|
To coincide with the theatrical release of THE PIANO TUNER OF EARTHQUAKES, Zeitgeist Films presents a thirteen-film retrospective of shorts by famed twin animators the Quay Brothers. Two of the world's most original filmmakers, identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay have been making their unique blend of puppetry and stop-motion animation for nearly 30 years and have spawned an enormous cult following.
The Quays display a passion for detail, a breathtaking command of color and texture, and an uncanny use of focus and camera movement that make their films unique and instantly recognizable. Best known for their classic 1986 film STREET OF CROCODILES, which filmmaker Terry Gilliam recently selected as one of the ten best animated films of all time, they are masters of miniaturization and on their tiny sets have created an unforgettable world, suggestive of a landscape of long-repressed childhood dreams. Zeitgeist is proud to present most of these extraordinary films in brand-new theatrical prints (freshly struck by the British Film Institute).
| Catalog Number: MC-661 |
Type: Shorts Compilation |
Genre: Art / Artist, Animation |
| Copyright: 2006 |
Length: 317 Minutes |
Format:
DVD Region: 1 |
| TV System: NTSC |
ISBN: |
UPC/EAN: 795975108638 |
| Label: Zeitgeist Films |
|
Wholesale Purchasing:
Program MC-661 is available for wholesale from Microcinema DVD. Contact info[at]microcinema.com or call at +1-415-447-9750
Exhibition:
Microcinema is not authorized to represent this title for exhibition. Write us for this contact information.
Films In Compilation
Nocturna Artificialia directed by
The Quay Brothers
USA,
Art / Artist,
1979,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:21:00
A dreamer is seduced by the mystery of the city at night. He leaves his room and goes into the street, where a tram-car carries him away. “As with much of their later work, it’s impossible to provide a coherent synopsis of the earliest surviving film by the Quay Brothers, as Nocturna Artificialia defies attempts at verbal encapsulation at every turn. The Quays themselves acknowledged this when they said “as for what is called the scenario, at most we have only a limited musical sense of its trajectory, and we tend to be permanently open to vast uncertainties, mistakes, disorientations, as though lying in wait to trap the slightest fugitive ‘encounter’.”... Shot on 16mm and funded by the British Film Institute's Production Board, Nocturna Artificialia is a remarkably confident piece of work, the Quays surmounting obvious technical and budgetary limitations to create a private universe entirely out of their own recurring obsessions. Their later films may be more assured, but their roots are clearly visible here.” –Michael Brooke
|
 |
The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer directed by
The Quay Brothers
USA,
Art / Artist,
1984,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:14:00
The film is structured as a series of little lessons in perception, taught by a puppet simulacrum of Svankmajer, whose head is an opened book, to a doll whose head the master empties of dross and refills with a similar open book. Each of the nine segments or chapters “refers variously to the importance of objects in Svankmajer’s work, their transformation and bizarre combination through specifically cinematic techniques, the extraordinary power of the camera to ‘make strange’, the influence of Surrealism on Svankmajer’s work, and the subversive and radical role of humor. Taken out of the context of the original Visions television documentary on Svankmajer, for which they served as illustration/commentary, these vignettes might at first sight seem a trifle bewildering. They ideally need to be viewed more
than once before they begin to work effectively as quirky introductions to the Svankmajer universe. Then, however, they emerge as surprisingly charming and delightful excursions into this astonishing (and often deeply disturbing) directors work.” –Julian Petley
|
 |
This Unnameable Little Broom or The Epic of Gilgamesh directed by
The Quay Brothers
USA,
Art / Artist,
1985,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:11:00
This was originally conceived as a pilot for a series, which never materialized due to lack of funding. Alternative title: Little Songs of the Chief Officer of Hunar Louse (Being a Largely Disguised Reduction of the Epic of Gilgamesh), Tableau II, “in which Gilgamesh sends a prostitute to seduce the wild man of the forest, Enkidu. The Gilgamesh figure is a sort of grotesque fascist hydrocephalic child despot on a tricycle, ruthless patrolling his sandbox kingdom. Enkidu, made from a bird skull adorned with
an exotic headdress of feathers and shells, brings to mind Max Ernst’s renowned collage series Une Semaine de Bonté. The wicked child sets a devilish trap for the creature – a gobbet of raw flesh to lure him, and then a mechanical trapdoor in the shape of a vulva…it is strong stuff, a waking nightmare of paranoia and sexual violence. The camerawork is frenetic, yet the effect is precisely that convergence of the dreamlike and the mythic, the bizarre and the inevitable that all their work aspires to.” –J.D. McClatchy
|
 |
Street of Crocodiles
directed by
The Quay Brothers
USA,
Art / Artist,
1986,
B&W/Color,
Magnetic Monaural,
00:21:00
Adapted from a short story by Polish writer Bruno Schulz, the Quays’ first film in 35mm, and their first masterpiece, delves deep into a nightmarish netherworld. A museum keeper spits into the eyepiece of an ancient peep-show and sets the musty machine going. Inside the puppets partake in a series of bizarre rituals among the dust and the grime. “On display in a deserted provincial museum is an old viewing Kinetoscope machine with a map indicating the precise district of the Street of Crocodiles. Lodged deep within this wooden oesophagus lie the internal configurations and mechanisms of the Street of Crocodiles like some quasianatomical exhibit. The anonymous offering of human saliva by an attendant caretaker activates and releases the Schulzian theatre from stasis into permanent flux. Myth stalks the streets of this parasitical zone where the mythological ascension of the everyday is charted by a marginal interloper who threads himself through this one night of the Great Season. No centre can be reached and the futile pursuit concludes in the deepest rear rooms of a slightly dubious tailor’s shop.” –The Quay Brothers
|
 |
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies directed by
The Quay Brothers
USA,
Art / Artist,
1987,
B&W,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:14:00
In the fragile immobility of a room a couple wait, as twilight advances, alternately oblivious to and made anxious by presentiments of some brutal destruction being remorselessly rehearsed outside their door. Loosely inspired by an etching by Fragonard.
|
 |
The Comb (From the Museums of Sleep) directed by
The Quay Brothers
USA,
Art / Artist,
1990,
B&W/Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:18:00
The Comb opens in the shadowy bedroom of a sleeping beauty and seems to enter her mind and burrow into her dreams. Based on a fragment of text by the Austrian writer Robert Walser, The Comb is
an exploration of the subconscious visualized as a labyrinthine playhouse haunted by a doll-like explorer. A mesmerizing and resonant blend of live action and animation, The Comb is set to a sensuous score of violins, guitars and attic room cries and whispers, and bathed in a gorgeous golden glow.
|
 |
De Artificiali Perspectiva or Anamorphosis directed by
The Quay Brothers
USA,
Art / Artist,
1991,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:15:00
The Quays’ interest in esoteric illusions finds its perfect realization in this fascinating animated lecture on the art of anamorphosis. This artistic technique, often used in the 16th- and 17th centuries,
utilizes a method of visual distortion with which paintings, when viewed from different angles, mischievously revealed hidden symbols.
|
 |
Stille Nacht I - Dramolet directed by
The Quay Brothers
USA,
Art / Artist,
1988,
B&W,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:01:00
A dazzling fugue of iron filings that was made as an Art Break for MTV.
|
 |
Stille Nacht II - Are We Still Married? directed by
The Quay Brothers
USA,
Art / Artist,
1992,
B&W,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:03:30
A three-minute animated choreography with an ethereal pop soundtrack by the remarkable band called “His Name Is Alive”. With a typically eccentric cast of a ragged doll, a white rabbit and a manic ping-pong ball, the Quays construct a hypnotic, beguiling, and vaguely menacing ballet— something like a music video made by Max Ernst. In beautifully textured black & white, Are We Still Married? is a small work, but it is as accomplished and unforgettable as their very best.
|
 |
Stille Nacht III - Tales From Vienna Woods directed by
The Quay Brothers
USA,
Art / Artist,
1993,
B&W,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:03:30
The third in the Stille Nacht cycle, Tales From Vienna Woods was also made with the intention of exploring imagery that they planned to develop further in their first feature Institute Benjamenta, which was then in limbo awaiting funds. In fact, so close were the short and the feature in terms of overall tone (despite the one being animated and the other liveaction) that the former was subsequently recycled as the latter’s theatrical trailer, in a slightly but not significantly modified form. –excerpted from screenonline.org.uk
|
 |
Stille Nacht IV - Can't Go Wrong Without You directed by
The Quay Brothers
USA,
Art / Artist,
1994,
B&W,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:03:30
Following their collaboration the previous year with Are We Still
Married?, the Quays reunited with His Name Is Alive to create the video for their 1993 single “Can’t Go Wrong Without You.” Very consciously a sequel to the earlier video, this recapitulates many of its central Lewis Carrollian motifs: the girl with constantly expanding and contracting height (an effect enhanced here by standing her on scales, her weight fluctuating in time with her changing size), the paddle decorated with the image of a heart and a pair of eyes, the rabit, and recurring impressions of keys, locks and dark, mysterious secrets. –excerpted from screenonline.org.uk
|
 |
In Absentia directed by
The Quay Brothers
USA,
Art / Artist,
2000,
B&W/Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:20:00
The first new film by the Quay Brothers in the five years since Institute Benjamenta, In Absentia is a collaboration with the celebrated avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who composed and conducted original music for the film. Shot in black and white and color and projected in CinemaScope, In Absentia combines live action and animation with dazzling use of light to convey the mindscape of a woman alone in a room repeatedly writing a letter with broken off pieces of pencil lead.
The film is dedicated to “E.H. who lived and wrote to her husband from an asylum.” In Absentia, which premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, was produced by Keith Griffiths at Koninck for the BBC and Pipeline Films’ series of short music films “Sound on Film International.”
“The night’s one unqualified success was In Absentia, from the Brothers Quay and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Ostensibly, the visuals were typical Quay: a mix of animation, live action and shadowshow sketching out a vestigial narrative about a woman obsessively writing letters in an asylum. But the violence of the music — with harsh, intense swathes of synthesizer and screeching organ — brought out extreme new tonalities in the Quays’ imagery, especially in the swells and blasts of white light, in retina-scorching digital projection. This dazzling piece of work, I suspect, was the only one of these collaborations that will have a life of its own outside the programme.”
– Jonathan Romney, The Guardian
|
 |
The Phantom Museum directed by
The Quay Brothers
USA,
Art / Artist,
2003,
B&W/Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:12:00
Random forays into one of the world’s most extraordinary museum collections: Sir Henry Wellcome’s unique trove of medical curiosities. With their customary dexterity and affinity for the arcane, the Quay Brothers imaginatively document this unique assemblage and bring it hauntingly to life.
|
 |
There currently are no reviews available
|
Avoid Eye Contact Volume I
MC-538, 2003
|
In September 2003, eleven animators met in a large Chelsea loft. Eleven went in, Avoid Eye Contact came out. Welcome to Avoid Eye Contact, a tour of the best Independent Animation from New York City.
The films on this volume span the last few... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Avoid Eye Contact Volume II
MC-519, 2005
|
New York City is a place of constant change, invention and chaos; Avoid Eye Contact sums up these urban qualities in animated terms.
Avoid Eye Contact Volume 2 continues to explore the thriving contemporary independent scene going on in New... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Bill's Dirty Shorts
MC-555, 2006
|
A collection of Bill Plympton's newest naughty shorts. This DVD contains 80 minutes of material from the years 1997 to 2002.
Includes short films:
• “Sex and Violence”
• “The Exciting Life of a Tree”
• “More Sex and... more >
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Inhaling the Spore
MC-559, 2004
|
Behind a storefront in Los Angeles is one of the most unusual cultural institutions in America - The Museum of Jurassic Technology. It's a modern-day “cabinet of curiosities,” filled with juxtapositions of the genuine, the strange, and the... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Monster Road - Collector's Edition
MC-856, 2005
|
Monster Road is a feature length documentary exploring the wildly fantastic worlds of legendary animator Bruce Bickford. Tracing the origins of Bickford's iconoclastic worldview, the film journeys back to Bickford's childhood in a competitive... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, The
MC-673, 2005
|
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes is the breathtakingly beautiful and long-awaited second feature film from the Quay Brothers. On the eve of her wedding, the beautiful opera singer Malvina is mysteriously "killed" and abducted by the malevolent Dr.... more >
|
|
|
|
No screenings found
|
EU STORE
Email this page to a friend
