The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom

5. Negotiating the Labyrinth

Negotiating the Labyrinth Negotiating the Labyrinth T T T here is a range of influences throughout the history of art to which critics and curators refer to bring the Quay Brothers in stylistic proximity with other artists. But in cinema this remains a small group of experimental and auteur filmmakers. Cineastes whom the Quays mention as having had a particular influence on them are Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Robert Bresson, Theodor Dreyer, Georges Franju, Charles Bokanowski, Andrei Tarkovsky, Aleksandr Sokurov, and others. All of these filmmakers are noted for their unusual poetics of lighting, mise-en-scène, and camera. The influences of impressionist cinema and especially surrealism are evident in some of the early films—Nocturna Artificialia, The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer, and Street of Crocodiles—and they qualify as recent works in this tradition. The diagonally striped box the puppet holds in Street of Crocodiles was a small homage, a nod, to Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929), a film that stimulated some incisive thoughts in the Quays early on: [Un chien andalou] is one of the most powerful films we ever saw, and it’s a short film, which proves you didn’t need to do a feature film to astonish. It has a violent lyricism and the poetic images were wild, really attractive. It’s just a layer; it’s as much as you read anyone’s work, it adds to the density of the material, and it’s not important to h 5. 136 N e g o tiatin g the L ab y r inth know, not at all. [The puppet] just has a box around his waist with a screw hanging out. It’s better than a Gucci bag.1 Yet they are not completely at ease with the surrealist attribute, as is clear from a 1996 interview: “Of course we are familiar with surrealism, we know its history and its place, but the term can too often be used in a cavalier way, without acknowledgment of its real meaning. . . . When it’s used cautiously and intelligently it can be a very descriptive term, but we’re weary of its over-use.”2 In their later films the emulation surrealism seems to have initially provoked in the Quays is less mannerist and references are increasingly literary and musical. The Quays explain what interests them aesthetically: Our animation draws heavily on a very sophisticated visual language —a certain quality of lighting and décor, of stylized movement —which has a lot to do with Expressionism. But at the same time one could talk [of Buster] Keaton, or early Swedish or Danish cinema, all of which are crucial for us.3 Their works have also been compared to those of other contemporary filmmakers, including Canadian director Guy Maddin, noted for his use of filters, monochrome film stock, and silent film stylistics. Viewers familiar with the films will recognize the three directors’ own knowledge and implementation of these techniques, and it can also explain the cinephile nature of their engaged audiences. But these similarities rest within the works, evident in their response to Ryan Deussing, who suggested aesthetic similarities between Maddin’s Careful (1992) and Institute Benjamenta. The Quays: “The relation to Careful is purely fortuitous . We had never seen the film when we got started shooting, and [Maddin] had never read [Walser’s] book. Somehow we do share the same iconography.”4 The comparison and the shared iconographies originate in part in Maddin’s fascination with the histories of silent cinema. His use of intertitles, scratching pristine film stock to make it appear old and worn, and his fantastic mise-en-scène and unusual narratives places him in the same continuum of filmmakers as the Quays. Maddin’s characters in Careful, for instance, are distant and stilted, unemotional, much like puppets themselves. The era of filmmaking the Quays mostly align themselves with is telling and reveals much of their own cinephile natures: “The whole history.”5 They are regulars in the art house cinemas and have combed many histories of filmmaking; fine filaments find their way into their films. 137 N e g o tiatin g the L ab y r inth In interviews, the Quays readily cite animation filmmakers who use techniques other than puppet animation as influences on their own works, including Walerian Borowczyk (who had a much stronger impact on the Quays than is usually reported), Jan Lenica, Jerzy...