Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies
And the award for best use of typography in a short film goes to...
Timothy Quay
Filmography
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The Phantom Museum
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 arcane, Stephen and Timothy Quay imaginatively document this unique assemblage and bring it...Watch Movie
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In Absentia
IN ABSENTIA is a remarkable collaboration between filmmakers Stephen and Timothy Quay and the celebrated avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (who composed and conducted the original music for the film). Shot in black and white (and, occasionally, color) in Cinemascope, IN ABSENTIA combines...Watch Movie
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Anamorphosis
Stephen and Timothy Quay's interest in esoteric illusions finds its perfect realization in this fascinating animated lecture on the concept of ANAMORPHOSIS. This artistic technique, often used in the 16th and 17th centuries, utilizes a method of visual distortion with which paintings, when viewed...Watch Movie
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Stille Nacht II
A three minute animated choreography with an ethereal pop soundtrack by the remarkable band His Name Is Alive. With a typically eccentric cast of a ragged doll, a white rabbit and a manic ping-pong ball, Stephen and Timothy Quay construct a hypnotic, beguiling and vaguely menacing ballet,...Watch Movie
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The Comb
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...Watch Movie
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Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies
In the fragile immobility of a room, a couple waits 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 Jean-Honoré Fragonard.Watch Movie
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Street of Crocodiles
Stephen and Timothy Quay's masterpiece, STREET OF CROCODILES is adapted from the book by Polish writer Bruno Schulz and was their first film shot on 35mm. A museum keeper spits into the eyepiece of an ancient peep-show and sets the musty machine in motion, plunging the viewer...Watch Movie
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This Unnameable Little Broom
This piece 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) "in which Gilgamesh sends a...Watch Movie
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The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer
This early film by renowned animators Stephen and Timothy Quay is structured as a series of little lessons in perception, taught by a puppet simulacrum of Jan Svankmajer (whose head is an opened book) to a doll (whose head the master empties of dross and refills with a similar...Watch Movie
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Nocturna Artificialia
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...Watch Movie
Genres
- Adaptation / Artistic
- Adaptation / Literary / Poetry
- Adaptation / Literary / Prose
- Animated / Stop-Motion/Puppetry
- Avant-garde
- Avant-garde / Surrealistic
- Documentary / Art / Visual Arts / Motion Pictures
- Documentary / Art / Visual Arts / Painting
- Documentary / Biography
- Documentary / History
- Documentary / Science
- Drama / Portmanteau
- Fantasy / Allegory
- Fantasy / Dream
- Fantasy / Fable
- Fantasy / Folk Tale
- Horror / Expressionist
- International / European / United Kingdom / British
- Music / Musical
- Short / Documentary
- Short / Narrative
- Suspense / Psychological
Recent Reviews
In Absentia
Still my favorite Quay/squared. Sticks with you. Better each time thru. A shred of leather tie from another Q2 film makes an appearance.
Street of Crocodiles
A remarkable depiction of Futility and despair. The cardboard figures, and mechanical movement obviously underscore existence absent emotion, and feelings. The thread that runs through this is the wire that...
In Absentia
Unlike other Quay pieces, this one didn't age well. I feel like I been here before. It's basically the film from The Ring. And I know, The Ring came out...
Stille Nacht I
Always fun to watch your food moving about in your bowl...