new aesthetic forms, but also because they were able to make extensive experiments in technique, both with cameras and on large stage sets. The Quay Brothers are best known for their puppet and feature-length films. Less known, but no less incisive in their creative development, is their intense engagement in stage design for opera, ballet and theatre: since 1988, the Quay Brothers have created sets and projections for performing arts productions on international stages. Their work at miniature scale has translated into large-scale designs for the theatre and opera productions of director Richard Jones: Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges; Feydeau's "A Flea in Her Ear"; Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa; and Molière's "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme". Their set design for a revival of Ionesco's "The Chairs" was nominated for a Tony Award in 1998. The Quay Brothers' excursion into feature films and live-action dance films were not an indication of a move away from animation and the literature that inspires them—on the contrary, the film explores the potential which slumbers in the combination of these cinematic techniques. Their puppet animation set designs have been curated as an internationally touring exhibition called "Dormitorium" which toured the east coast of the United States in 2009, including the originating venue of the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, followed by Parsons The New School of Design, New York,Dormitorium Exhibition Newschool University. Parsons School of Design. Retrieved July 7, 2010 Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA and Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
Literature The Quay Brothers are strongly influenced by literature and the written word – from Eastern-European poetry to South American magic realism.
Lewis Carroll (Alice in Not So Wonderland) Emma Hauck (In Absentia) Felisberto Hernández (Unmistaken Hands: Ex Voto F.H, The Doll's Breath) Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis) Stanisław Lem (Maska) Rainer Maria Rilke (Eurydice: She, So Beloved) Bruno Schulz (Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass) Robert Walser (The Comb, Institute Benjamenta)
Music Music is an essential part of the Quay Brothers' films, as they also find inspiration in Eastern European classical music. The Quay Brothers' films feature music by the following composers:
Stefan Cichoński (Nocturna Artificialia) Trevor Duncan (Piano Tuner of Earthquakes) Leoš Janáček (Leoš Janáček: Intimate Excursions, The Sandman, The Metamorphosis) Lech Jankowski (Street of Crocodiles, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, Ex-Voto, The Comb, Institute Benjamenta, De Artificiali Perspectiva, or Anamorphosis) Zygmunt Konieczny (Nocturna Artificialia) György Kurtag (The Sandman) Zdeněk Liška (The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer, The Phantom Museum) Steve Martland (Songs for Dead Children) Claudio Monteverdi (Eurydice: She, So Beloved) Timothy Nelson (Wonderwood, Through The Weeping Glass, Unmistaken Hands: Ex Voto F.H., Vade mecum, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass) Arvo Pärt (Duet) Krzysztof Penderecki (Ein Brudermord, Inventorium of Traces, Maska) Sergei Prokofiev (Alice in Not So Wonderland) Christopher Slaski (Piano Tuner of Earthquakes) Karlheinz Stockhausen (In Absentia) Igor Stravinski (Igor, The Paris Years Chez Pleyel 1920–1929) Gary Tarn (The Phantom Museum, Tempus Fugit) Antonio Vivaldi (Piano Tuner of Earthquakes) Michèle Bokanowski (The Doll's Breath) Alfred Schnittke (Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass)
Legacy In 2010, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia received a Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative grant through The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage for an exhibitions project that would include a new work by the Quay Brothers. The Quay Brothers produced a new film entitled Through the Weeping Glass: On the Consolations of Life Everlasting (Limbos & Afterbreezes in the Mütter Museum). The film is their first made in the United States, produced by Edward Waisnis through his company PRO BONO films in collaboration with Atelier Koninck QBFZ, London and it focuses on the history and collections of the college's famed Mütter Museum. The film, with narration by Derek Jacobi and a musical score by Timothy Nelson, was shot on location in Philadelphia during the summer of 2010 and premiered in autumn 2011, with symposia, at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania; New York City's Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. The film was subsequently shown at the Wellcome Collection, London, England; the CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival in Toronto, Canada; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and at the Wexner Center of the Arts at Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. It was reviewed in both Sight & Sound and Film Comment. The 35mm negative and print were selected for inclusion in the film collection of the Museum of Modern Art.