Life is a dream

The Quay Brothers at the Brattle

by Gary Susman

"BROTHERS QUAY RETROSPECTIVE," At the Brattle Theatre, July 24 and 25.

For all our current digital prowess, film is still a medium whose works are created and displayed in much the same fashion that they were a century ago, with filmmakers drawing on traditions of stagecraft that are older still. The moviehouse is a shadow box, a puppet theater, a self-contained flickering world of wondrous and strange dancing objects illuminated by a pinprick of light.

The work of the Brothers Quay, with its stop-motion animated figurines and its Old World atmosphere, looks like the lost art of a forgotten age, yet it remains more in the avant-garde than most of what falls under the rubric of animation these days. Forget Mulan and Small Soldiers, forget South Park and The Simpsons. The most bizarre and fascinating animation available this weekend is the Brothers Quay retrospective at the Brattle.

Timothy and Stephen Quay, 50-year-old American-born identical twins, have been creating their exquisite miniatures in their London studio for two decades. Although their animated shorts, with their surrealist disregard for narrative, have kept their exposure largely limited to arthouses and museums, they've had some impact on popular culture: they were the inspiration for the twin zoologists in Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts, and their style has been aped in music videos. They've made some music videos of their own, which are included in the Brattle program, along with some of their most celebrated short films and their first feature-length work, Institute Benjamenta.

The Quays' sensibility is largely formed by Eastern European artists and writers. Their stop-motion animation of both custom-made puppets and everyday objects follows in the tradition of the great Czech animator Jan Svankmajer (Faust, Alice), to whom they pay tribute in "The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer," a series of instructive vignettes inspired by their mentor's work. Other Quay inspirations include such proto-Surrealist authors as the early-20th-century Swiss writer Robert Walser (Benjamenta is based on his Jacob von Gunten) and Polish novelist Bruno Schulz ("Street of Crocodiles"), who was killed in the Holocaust. The brothers have also made animated documentary shorts about the composers Igor Stravinsky and Leos Janácek.

They typically commission Lech Jankowski, who has scored most of their shorts, to compose the music first, with the resulting animation following the rhythm and tone of his modernist chamber pieces. Accordingly, the Quays' films have a feel often described as Kafkaesque. Although the shorts are full of furtive, skittering life, there is a sense of genteel, lethargic enervation; the sets and characters, for all their meticulous detail, have surfaces that appear weathered and worn by age and neglect. The puppets have long, spidery fingers and flutter like insects. There is often a protagonist whose paranoia and sense of being trapped by circumstance are made literal by a claustrophobic set and the darting eye of the camera. Plot is a distant consideration by comparison with the dream logic of the images, which defy easy interpretation but are pregnant with portent: armless hands grabbing a ladder that sprouts branches and leaves in "The Comb," tines of a fork that wriggle like a cat's whiskers in "Long Way Down (Look What the Cat Drug In)," screws that loosen themselves from the floorboards and dance in "Crocodiles."

"Crocodiles" is the masterpiece of the dream gems the Quays have originated. Their work for others, which is generally less inspired but still striking, includes music videos for the likes of English mopesters His Name Is Alive ("Are We Still Married?" and "Can't Go Wrong Without You") and acoustic troubadour Michael Penn (Long Way Down), as well as the mini-documentaries, which are represented here by "Anamorphosis," an exploration of the technique of distorting perspective in a painting so that an image reveals itself only from a sidelong glance.

The brothers' most recent work is their live-action feature, Institute Benjamenta. Based on Walser's novella about a school for butlers, it expands the animators' dread and enchantment to human scale. Shot in luminous black and white, it's a ghostly fairy tale that lulls viewers into a hypnotic state. Its subtitle, "This Dream People Call Human Life," would be apt for all the Quays' work.

Program I (July 24 and 25) includes "Street of Crocodiles," "Nocturna Artificialis," "The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer," and "The Epic of Gilgamesh." Program II (July 25) includes "The Comb," "Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies," "Anamorphosis," "Are We Still Married?", "Long Way Down," "Tales from the Vienna Woods," and "Can't Go Wrong Without You." Institute Benjamenta screens July 25. Call the Brattle at 876-6837.