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"Tales of the Brothers Quay" is the suitably retro title of the compendium of animated shorts by the American-born, Britain-based twins Stephen and Timothy Quay upcoming at Film Forum, but a better name for the program comes from one of the films included in it: Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies. Like their vocal admirer Guy Maddin, the Quays’ aesthetic is motivated by nostalgia for archaic textures; but since the tropes they appropriate come less from the lineage of film than a shadow-history of orphaned Eastern European art movements and pre-cinematic perspective tricks, their stop-motion Surrealist dioramas take on a ghost-lit spookiness. (That said, though, the class of the program is 1986’s Street of Crocodiles, which more than any other of their films is edited with regard for the grammar of classical cinematic continuity, and creates the most sustained, engrossing space.) The landscape is dotted with headless dolls and metallic detritus, and scored to malformed chamber music; whatever traces of preciousness come through in their pastiche-driven project are pushed to the background by the menace implicit in the repetition of the uncanny. It’s this facility with a private, unresolved dream logic which, paradoxically, makes the Quays’ works so accessible: two of the most pleasurable works in the program are three-minute black and white distillations of their signature style made as music videos for atmospheric, sepulchral songs by His Name Is Alive. They’re goth bedtime stories, already slipping into the language of sleep.
January 19-26 at Film Forum
January 19-26 at Film Forum
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