They See A Darkness

Courtesy of University of The Arts The Quay brothers on the set of The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes

Inexplicable, obsessive and vaguely ominous happenings are the norm: A harlequin on a tricycle is sadistically bent on capturing a strangely beautiful winged creature in elaborate and brutal traps. Disembodied hands quiver over vibrating strings while an intricately configured device goes through laborious but unexplainable machinations. A wooded island is inhabited by a mad scientist intent on building an orchestra of musical automata. A woman scrawls endless rows of text with pencil nubs while outside, a harsh play of light resembles an apocalyptic borealis.

For the past 30 years, the identical twin animators have been locked away in their London studio, creating worlds that are equal parts fairy tale and nightmare, miniature and operatic, timeless and immediate. Though much of their work, a body of acclaimed short films and a pair of compromised but fascinating features, is drawn from the texts of central European literature, it's as purely visual an experience as a vivid hallucination or a lucid dream.

In person, Stephen and Timothy Quay are the rare artists who actually seem to exist within the imaginary landscapes they've invented. Sharing the same mane of graying, mad-scientist hair and speaking in a half-accent shared by affected Shakespearean actors, the pair perpetuate every curious stereotype about twins, sharing a hive-mind, finishing each other's sentences, conjoined in all but physiognomy.

So naturally, it's only safe to assume that these unbelievable creatures hail from some mittel-European fairy-tale village on the outskirts of a haunted forest, right?

"The fairy tale village of Norristown!" laugh the Quays. "Well, it is called Fairview Village."

That's right. These otherworldly filmmakers hail from Montgomery County, from the same town that spawned John Street and Jaco Pastorius. They refer to the area now as "hicksville," though they acknowledge that the environment of their childhood did play a part in their developing aesthetic.

"The sound of crickets, definitely, and lightning bugs," muse the Quays over the phone from their London studio (there's no point in trying to identify which of the brothers is speaking — not only is it virtually impossible to tell their voices apart, but rarely does a sentence begin and end in the same mouth). "Nature was very formative. I don't think it shows up literally in our films, but there are scenes where I think you get a real sense for nature."

Though subtitled Tales from Vienna Woods, the third entry in the Quays' Stille Nacht series was actually in part inspired by forests closer to home. "We used to spend every summer in the Poconos," the brothers recall. "We were magically transformed by deer and the smell of pine and deep forests. There's a real fairy tale element there. Something was laid for us that we came back onto much later when we discovered it in Europe. Stille Nacht III is our homage to the Poconos, in essence, although at the time we got the idea in Austria. There's this simultaneity of being in another country that mirrored our childhood memories."

The Quays' invented worlds will finally be introduced to their formative real-life one when the sets, or "décors," from several of their films are exhibited at UArts' Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery beginning this week. The brothers are alumni, graduating in 1969 with degrees in photography and illustration when the school was still known as the Philadelphia College of Art (PCA). Their move to Philadelphia and to art school had a profound impact on them at the time.

"The thing that we liked instantly was that the college had a fantastic library and music library and a fantastic film course. We suddenly dove into a period of hunting and researching and learning things that we wouldn't have had access to in high school. And you'd see a lot of other artists at work. It was really a hothouse — a humbling experience in the best sense of the word."

Though studying with an eye toward becoming commercial illustrators, the Quays began seeing animated films by the likes of Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica that opened their eyes to the medium's possibilities. At the same time they began to discover the literature that would have such a profound influence on the tone of their films when they asked the college librarian what "Kafkaesque" meant after reading it in a visual arts magazine.

Though they have yet to adapt his work for the screen, in favor of later discoveries like Bruno Schulz and Robert Walser, they share with Kafka a feeling of subjective cityscapes, of an oppressive urban environment possessed in a physical sense of its inhabitants' perceptions of paranoia and persecution. "In terms of literature," insist the Quays, "nobody's created this sense of the bleakness of the labyrinth and done it with such ferocity. There's almost a medical dissection, something so cold and unpitying."

But it's not so much Kafka's stories that intrigued the brothers, but his diaries, the fragmentary nature of which has spawned the unresolved, mysterious quality that makes their work so rich. "It was these very intense, powerful fragments that Kafka would write day to day, just impressions that he would write when he could. We've always liked that unfinished and very intimate quality."

The duo share uncannily similar tastes and interests, even going so far as to cut books in half when they were younger, one starting from the beginning, the other from the middle, and then switching off. "We didn't want to go out and buy two," they claim. "Now we just wait for the other to finish it."

They shrug off the mythology associated with being twins, insisting they become aware of the fact only when others draw it to their attention. But it has led to an intimate and productive collaboration. "It's the greatest chance encounter," they say.

Their fantasized connection to Europe became fully fleshed via the encouragement of Paul Hogarth, then a professor visiting PCA from London's Royal College of Art who encouraged the brothers to apply. Their acceptance facilitated their move to London, where they've remained ever since, returning only sporadically — their last visit was for a UPenn-sponsored retrospective in late 2006. They again studied illustration, but began making animated films in their own time with borrowed equipment.

From the beginning, their working method has been "completely democratic," they say. "We each build the puppets, we each animate, we each make the décors. That's the best way to make the errors which create discovery points. We've never been frightened by making errors because I think that gives pause for a kind of deconstruction and reconstruction of the plan — or the lack of a plan. We always have a very clear intention, we just keep it kind of diffuse."

For years, most of the Quays' films were produced with the support of Britain's Channel Four, though that source has largely dried up in recent years, slowing the brothers' output. They are currently working on a short film based on Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem's 1977 short story "The Mask," and are in pre-production on their third feature, an adaptation of Bruno Schulz's 1937 novel Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.

The Quays are intimately linked with Schulz in the popular imagination; not only is their 1986 adaptation of his Street of Crocodiles their best-known film, but it has served as the introduction for many to Schulz's work. The film, named by Terry Gilliam as one of the 10 best animated films of all time, represents many of the themes that emerge repeatedly in the Quays' work: the setting, a mix of urban decay and Victorian museum (think the Mütter spanning all of South Street); doll parts, meat and inanimate objects brought to inexplicable life; a deep, haunting sense of mystery, as of something not watched and understood but half-remembered and nagging from the wells of the subconscious.

They've also maintained a sideline career producing music videos and television commercials. Their work has graced MTV — in the days when they actually played music videos — in pieces for His Name Is Alive ("Are We Still Married," "Can't Go Wrong Without You"), Michael Penn ["Long Way Down (Look What the Cat Drug In)"] and 16 Horsepower ("Black Soul Choir"), as well as sections of Peter Gabriel's groundbreaking "Sledgehammer" video and promos for the station itself. Their work has strongly influenced other video directors, most famously Fred Stuhr's early-'90s videos for Tool, often mistakenly cited as the Quays' own work. They have also designed sets for opera and theater productions and provided a short sequence for Salma Hayek's biopic Frida.

Music is an integral element in all of the Quays' films. Their usual mode of production is to have their composers write music without a visual guide, with only the source material or ideas for a film in mind. Their collaboration with composer Leszek Jankowski was particularly fruitful, a fusion of sound and image that renders both inextricable from the other. In 2000, they were the only filmmakers willing to work with the eccentric and belligerent Karlheinz Stockhausen, creating the disturbing In Absentia for the BBC series Sound on Film.

In 1994, the Quays made their first foray into feature-length live-action film, at the "gentle provocation" of longtime producer Keith Griffiths, resulting in Institute Benjamenta. A decade later they followed up with their second feature, The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes. Benjamenta will screen at Philadelphia CineFest. The brothers will receive the Vision Award for Extraordinary Achievement in Filmmaking at the April 3 screening, then appear for a question-and-answer session after a hand-picked program of their shorts the following night.

Persuading the Quays to return to their alma mater was a long-held dream of UArts College of Art and Design dean Stephen Tarantal, who arrived at the school as an illustration instructor a few months after their graduation. Rosenwald-Wolf exhibitions coordinator Ed Waisnis traveled to the Quays' studio, which he described as feeling like "a Victorian warehouse," to arrange the exhibition, which will feature 11 of the brothers' 18 preserved décors — others have been destroyed over time.

It's actually somewhat surprising that the Quays would accede to the museum-like display of their work. Besides their naturally hermetic quality, an interview at a Paris doll museum included on the Phantom Museums DVD collection of their work finds them reacting with distaste to the lifeless display.

"They're adorable," the Quays recall, in a tone of voice more suited to "They're poisonous," or "They're radioactive."

"That museum was very antiseptic," they say. "It's Victoriana in excelsis. It was sort of a mausoleum where they were all lined up, corpse after corpse after corpse, all grinning at you."

Waisnis calls the feeling of seeing the actual décors "a major disjunction of scale. Obviously when you're watching the movies, you know you're not watching a concrete reality. But when you actually see them in the physical world, you're looking at these immensely detailed worlds concisely contained within a vitrine. It's a different way of looking at the depths of the content."

For the Quays, the small scale of their work helps to draw viewers into their world. "You have to stoop a little bit to enter into the detail of the miniatures, and I think that's always a surprise for people. We like the idea that the objects actually pull you down into their realm."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)