About

The Brothers Quay’s work is “an uncanny form of mixed live-action and animation film, amalgamating psychology, [and] surrealism…a place of dusty nightmares, folkloric paraphernalia and crumbling institutes filled with the dispossessed” British Film Institute.

Hailing from Philadelphia, but working from the UK, identical twin brothers Timothy and Stephen Quay are heavily influenced by Eastern European avant-garde artists and writers, among them Czech animator Jan Švankmajer. The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer is a fitting introduction to the Quay’s uncanny world of everyday objects transformed into animated oddities.

Street of Crocodiles is based on a story by Polish artist Bruno Schulz. In the Quay’s version, a marionette cuts his own strings and moves through darkly weird, gritty settings. Director and Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam named it one of the ten best animated films of all time, and director Christopher Nolan included it in his 2015 anthology-documentary The Quay Brothers in 35mm.

Marrying a disconcerting soundscape to its unsettling and intricate visuals, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies is inspired by the work of painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard. As with other Quay films, Rehearsals transports us “eyeball and eardrum through fantastically handcrafted architecturally impossible visions of lost modernity” Artforum.

The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer 1984

14 minutes | Ages 15+ | Contains unsettling imagery

Street of Crocodiles 1986

20 minutes | Ages 15+ | Contains unsettling imagery

Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies 1987

14 minutes | Ages 15+ | Contains unsettling imagery