This week I’ve been exploring what writers can learn from cinema. On Sunday, in You, the Film Crew, I noted how each of us has the possibility — within our writing — of doing every job that’s needed for the scripting, casting, filming, editing and everything else of a movie.
The Quay Brothers (I think of them as the QQuays), just the two of them, are the great example of exactly this.
Granted, they don’t write their own music, and they usually collaborate with numerous other craftspeople, but because they do stop-motion animations, they perform a higher percentage of the work than almost any other writer/director team.
As well as creating what stands (or doesn’t) for a story in their work, they also make sets and props, sew costumes, and control every gesture of their actors.
Because their actors are puppets.
Last night, I went to a QQ&A at the BFI Southbank with the QQuays.
The event was interesting in parts but frustrating overall. The brothers weren’t asked about their new full-length film, nineteen years in the making, Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass.
I’m not sure what they’d have said that would do more to convey it than the trailer.
It’s very clear that the Brothers are mostly interested in what can be expressed after words have collapsed. They work with light, gesture, dance, clatter, motionlessness, dark. Their favourite writers, to read and adapt, are Franz Kafka, Robert Walser, Felisberto Hernández, and Bruno Schulz — source of Sanatorium. All writers whose stories are perpetually in the process of collapse.
Their new film will be shown as part of the BFI London Film Festival.
Years ago, I was commissioned to review a book about the QQuays.
I had far more to say than the 800 words The New Statesman would allow.
Here’s a little of it.
What is the difference between European dust and American dust?
That’s the question I’d like to get to, once I’ve let you know that the Quay Brothers are — for my money — the most important and subtle filmmakers around.
And you’re aware that identical twins Stephen and Timothy (born June the 17th, 1947 in Norristown, Pennsylvania) have made two full-length live-action features — Institute Benjamenta, a masterpiece, and The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, a non-masterpiece — as well as a series of magical short animations running from Nocturna Artificialia (1979) to Maska (2010).
‘Magical’ isn’t a word I use in any way loosely. But I believe that, in private, the Quays are hoping to achieve something supernatural. Although Suzanne Buchan, in The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom, is prepared to analyze the relationship of stop-motion animation to vitalism, she stops well short of suggesting that anything inexplicable is taking place.
The Quays themselves are prepared to admit this much —
what we want to achieve within our films is an “objective” alternate universe, not a dream or a nightmare but an autonamous and self-sufficient world, with its particular laws and lucidity.
But it is in this passionate attack on ‘ghetto-ized, anodyne cliché-ridden dosage of puppet animation for children’s television’ that they really let slip. It is, they say, ‘an absolute swamp of banality, where all the characters are inevitably docile bogus flunkies wrapped around well-known actor’s voices’.
Characters the opposite of this would be obstinate true masters surrounded by obscure voices of their own selves.
Which isn’t a bad description of the Quay’s animations. Suzanne Buchan has several goes at this. She describes Street of Crocodiles — based on the writings of Bruno Schulz – as ‘this exquisite composition of poetic detritus’. Elsewhere she writes, ‘In many of the Quays’ films, fragile objects and aimless figures carry out pointless tasks… We are puzzled by their repetitive purposefulness: it is a purpose without a point.’ A beautiful summation.
These states of ‘purpose without point’ are partly derived from those which characterize the work of three Mitteleuropean writers — Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, Robert Walser. A chapter of Into a Metaphysical Playroom is devoted to exploring how the Quays have internalized the particular stymied metaphysics of each of them.
‘We have seen,’ Buchan writes, ‘that since the Quays left Philadelphia in 1969, a European aesthetic beckoned them into a locus of literary and poetic fragments, wisps of music, the play of light, and morbid textures.’
And also dust, perhaps the most morbid texture of all, being a melange of different deadnesses.
The films of the Quays are full of dust. It seems to cover every surface. How they create it is one of their professional secrets. How they were able to shoot with a Bolex camera, frame by frame, day after day, in such a hostile-to-celluloid environment is miraculous. In Suzanne Buchan’s reading, their dustiness is part of their ‘European aesthetic’. Yet this, I think, is to go too much with the obvious grain of the films. Many of Buchan’s best insights come as asides, and a few of them contradict the main thrust of her argument. ‘It is hard,’ she writes, ‘to imagine that a gust of wind ever disturbed the accrued, sedimentary dust that glows softly in the bright light that infiltrates these spaces.’ And elsewhere she describes ‘cultivated dust… nurtured patinas.’
This isn’t a European aesthetic so much as an American fantasy of what a European aesthetic might be. In other words, this isn’t European dust so much as an American take on European dust — practically a homage to all our accumulated neglects; a cover version.
The Quays are often seen as being completed divorced from contemporary reality — creators of apolitical dreamworlds. Yet, in the peripheral details, it is clear that they are very concerned with their own reverse emigration to Europe. The full title of one of their earlier films is Little Songs of the Chief Officer of Hunar Louse, or This Unnameable Little Broom. As the notes to their DVD ‘The Short Films 1979-2003’ explain, ‘Hunar Louse — a satirical inversion of Lunar House, the Croydon-based headquarters of the Home Office’s Immigration and Nationality Directorate.’
And in one of the peripheral details of Bruno Schulz’s story, ‘Street of Crocodiles’, we find something very strange. The very zone that the Quays were attracted to, and which they brought to life, is described thus —
While in the old city a nightly semi-clandestine trade prevailed, marked by ceremonious solemnity, in the new district [i.e., the Street of Crocodiles] modern, sober forms of commercial endeavour had flourished at once. The pseudo-Americanism, grafted on the old, crumbling core of the city, shot up here in a rich but empty and colourless vegetation of pretentious vulgarity.
Few people would come away from watching Street of Crocodiles thinking they had seen a visualization of ‘pseudo-Americanism’.
The ‘old, crumbling core of the city’ would be the phrase they’d most likely choose to describe the mise-en-scène. And yet, the whole animated action takes place in one of the glassy Arcades that Walter Benjamin saw as epitomizing the nineteenth century. It may be dilapidated, but it is hardly old by European standards. The time it exists in has been accelerated, forged; the dust has been gathered and sprinkled rather than neglected into existence.
The Quays, I am sure, are more than aware of this. In interview, they have referred to Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles as ‘a false zone, a forged zone.’ And what makes the dust of their aesthetic so fascinating, to me at least, is that it is self-consciously forged dust — curated, idealized, pseudo-European.
Perhaps it is as a sly acknowledgement of this that a barcode is included, easily missable, in the background of one of the shots in Street of Crocodiles. This is arcade dust in the age of the queue for Tesco’s self-service checkout.
To complicate things even further, in an interview about their research visits to Poland, the Quays describe the town of Wrokław as ‘like Pittsburg, full of dust.’
It’s questions like this that, to my mind, make the Quays such fascinating filmmakers.
Most of the time, we’re not watching what we think we’re watching; most of the time we spend watching their films is a completely different kind of time to most of the rest of our time.
Suzanne Buchan, The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom, University of Minnesota Press, pbk 978-0816646593, £18.50
I have an old DVD of all the Quay Brother's films. Love Street of Crocodiles. And Bruno Schultz is a favourite of mine n'all. Recently read his work again in a new translation. Looking forward to Quay Brother's new film.
Talking of dust, I have a theory that the reason (if there is such a thing!) everyone is mad, is the dust in our walls. Every house full of mould and the spoors in the dust, in the walls, and floors. We breathe our madness. What are fungi known for? Ah yes, of course, mood change and hallucination. Not just ghosts, but the rage of different realities clashing. And we call it perception. We breathe the dust of our madness. Some of us, the Christs, we are afflicted with ecstatic visions. The rest of you hate each other with violence for different experience of a reality that don't exist. Bless. Bless the dust.