The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom

Conclusion

C o n c l u s i o n Toward a Poetics The Quay Brothers’ live-action and puppet animation films are informed by a conceptual dialectics rooted in profound knowledge of the histories and aesthetics of painting, illustration, performance, literature, and architecture, including the –isms of modernist art practice, poetry, and cinema. The eclectic iconography of the Quays’ cinematic world—its meandering narrative structures and unique cosmogony—hinders an assured or exclusive classification to a genre or a movement . If anything, their works belong to a hybrid category of poetic-experimental film that operates at a liminal threshold between live action and animation. In a discussion of the spectator’s sensual and emotional response, Turvey’s words ring true for viewers trying to describe the Quays’ works: To speak of being struck, overwhelmed, saddened, or horrified by a film, to express the feeling of total absorption, rapt attention, or loss of consciousness in a film, to venerate films, like photographs and paintings, as special, fetishized objects in their own right, is to describe a sensuous experience in which the film itself, as a concrete object, plays a major if not determining role.1 258 c o n c l u si o n The sensuousness of the Quays’ films lies both in their haptic qualities and in their selection and treatment of the materials they use in puppet animation that elicit artifact emotion as described in chapter 4.2 Nelson suggests that “consuming art forms of the fantastic is only one way that we as nonbelievers allow ourselves, unconsciously, to believe.”3 It may not be an overstatement to say that the fantastic element in the Quays’ films (and indeed, in other puppet animation films) can also contribute to fending off Freud’s “manifest prohibitions of reality,” redeeming the last state of belief in contemporary secular experience, providing solace from Bennett’s “disenchantment tale” of modernity. In their substance and their encyclopedic references, the Quay Brothers’ films represent a cinematic analogy or embodiment of the cinema activist concepts proposed by Zielinski in the Introduction. I hope my tentative investigations into the why, the what if, and the how come of their poetics may provide some explanation for the “wow” their films evoke in their viewers and critics. This book has described, contextualized, and explicated prominent cinematic, aesthetic, and technical parameters and systems that are unique features of the Quay Brothers’ work in animated and live-action cinema. My analysis has not emphasized communication models, nor been concerned with the films’ ideological underpinnings or questions of genre and ideology, nor attempted to place the films in a general continuum of filmic practice. Its greater focus lies on the poetics implicit in creation of the cinematic artwork and the way the viewer is actively involved in film reception. I have attempted to describe a thematic, conceptual, and praxisbased poetics of the Quays’ system of style as it currently stands. Yet I have been caught in a hermeneutic circle to some degree. I have undertaken a synecdochal analysis: relating parts of the Quays’ artistic practice in Street of Crocodiles to their work as a whole, and how the particular world of this film is constructed by exploring its uniqueness and how certain techniques continued to be refined in later works. Without being prescriptive or making definitive statements or claims, I have attempted to clarify what their innovation constitutes, what sets the work apart from its contemporaries and its historical predecessors, and how the Quays’ works after Street of Crocodiles continued exploring this film’s innovations by developing new creative systems and methods.4 I also hope it has become clear how the spectator’s co-creational engagement with the Quays’ audiovisual works helps to develop skills and refine schemata toward understanding how the films are constructed and what their artistic contexts are. The approaches and methods used in this study hope to sensitize awareness about the specificity and the very 259 c o n c l u si o n real differences in the experience of watching, perceiving, and understanding these films, and to refine a language to describe the universe, world, realm, or region they create (and, perhaps, one that can be used for the many other worlds of animation). But the Quays, as cinematic poets, will continue to develop more enigmas and puzzles as their work continues, providing ample material for future viewers and scholars. Whether the...