Stille Nacht IV1993

The first film of the STILLE NACHT series (initially commissioned as an "MTV Art Break") is a gorgeous black and white reverie about iron filings.

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, something like a music video made by Max Ernst.

The third film of the STILLE NACHT series is an excursion into the dark, dream-like forests of the Quays' imagination (which features imagery later used in the feature INSTITUTE BENJAMENTA).

A museum keeper spits into the eyepiece of an ancient peep-show and sets the musty machine in motion, plunging the viewer into a nightmarish netherworld of bizarre puppet rituals among the dirt and grime.

THE COMB opens in the shadowy bedroom of a sleeping beauty and seems to enter her mind and burrow into her dreams.

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.