The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom

Introduction

I n t r o d u c t i o n Years ago, while writing a master’s thesis on James Joyce’s cinematic language, I watched a screening of the Quay Brothers’ Street of Crocodiles (1986). I was immediately enthralled by the beauty of the images, but I could not pinpoint what was so striking and emotionally moving about the film. I was smitten by its complexity and poetry, but when I tried to describe what I thought was actually happening in the film’s convoluted narrative, I was stumped in my attempts to communicate exactly what it was. I found cold comfort in a text from Michael Atkinson: “It wouldn’t matter if every man, woman or child on earth saw The Street of Crocodiles. Only I would truly understand it—which is not to say that I literally understand it at all.”1 However, it was encouraging to realize that I was not alone in my inability to describe the film. Unlike most live-action cinema at that time (1991), before computer-generated imagery and digital animation flooded commercial and independent studios, these images and objects brought to life have a different relationship to my lived experience. The best way I could describe it at the time was as a Joycean epiphany, visione animato all’fino de lo scoppio, vision animated to the bursting point, illogical, oneiric, and exhilarating.2 It was a phenomenon that I implicitly understood but could not adequately describe. I am fascinated, yes, by screws that are empowered and transport themselves offscreen over a stodgy layer of meticulously crafted dust. But what of the screws? xii int r o d u c ti o n My quizzical epiphany engendered increasing interest on animation as a complex, special power of film. Vachel Lindsay’s 1919 reflections on animation—the “trick film” as it was known in his era—are proposals about how inanimate objects can be usurped from their nonliving states using this technique: The ability to do this kind of a thing is fundamental in the destinies of the art. . . . Now the mechanical or non-human object, beginning with the engine . . . is apt to be the hero in most any sort of photoplay while the producer remains utterly unconscious of the fact. Why not face this idiosyncrasy of the camera and make the nonhuman object the hero indeed? Not by filling the story with ropes, buckets, firebrands, and sticks, but by having these four unique. Make the fire the loveliest of torches, the water the most graceful of springs. Let the rope be the humorist. Let the stick be the outstanding hero, the D’Artagnan of the group, full of queer gestures and hoppings about. Let him be both polite and obdurate. Finally let him beat the dog most heroically.3 Lindsay’s prescient comments made almost a century ago about how fundamental animation—“this kind of thing”—is to destinies of art have been abundantly confirmed in the meantime, especially since the digital shift. The viewer of such films, then and now, is confronted with an illogical, yet comprehensible vision of objects that move, have intent and personality, and can be cunning. Yet besides the charm and stylistic elegance, what do these images affect in our perception that is different from the filmic actions and dialogues of living, sentient beings? How can a piece of metal be endowed with a gesture that moves us emotionally? In what kind of world can a screw “live”? Or for that matter, what entails the experiential difference between a screw animated on-screen and one that we twirl in our fingers? The forays of Stephen and Timothy Quay (hereafter the Quays or Quay Brothers) into animation filmmaking have resulted in one of the most complex and rare oeuvres in cinema. Their films do not fall in the category of industrialized commercial production and they are fiercely idiosyncratic. They are exemplary visual excavations, an alchemical reworking of occluded but recognizable elements from other films and artworks, identified by a highly original style and poetic dialectical form. Like many independent animation films, the Quay Brothers’ films are not for children: they are adult oriented, complex, xiii int r o d u c ti o n and experimental, and the experience of watching one of their works differs significantly from what is usually understood by the term “puppet animation film.” At first glance, their inspirations are...