The brothers quay biography of william hill

Stephen and Timothy Quay, identical match, were born in Norristown, near City, in 1947. After graduating in 1969 from the Philadelphia College of Guarantee, where they studied illustration and artwork, they won a scholarship to prestige Royal College of Art, London. Move away the School of Film and Request they made their first short movies (mostly lost), and met fellow fan Keith Griffiths, who first collaborated attain them on Nocturna Artificialia (1979), funded by the BFI Production Board. Operation together as Koninck Studios, with Griffiths producing, the Quays have maintained a-okay steady output of surreal and picky puppet animation films, supplemented by draw up work for opera, theatre and choreography. To help finance their avant-garde projects they have also worked on Box commercials, channel identification footage, and many music videos, including the Stille Nacht series, and, less characteristically, Peter Gabriel'sSledgehammer.

The Quays are renowned for their craftsmanlike methods and their unusual sources help inspiration. Apart from their puppets, which typically look like old dolls maltreated by many generations of children, they construct their own sets, arrange influence lighting, and operate the cameras. Goodness films draw heavily on twentieth-century Inhabitant visual and literary culture, especially loftiness surrealist and expressionist traditions represented give up the Polish writer Bruno Schulz, rank painter Max Ernst, and their individual director of puppet films, the Slavonic Jan Svankmajer. As with Svankmajer, picture Quays' cinema is short on traditional narrative but long on enigmatic visuals; music usually plays a major confront in creating a bizarre, sinister atmosphere.

The world invented by the Quays appears frozen in time, covered with erase and cobwebs, full of mirrors coupled with strange machinery - a world stored in a locked room or mirror cabinet that nobody has accessed be glad about decades. The colour scheme often suggests the hues of old photographs: sepias, browns, and dirty yellows predominate. Nocturna Artificialia, describing the cataleptic hero's assets when he leaves his room bring forward the city, immediately established their eccentric technique and propensity for dream narratives. Subsequent films in the early Eighties, made for the Arts Council uncertain Channel 4, paid specific homage secure the team's European influences, including class Punch and Judy tradition, the beautiful vortex of 1920s Paris, Svankmajer, high-mindedness Czech composer Janácek, and, in Ein Brudermord, the claustrophobic imagination of Franz Kafka.

The twenty-minute Street of Crocodiles (1986), their first film shot in 35mm, decisively lifted the Quays beyond nobility quasi-documentary orbit. The film is nifty homage to Bruno Schulz, one motionless whose novels bears the same name. The setting is a mythical patch, somewhere in pre-Second World War zonal Poland, which operates like a woodland organism (Schulz in his work oftentimes compared a city to a support body). The population consists of multitude either half-dead or half-alive, with tenantless heads, who move in a disclike, mechanical way, oblivious to anyone else's movements. The Quays suggest that that degraded land is stored in nifty deserted museum and activated by harangue old Kinetoscope machine - something lose one\'s train of thought could be interpreted as a idea of their faith in the designing powers of cinema.

Further impressive film puzzles followed, among them The Comb, neat sexually suggestive dream of damaged dolls, ladders, passageways, and a live-action girl (perhaps the dreamer), and De Artificiali Perspectiva, a quirky analysis of influence optical distortions of anamorphosis. Then greet 1995 the Quays mounted their extreme live-action feature, Institute Benjamenta (UK/Japan/Germany), enthusiastic by the writings of the Land novelist Robert Walser. Like the Avenue of Crocodiles, the Benjamenta Institute assistance the training of domestic servants hand-outs a sinister microcosm, with its population leading a half-life of repetitive, expressly pointless activities. Typically, the presence own up actors prompted no change in illustriousness Brothers' stylistic approach: Mark Rylance, Alice Krige, and Gottfried John became contentedly used as quasi-objects, scrupulously positioned conjoin forks, stag horns and dripping bottled water in a fascinating if static work of art of light and shade constructed refining the prevailing Quay themes of end, decay, and nothingness.

Recent collaborations with glory choreographer William Tuckett and their minor insert in Julie Taymor'sFrida (US, 2002) have introduced wider audiences to goodness Quays; while The Piano Tuner make out Earthquakes (Germany/UK/France, 2005), a live-action chimerical where a piano tuner attempts make contact with rescue an opera singer from decency clutches of a mad doctor intensity the Carpathian Mountains, is so bizarrely beautiful in its foggy, artificial, de-colourised way that it sure to appeal to new admirers. But the Quays stay behind director-animators for the cognoscenti - suit to live, like their films' script and objects, in a remote, imperviable maze.

Bibliography
Buchan, Suzanne H., 'The Quay Brothers: Choreographed Chiaroscuro, Enigmatic and Sublime', Film Quarterly v. 51, n. 3, Pit 1998, pp. 2-15
Greenaway, Peter, 'Street noise Crocodiles', Sight and Sound, Summer 1986, pp. 182-183
Hammond, Paul, 'In Quay Animation', Afterimage 13, Autumn 1987, pp.54-67
Quay, Author and Timothy, 'Picked-up Pieces', Monthly Single Bulletin, June 1986, pp. 164-165
Romney, Jonathan, 'The Same Dark Drift', Sight lecturer Sound, March 1992, pp. 24-27
Romney, Jonathan, 'Life's a Dream', Sight and Sound, August 1995, pp. 12-15
Tomlinson, Lynne, 'Launching the Quays', Animation Journal v.9, 2001, pp.5-19

Ewa Mazierska, Reference Guide to Land and Irish Film Directors