“We use virgin olive oil and lubricate the eye”: The brothers of the quay, in the method behind the mysterious worlds

In the world of quay brothers, all substances are seen and transformed through lenses. In Dormitorium, London’s animator models in Swedenborg House and the current exhibition of film decor, some exhibited products are taking the form of Peepshows. But these are not traditional species, but there are small holes that will be surprised. Instead, there are large lenses on the front: look at them and swollen greenery masses or horns such as octopus tentacles, such as bending, or an unquestioned entity, a potato -like -headed entity looks at you.

Then there are clocks for Quays’ stopping animations for years, including large showcases, holding (1991), Crocodile Street (1986) and long -awaited feature, partly the animation section Live Action, Sanatorium. Looking at these sets and the sensitive -looking puppets prepared in them, it is hard to imagine that they are frozen in the middle. However, in the films, these seemingly fixed structures, sudden light shifts and camera are revived by examining every corner of their fields with the sensitivity of key hole surgery.

Mounting these screens for the purpose of exhibition “becomes another creative action”, Stephen and Timothy Quay told me when I visited them in their studios near Old Street. “Four or five,” they say about Peepshow boxes, “Sometimes he wanted close shots. Sometimes adding a lens is approaching the movement-you move your head slightly and you understand that it is revived in the area.”

The Dormitorium show comes to London as part of the Polish Film Festival Kinoteka. The certain Polish connection here is that the Sanatorium, which is under the symptom of hourglass, is the second film of Quays, inspired by the 20th century writer Bruno Schulz after the Crocodile Street. Schulz, an artist who showed his own stories, was a master of hallucination and turned his hometown Drohobycz in Galicia in Galicia into a feathered private area of ​​his imagination; The legendary status was further forward with the tragic death of a Gestapo officer in 1942.

Quays’ film with live action series shot in a studio in Warsaw – in Venice in the autumn and this week BFI IMAX – usually inspires Schulz’s creative style and especially the title story of the Collection Sanatorium under the hour of the hourglass. Hero Jozef is traveling by train to visit her father in an artaryium – here, even though she’s already dead, the old man is still living in a place ruled by strange time fluids.

While both are inspired by Schulz, there is no direct connection between Quays’ Crocodile Street and Sanatorium – the second is not a sequel. However, they are stylistic and thematic associated: In both, the action is framed by the mysterious imaging machines of archaic design. The Sanatorium involves the auction of an element listed as Maquette for the sect of a dead retina. To quote Quays’s notes, it contains a skillfully hidden puzzle drawer containing the owner’s deceased retina ”.

Retina is one of the most uncomfortable material objects in Quays’ Front, in the close-up coup, in the form of liquefaction and drying, not easily explained by the usual techniques of the animation of stop-motion. In fact, the brothers clarify, a sheep eye sphere from a mysterious object. And pulse? “You should only know how to use a hair dryer. We use virgin olive oil and lubricate the eye.”

The dialogue in the sanatorium is in Poland to capture the tone and texture of Schulz’s world. It is a language in which the Quays themselves do not speak, perhaps explains the other world of the dialogue of the film – as if the words themselves themselves have been found as if they were found in dusty weather, the quality of incentive quality.

Two Raids Live Action Features Institute Benjamenta (1995) and Piano Earthquake Tuneri (2005) used intermittent human figures in Quays animation shorts; They decided to mix the actors and puppets here because “We definitely wanted two parallel universe”. At the beginning, long -term producers were considered to be 75% live action and 25% animation until they suggested to reversed Keith Griffiths rates.

Therefore, a group of best hats is the beginning of the film, which includes chimney scanning and auction. Among the human actors in the sanatorium, Schulz’s one -time fiancé Josefina Szelinska is a brief -looking woman (played by Ballet dancer Zenaida Yanowsky). However, actors not only frame the narrative: their assets are infiltrating the main action. “You frame the world of live action in the décor of puppets, there is a turbidity.”

This human presence also contains a number of erotic rituals issued by a woman played by Wioletta Kopanska and male fans. These sequences are to be sold to Schulz’s paganism book with 20 image cycles using ‘cliché verre’ or glass printing technique: Sadomasoshistic scenes where male groups (some are clearly modeling on Schulz himself) kneeling or crawling around the women’s figures.

Given the brightness of Quays developing singular animation languages ​​for 45 years, it is only more extraordinary to enter this area at the age of 32. “While making early films at 8mm, we worked with actors before making a puppet.”

The turning point came when Keith Griffiths claimed that they made an experimental film. “’We don’t make experimental movies.’ Well, just write something. ‘

“When making most of our drawings, we always felt that we wanted to give depth, sound and music, these elements. We thought that we could try and try something like a laboratory.

“The puppets are only that high. They will not shake anyone’s boat, they will not cost a lot of money. Nobody trusts us with a crew, rookie. So we said ‘Let’s work with puppets’.”

Considering the smallness of the craft approach of the docks, it was not an easy way to follow, but the stable anti-per-flow tenor of the worlds (not to call nightmares) is not an obvious magnet for investment. The completion of the sanatorium took 19 years, most of the time in other projects (shorts, stage and opera design, advertising work).

“There was never money before, so we started in 2005. We made a pilot, we made some live action scenes-and then you connect to doing something else. Sometimes there was a four-year gap; we never gave up and we continued to do this when we had a clean running chance.”

Now, while firing in 4K, the docks protect an analog imagination, a stubborn ruins of the antique spirit in the face of hyper-modernity. Quays worlds and beings living in them are made of other objects and pieces: scissors, feathers, baby heads, detection of flea markets. Then there is a repeating landscape in the Sanatorium: “A little Holy The trains and mountains we found on Ebay are all coats. We got 20 kilos of mushrooms – you can only carved and put them and become a landscape. “

Traditional methods and values ​​are folded – matte, importance, manipulation. “All quiet cinema, Quings, Quays says.

Dormitorium: Quay brothers’ movie decors The exhibition is at Swedenborg House, London until April 4 Kinoteka Poland Film Festival.

Sanatorium under the clock sign, BFI Film Production Fund, screens BFI IMAX with Question -Evap With the managers on March 26.