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Review: Suzanne Buchan (2011) The Quay Brothers: Into a
Metaphysical Playroom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Micki Nyman1
Those familiar with the work of Stephen and Timothy Quay should enjoy
this critical approach to their work. Suzanne Buchan’s treatment of these
postmodern artists, who specialise in pairing the expected with the
unexpected and tradition with innovation, does not disappoint. Beginning
with their schooling at the Art Institute in Philadelphia, Buchan traces
various influences on the Quays’ artistic hybridity: the Marionette Theatre
in Brussels, the Eastern European Surrealist author Bruno Schulz, and
theatre/dance stage design. Buchan does not merely show the filmmakers’
resolve in creating a contemporary surrealistic moment through interfacing
various generic and cultural hybrids; she keenly glimpses the notion that
their metaphysical vision conceives of being (essence) in terms of becoming
(difference), rather than as an either/or duality. Buchan calls the play of
these dual metaphysical strands vitalism. Defined as the giving of life to
inanimate objects, vitalism embodies the notion that reality can transcend
mere desire to embrace ‘an apprehensive pleasure at seeing the impossible’
(125). In their vitalist project, the Quays render a metaphysics that includes
a full complement of experimental strategies that, as Buchan notes, ‘are
obliged in part to affinities that bear with early cinema: gesture instead of
dialogue, juxtaposition and image composition, rather than narrative
continuity’ (176). To counter the unsettling presence of space/time
disruptors that frustrate audience expectation, a metaphoric, four-tiered
labyrinth imbues the Quay metaphysic, guiding viewers to imagine new
domains of thought and affect.
Drawing out the complexity of the Quays’ aesthetic program is part
and parcel to Buchan’s text. The complexity of their work, she begins, can
be explained by its hybridity of influence with respect to genre,
philosophical underpinning, and method. Such interplay of form and content
might be confusing to a reader seeking ready access to the complexity of
Quay filmmaking, yet Buchan refuses to mislead: ‘to watch any film from
the Quay Brothers is to enter a complicity of furtive glances, choreographed
shadows, and a mélange of motifs and tropes’ (1). Early on, one is led to
surmise that when one experiences the cinematic art of the Quays, one
discovers a ‘synesthetic, haptic world, a palimpsest of evocative sound and
images that meld music, literature, dance, architecture, graphic design, the
1
Fayetteville State University, North Carolina: [email protected]
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sacred and the occult, pathology, and eroticism’ (2). Buchan then sets out to
capture their inscrutable world by applying the concept of the ‘metaphysical
playroom’ to unravel yet unify the various philosophies that inform the
Quays’ films (2). By its very nature, metaphysics is a realm of philosophy
that seeks to explain human nature or essence through an understanding of
the unseen, a manifestation of spirit. Toward such an understanding, Buchan
relies on Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1911), Sigmund Freud’s
theory of the unconscious, and Arthur Schopenhauer’s World as Will and
Representation (1819) to explain the context of the word metaphysical with
respect to the Quays’ work. Re-interpreting metaphysics in terms of
vitalism, Buchan initially relies on Schopenhauer’s ‘non-rational universal
will as the ultimate reality, “the thing-as-such”… and the driving force
behind all manifestations of organic life as well as inorganic nature’ as the
basis for her claim (34). The philosophy of vitalism, Buchan stresses,
inheres in a Bergsonian interpretation of matter, simultaneously merged as
thing and representation, a conception of matter that defies the
human/object polarity and instead suggests spiritual resonance or essence in
all manifestations of reality, in beings and in things. As such, all objects are
relegated to a randomness of universal will, a presence that distinguishes
difference, a becoming presence that sustains internal and external
movement. Relegated to visual impressions harmonised by sound and
music, cinematic images come to life vis-à-vis technological methods that
bring forth this vitalism, the awakening spirit of matter, whether organic or
inorganic. Buchan believes that the Quays’ films delve into the hidden life
of objects, whether these are puppets, props, or paraphernalia, animated or
not. To this end, the Quays render a sustaining force of vitalism in a
program of realism that both celebrates quotidian events and things and
ignites the viewer’s imagination (32-34).
Buchan traces the Quays’ source of their early masterpiece, Street of
Crocodiles (UK, 1986), to their early start as illustrators, a fact that includes
an immersion into animation initiated at the Philadelphia College of Art
(1965-1969), but solidified in transatlantic study at the London Royal
College of Art (1970-1972), an intense study of Great Britain and the
Eastern European stage, film, and authors (1973-1978), and which
culminated in collaboration with film producer Keith Griffith of the British
Film Institute (1978). Griffith, as Buchan notes, ‘has produced or
coproduced almost all of the Quays’ films except most commercials and
Stille Nacht shorts’ (11). A champion of art house cinema, Griffith remains
‘interested in certain kinds of filmmaking and in particular with animation,
which can veer from the visceral excitement of the abstract, to a sort of
surrealistic stream of images... in optical metamorphosis, a body of work...
that focuses on abstraction, metamorphosis and the meaning that the
relationship of these images can stimulate’ (13). The Quays’ project of
isolating camera shots of a microcosmic film set and moving the puppets
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through stopping and starting the camera’s shooting, one moment at a time,
represents a novel form of animation, one that extends the vitalist project of
the Quays through its many influences.
‘There is a range of influences throughout the history of art,’ says
Buchan, ‘to which critics and curators refer to bring the Quay Brothers in
stylistic proximity with other artists’ (135). She goes on to suggest that this
vast mix of artistry is merely one aspect of the metaphoric labyrinth that
drives her interpretive focus of the Quays. Buchan relies on the Quays’ own
words to begin her discussion of their art:
Our animation draws heavily on a very sophisticated visual language
- a certain quality of lighting and décor, of stylised movement which has a lot to do with Expressionism. But at the same time
one could talk [of Buster] Keaton, or early Swedish or Danish
cinema, all of which are crucial for us. (136)
The sobriety of their product, they admit, is due to their familiarity with
Russian and Polish animation styles from the turn of the twentieth century
(137). Moreover, the Quays insist that their Surrealist style, which
seemingly hampers rather than conveys narrative continuity, has developed
from their love of art house cinema, and their engagement both with the
filtering technique of Canadian director Guy Maddin and his fascination for
silent film iconography, and with other animation filmmakers including
Walerian Borowczyk, Jan Lenica, Jerzy Kucia and Alexandre Alexeїeff.
Buchan relates a second aspect of the symbolic labyrinth that leads
to the mixed tension of the Quays’ cinematic shorts. By creating a distinct
cinematic space, Buchan notes that they ‘deliberately construct a spatial
logic of “direct connections between discontinuous space” where familiar
forms are placed in a narrative field with unfamiliar ones’ (137). It is in this
field of discontinuous space that the viewer negotiates a labyrinth—a
composition of disconnected spaces comprised of many distractive images,
or creations of metaphoric collage, as it were—where all cinematic images
are infused by chiaroscuro lighting, rapid editing, and single frame
‘autopsy-like’ analogue (137, 138). Buchan defines ‘autopsy’ as ‘innards—
the materials and structure and their organisation’ of scenes, that the Quays
amplify for the viewer. The shot-by-shot scenes in which the innards have
been displayed contrast pointedly with the typical cultural narrative and
storyline that have been omitted. Omitting familiarity in the cinematic
experience renders an ‘elusive’ creative impulse that simultaneously
disrupts the viewing experience while pulling the spectator into its depth
(137, 138). Despite the Quays’ reliance on sequencing that paradoxically
provides orientation yet ambiguity for the viewer, Buchan is convinced that
the experimental focus of the Quays renders a clear relationship of images
to human experience, ‘the driving force behind all manifestations of organic
life as well as inorganic nature’ (34).
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The narrative and aesthetic design of Street of Crocodiles, the
Quays’ most famous film, is analysed throughout the book and relates to the
third labyrinthine aspect of their work, that of background:
we can be constantly aware of the animator’s creation of the world
we see… A number of shots that use unmotivated montage seem to
have neither a subjective nor an objective point of view… Most of
the shots of the metaphysical machines are deliberately unresolved
or are unmotivated by conventional point-of-view structures, and I
propose this unmotivated third point of view is that of the vitalist,
metaphysical machines. (144-145)
An instance of the metaphysical machine is represented in the flesh-filled
pocket watch in Street of Crocodiles. Buchan describes how the sequence is
preceded by a shot of a monkey clanging a pair of cymbals; the watch
appears only once to set the stage of the monkey’s construction of time and
point of view. Most of the shots and scenes where the monkey appears are
framed by the motifs of looking and of negotiating various thresholds of
architecture—openings, holes, windows, passages, or drawers—that
promise a coalescence of interior and exterior renderings of space,
reminiscent of Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1958). The protagonist
of Street of Crocodiles, a puppet,
enters a realm pervaded with layers of velvety dust. Interspersed
with vignettes of metaphorical machines, hermetic spaces, and a
subplot involving a child with a hand mirror reflecting a beam of
light to vivify objects, the puppet wanders through the decrepit
alleys, surreptitiously appearing out of shops, concealing objects in a
diagonally striped box, and gazing voyeuristically into peepholes
and endless deep spaces. (35)
The puppet encounters internal organs, such as a liver, right alongside
external objects, such as a map of Poland, in his work space. Still, in this
loose adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles (1934), Buchan
notes that it is the edginess of the mise-en-scène that guides the viewer’s
perspective towards what defies simple explanation, and towards the
metaphysical. Pushing into uncharted terrain, the Quays engage with
surrealism aesthetically to create cinematic liminality, and the interface/play
between interior and exterior spaces and interior and exterior realities.
In Street of Crocodiles, the Quays furthermore use puppets,
chiaroscuro, and uncanny soundscapes to explore ‘interior psychic regions
as we find them projected onto an outer landscape,’ representing the
madness that exists in Schulz’s own text, where he writes of his father’s
‘delirious withdrawal into madness… that extends [from] the walls of his
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family home… [to] the cosmos’ (63). The Quays’ short masterpiece seeks to
show Schulz’s recuperation of the mythical to represent the loss and
subsequent recuperation of innocence, and, more importantly, the power of
dream to counter human alienation (65).
In chapter six, Buchan further implicates the scope of Quay
liminality to include ‘the liaison of music with objects and textures… a
composition of carefully planned and executed movements, rhythms,
proximities… [so that] the images gain a lyricism that is not only inspired
by the music, they are complicit with it’ (167). Rather than commission a
composer to create the necessary musical/textual narrative solidifications in
the manner of most filmmakers, the Quays decided to apply composer Lech
Jankowski’s theatre music to the film because he too was an admirer of
Schulz (170). Buchan points out that this mode-defining process has
become instrumental in how the Quays apply ‘audio temporal space’ to their
work: ‘[t]heir associative, organic process of responding to Jankowski’s
constituent music fragments—that he himself did not know what they would
be used for—did not provide a causal or temporal order for the
choreography of these images or shots’ (170-171). Music is brought
simultaneously into their conscious and unconscious processes, and
subsequently to ours as viewers, through their immersion into the music that
is played in the scenes that eventually appear in the film. Paradoxically,
music is not merely used in the way to which we might be accustomed as
theatre goers—that is, to accentuate the action or to assist characterisation—
but rather as a way to evoke a whole variety of feelings. The music is less
concerned with romance or ideas than it evokes raw emotionality,
accentuating the process of introspection. In the Quays’ own words, the
musical score,
which we always referred (between each other, of course) as the
‘Broken Automation Waltz,’ suggested to us that the Zone of the
Street of Crocodiles - that it too had to breakdown, falter like the
music, unhinge - and hence, the screws, which, by their nature, hold
things together, should unscrew, desert and flee their moorings,
including the moorings of the puppets themselves. (186)
In contrast to traditional music scores, the music/sound score here unmoors
the meaning of the narrative to create a disjunctive complement to the
viewer’s perspective, so that each viewer’s expectations are cued to this
reality of disjunction as well as to the ‘partial, faint structure for the film’s
other visual and aural patterns and systems’ (186). Typically, a Quay
soundtrack is composed of noises that complement ‘sources, motives,
strategies, gestures, grammars, and contexts’ (187). As Buchan explains,
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in 4:40-5:02, the small screws in Street of Crocodiles are
accompanied by shrill, squeaking strings; and then at 5:11-5:38, we
hear a similar music before the screws appear in the frame and screw
themselves into the watch face. And in the Hall of Mirrors, the
Schulz puppet finds himself in a glassed-in arcade; the music is a
kind of waltz, playful, counterpointing the urgency of his attempts to
escape. (186)
Distinguishing the unusual soundtrack, too, is its lack of legible voices.
Typically, voices are muffled and unrecognisable, making each viewer
decide for herself what meaning might be evinced either by the animate or
inanimate objects that she sees. According to the Quays, ‘[e]very object
finds and has its own voice—which is a metaphoric voice—not a speaking
voice in the conventional sense. It’s more likely to be a musical voice—
even silence. There’s no hierarchy in this respect’ (187). Similar to the
images themselves, the musical score aims for a hyperrealism, or what
Buchan calls an ‘anthropological representation’ that seeks simultaneously
to affirm and defy film convention (189). The Quays counter the trend
found in many films that seeks to match non-diegetic to diegetic sound and
the traditional trend of steering unconventional leanings towards
conventional ones. Instead, the element of surprise found in the musical
score represents a trend toward recouping unconventionality for its own
sake in Street of Crocodiles and the Quays’ other films.
In addition to the sound score, mystery is also evoked in puppetry
that embodies an ‘illusory otherness’ (127). The Quays’ puppets function
equally as creators and as viewer doubles; they function as fetish objects,
but they also raise queries that recall themes of doubles and of simulacra,
both of which figure in the filmmakers’ play of vitalism and animism (124125). With this in mind, the filmmakers set their puppetry and machines in a
harmony of discontinuous spaces through the ‘many other sequences [that]
don’t provide orientation and [which] leave an ambiguity of point of view
that creates curiosity, emotional tension and apprehension in the viewer’
(144). I recall feeling such apprehension during the biopic Frida (Julie
Taymor, USA/Canada/Mexico, 2002), for which the Quays worked as
(uncredited) animators during a hospital sequence made with puppets. The
sequence juxtaposes a tram accident with a hospital/operating room, which
evokes the Mexican Day of the Dead and which describes the internal state
of the young Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek). Director Taymor relies on the
Quays’ animated puppet sequences to capture Kahlo’s near death experience
through contrasting internal and external horrors that speak to the possibility
of transcendence (going beyond what is seen) through immanence (material
reality). In Frida, animated skeletons portray the Mexican doctors who
painstakingly operate on their near-death patient whose body is speared
completely by a tram pole. The magical scenes are memorable for their
imprint on the remainder of the film: the lingering sense of death that
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permeates the texture of Kahlo’s art and life, but which also inspire the
viewer, oddly enough, with hope. In this film and others, the Quays’ style of
puppetry and animation evokes varying states of consciousness through a
choreography of movement that is juxtaposed with objects or machines to
thereby reveal both the internal and external order of things and beings.
Ironically, puppets serve as a defamiliarising device, though the Quays use
an organic process to shoot them vis-à-vis the repositioning of puppet and
machine, one shot at a time. Their anthropomorphic use of puppets, like
their music, evolves over the shoot rather than after the shoot (170).
For Buchan, Quay artistry holds viewer enthusiasm as much for its
hybridity that eclipses classification as for its metaphysics that is infused by
vitalism. Her book can also be commended for its centrepiece of gloss stills
that feature 24 illustrated plates of the Quays’ visual work, delineating
décors, atmospheres, deep focus pulls and noncompossible puppets, as well
as stage and commercial stills. These photos illuminate the dual aesthetic of
discovery and liminality that informs the multi-dimensional labyrinth of
their artistry. Such play of insight is equally noted in the Quays’ surrealist
design with respect to their commercial ventures, their play props and
stages, or what the Quays call ‘stylised universes,’ and which Buchan calls
their unique ‘disjunctive poetic system’ (259). Such a system includes
vitalism, animism, hyperrealism, and Deleuzian conceptualisations of space
and time—all manifestations of the Quay dance of light and shadow.
Though Buchan’s focus renders the hybrid, visual, and animated nature of
the brothers Quay, she admits to the difficulty of her task, given that the duo
remain determined to capture new ways to see inner worlds.
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