It's a strange world that casts decor as its main character. This is the world of the Brothers Quay, in which all kinds of incomprehensible objects and machines hold the stage while human characters remain at their mercy. Disjointed, dreamy, labyrinthine,...
[more]It's a strange world that casts decor as its main character. This is the world of the Brothers Quay, in which all kinds of incomprehensible objects and machines hold the stage while human characters remain at their mercy. Disjointed, dreamy, labyrinthine, and oblique, this is a theater of the unconscious that twists everyday conceptions of space and time beyond recognition.
Indeed, this is a world of unexpected events. And not only for the viewer. The Brothers Quay exploit the accidents that arise in their own production process. And since they primarily work with puppets, accidents are bound to happen. Whether or not their creations are scripted or adventitious, they still give a sense of disjunction -- for the Brothers Quay, the absurd and the impossible lie at the base of all phenomena. These are not your typical narratives. The Brothers Quay take dreams as their models: they spin loose webs of associations, networks of images and metaphors that create a fragile, ethereal coherence in the midst of an essentially chaotic world.
Heavily influenced by animator Jan Svanlmajer and writer Robert Walser -- both of whom realize darkly humorous dreamworlds in their work -- the films of the Brothers Quay emerge in between physical and mental space. For these animators, space and time are not stable, consistent forms; they are involuted, distorted, porous, and multi-layered. As in the visions of Lewis Carroll or Franz Kafka, characters are always at the mercy of an insidious, shifting, incomprehensible architecture.
Such is the architecture of their most celebrated film, "The Institute Benjamenta" (1995). This was their first predominantly live-action film, although splices of animation periodically emerge to heighten the disorientation. As usual, the Institute itself resides at the center of the film. And events display their requisite degree of absurdity. There is only one lesson to be learned at the Institute Benjamenta, and although it's unclear exactly what the value of this lesson is, it nevertheless must be engrained into students' bodies and brains by means of monotonous repetitions and castigations.
This is a dark vision. "The Institute Benjamenta," filmed in black-and-white, has the ominous, oblique quality of chiaroscuro. And when they do use color, the Brothers Quay uses a palette like that of Francis Bacon: a palette of colors that seem to have been bled of light.
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