the Brothers Quay of filmmaking fame

Interview, NY MoMA exhibition:

http://www.fandor.com/blog/the-art-of-filmmaking-the-quay-brothers?campaign=kf&source=21395

I always forget they're from... Philadelphia.

cheers. i thought they were british. The Piano Tuner.... was so bad i had to leave half way through it in spite of being a huge fan of Institute Benjamenta and the other shorter things i had seen. leaving the cinema is the only thing i can remember about the film though so i'm useless here.

ok, i remember my exit being the result of embarrassment- a wtf were they thinking? kinda thing rather than thinking it inept or anything. like they had spent a hell of a long time making something and agreeing with each other in their tiny little world of the two of them without actually realising someone else would actually have to watch the thing. it's a fine line though - so much of the art i admire has actually been made this (psychological) way and that's its strength and power.

I wonder if Institute Benjamenta is as good as i remember it being. somehow i doubt it.

i thought they were British too. i think Institute Benjamenta is that good but i have a lot of tolerance for their shtick

I prefer their short films by a long shot. My favorite is "Rehearsals For Extinct Anatomies." O INEVITABLE FATUM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhkTMZOb924

I actually went to the opening night event at MoMa but I got there late and they wouldn't let me up the stairs with a drink in my hand so I haven't seen the exhibit as such, assuming there is one apart from screening

Švankmajer minus the wicked humor.

I have time for their films, and probably have all of them on a shelf around here, but the best thing about them is the music, often by Leszek Jankowski.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhXmN-Nr1HY

Second best thing about the Quay brothers is that they're the inspiration for Oswald and Oliver Deuce in Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFO2vqOBtl0

i was psyched for 'piano tuner' but ultimately thought it was tedious. liked institute benjamenta, but crabbits is right about the shorts being the best

When I was working for Planet Cinema magazine I was sent to Poland to interview the brothers. It was one of the high - and low - points of my journalistic career.

We met in a room lit by a 30-watt lightbulb, some thirty metres below Krakow's main railway station. A decrepit old caretaker explained (via subtitles) that since we were below the water table we would had to carry umbrellas at all times. And yet, despite the water cascading down the walls, four bald men in suit and tails sat playing out-of-tune mazurkas nearby.

I was just wondering if two of the string quartet would turn out to be the brothers when some earth began to accumulate in a little pile, the hole grew in circumference, and two undertakers climbed into the room. They introduced themselves as Zbigniew and Balthazar Quay. They had been detained at a funeral, they said, via subtitles. When I asked whose, they said it was the funeral of some wooden kitchen implements destroyed in a hotel fire. They were Funerary Cutlers by day, filmmakers by night.

The interview went from odd to farcical. They told me, via subtitles, that their favourite book was The Epic of Gilgamesh. In fact it was the only book they'd ever read. They'd fought over it and finally ripped the edition in two: Zbigniew had got the first half, Balthazar the second. But since they hadn't been speaking - even by subtitles - since the fight, neither had communicated to the other the contents of his part of the book.

"Tell Zbigniew he is standing on my foot," said Balthazar, via subtitles.

Zbigniew didn't react until I repeated the message, then immediately moved his foot.

I asked the brothers how they were able to collaborate without speaking. But, without using words, even subtitles, they told me that their bond went far deeper than words.

"But have you seen their version of The Epic of Gilgamesh?" butted in the caretaker, via subtitles. "It's obvious they haven't read the book. The whole thing's about a dragonfly trying to carry a pubic hair back to a beetle pinned to a piece of raw meat kept in the toe section of a woman's shoe."

I turned to the brothers for confirmation, but they had disappeared, via subtitles, back down the hole.

Later I learned, via letter, that this whole interview had been a fake. The real Brothers Quay are called Kevin and Brian. They live in Orpington, where they've made a one-to-one scale model of Lithuania in their basement. I pitched an article about it to Modeller's World, but they turned me down via a series of miniature plastic cypress trees.

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