The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom

2. Palimpsests, Fragments, Vitalist Affinities

Palimpsests, Fragments, V Palimpsests, Fragments, V N N N s, Vitalist Affinities s, Vitalist Affinities ow that we are equipped with a sense of the Quays’ creative origins and their trajectory from the United States to London, from illustration to the moving image, this chapter will unfold some of the literary, thematic, and aesthetic origins that the later work commencing with Street of Crocodiles engages with: literature being a main instigator of the “twist point” that incited a significant shift in their aesthetics. What is striking about the Quays’ films is the combination of references they choose, ranging from painting, early optical experiments, puppet theater, literature, surrealism, expressionism, and Baroque architecture to musical structures, Polish poster design, dance, and illustration. These references are primary motifs in many of the films, and often the sense of narrative develops out of how these isolated references are strung together. Not a compendium of their varied and wide-ranging interests in the arts, the aim here is more to illuminate some of what I regard as foundational literary influences that emerge in their films. This chapter explores specific literary techniques that transmute into many of their films and that are particularly suited to being interpreted via puppet animation, literary texts that have undercurrent metaphysical agendas. As early as 1984 they were aware of the difficulty these could pose to uninitiated viewers: 2. To say the poetic image is independent of causality is to make a rather serious statement. But the causes cited by psychologists and psychoanalysts can never really explain the wholly unexpected nature of the new image, any more than they can explain the attraction it holds for a mind that is foreign to the process of its creation. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 40 palimpsests , f r a g ments , vitalist affinities “Sometimes we are shocked by how few references people have to the literature and music that have driven us for fifteen years. It makes us feel elitist by default.”1 The Quays have accumulated a profound and yet intimate literary knowledge. In each of the films this knowledge is distilled into a different, sometimes novel style, more often an addition to the partial recombination of previous styles that each film embodies. The Quays comment on their approach to written texts: You read poetry in a very privileged moment, and you know you have to apply yourself, that intellectually you are in for a challenge, and that is the difference between people who would read a popular novel and those who would read poetry or Joyce or would tackle a South American writer.2 Similarities between each film and its predecessors, when considered together as an opus, suggest a continuum of development distinct from the earlier films. At the end of The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer, the little boy’s hole on the top of his skull is filled with a pert sheaf of pages, a petite version of the larger one of the master, who places it there. The sheaf is a metonymic trope for what the boy has learned: knowledge is literally sprouting from his head. This is an apt analogy for the pages, passages, and short stories that the Quays have collected over the years, an omnium gatherum of the wisps and fragments resting on pages in dusty volumes and notebooks that line their studio walls. This scene may be a tribute to the Quays’ occupation with and indebtedness to printed matter of all varieties—their studio walls, glass cabinets, shelves, and nooks are loaded with volumes of prose, poetry, history, pre- and post-Enlightenment scientific manuFigure 7. The Quay Brothers in their London studio, 1995. Copyright and courtesy of the Quay Brothers. 41 palimpsests , f r a g ments , vitalist affinities als, thick encyclopedias, antiquarian finds of French, German, and Latin American authors, oversized tomes on photography, painting, illustration, graphic design, cinema, and architecture (see Figure 7). Some of the humbler paperbacks have received new garments; the old covers have been replaced by new ones embellished in stark black, flowing ink in ornate Quay calligraphy. Leafing through the books, one finds richly illustrated pages of sexual pathology (Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1903 Psychopathia Sexualis) and favorite artists and conceptual works (Bruno Schulz’s drawings, The Bachelor Machine/Le Macchine Celibi, Harald Szeeman, 1975) that seep into their films, and early optical studies and cabbalistic science provide a clue to the themes of vision...