In an indeterminate place

Title Screen

The Broth­ers Quay are writerly film­mak­ers, and in say­ing that I’m not just refer­ring to their pen­chant for work­ing from lit­er­ary sources. Though they have drawn inspi­ra­tion from works as var­ied as The Epic of Gil­gamesh on the one hand and the writ­ings of Bruno Schulz and Robert Walser on the other, aside from the rel­a­tive obscu­rity of the lat­ter two and the former’s appar­ent resis­tance to filmic adap­ta­tion (only two Gil­gamesh movies in 4,000 years, and one of them by the Quays), there’s cer­tainly noth­ing unusual in that. No, the Quays’ inter­est in writ­ing has noth­ing to do with the shep­herd­ing of short sto­ries and nov­els from the page to the screen; rather, it’s all about the obses­sive visual explo­ration of writ­ing as both an activ­ity and an arti­fact that per­me­ates their films.

Work­ing through their fil­mog­ra­phy one can­not help but be struck by how often and how clev­erly writ­ing is incor­po­rated into their work, the 1988 black and white short Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies being exem­plary in this regard. The spar­tan cal­li­graphic title screen, with its spindly frak­tur let­ters and grace­ful dec­o­ra­tive ini­tials, sets the tone for the entire film, whose aes­thetic might be described as baroque min­i­mal­ism. The title screen plays a func­tional role as well, serv­ing as a win­dow into the filmic world: above the tri­an­gu­lar “A” of “Anatomies” is a peep-hole which the cam­era approaches, then peers through. On the other side we see a tiny, dis­em­bod­ied hand writ­ing furi­ously. Two other inter­ti­tles fol­low, both bear­ing cap­tions writ­ten in a flow­ery script ded­i­cat­ing the décor of the film (not the film itself, just the décor, a tes­ta­ment to the impor­tance they attribute to it) to both the Lon­don Under­ground and to an “anony­mous anatom­i­cal spec­i­men,” pre­sum­ably the pup­pet protagonist.

We then move into the inner world of the film, whose action alter­nates between two dis­tinct but com­mu­ni­cat­ing spaces – a light room with impos­si­ble, Escher-like stair­cases and white walls dec­o­rated with a pro­lif­er­a­tion of bar code-like lines and phrases writ­ten in flow­ery script, and a dark room with a gloomy, black and white striped fab­ric cov­er­ing the walls, the bed, and which is also piled up here and there. In the light room sev­eral fan­tas­tic, robot-like beings exist, among them two pterodactyl-like com­passes which come to life and glide across the white floor like ice-skaters, trac­ing cal­li­graphic curlicues as they twirl. In the dark room, two shad­owy fig­ures lan­guish, look­ing sickly and for­lorn. One rubs its fore­head with a cir­cu­lar motion of its hand, echo­ing the ges­ture of the robot-like pro­tag­o­nist in the white room, and the rub­bing motion strongly recalls the agi­ta­tion of the writ­ing hand, which returns repeat­edly through­out the film. At times sev­eral writ­ing hands appear, all scrib­bling away simultaneously.

As the film moves to its con­clu­sion we have another inter­ti­tle bear­ing a hand-written ded­i­ca­tion, this one to “the other Frag­o­nard” (Hon­oré, the anatomist) and to the Musée Orphila (the anatomy museum of the Uni­ver­sity Paris V), then come the cred­its. Both are writ­ten in the idio­syn­critic script of the pre­ced­ing title cards, thus giv­ing Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies a pal­en­dromic struc­ture that empha­sizes its inner coher­ence – the writ­ing spec­i­mens at the begin­ning and end frame the activ­ity of writ­ing which runs like a leit­mo­tif through the film.

Other works like In Absen­tia, their 2000 col­lab­o­ra­tion with Stock­hausen, and The Cal­lig­ra­pher, a sequence of three “idents” com­mis­sioned (and rejected) by BBC2 in 1991, also fore­ground writ­ing as an intran­si­tive activ­ity inter­est­ing in and of itself. Like the Quays’ fan­ci­ful hand-written title screens, inter­ti­tles, and cred­its, all of these films betray a fas­ci­na­tion with the mechan­ics of ver­bal expres­sion, with man­ual tech­niques and processes, and with the graphic arts in gen­eral, char­ac­ter­is­tics that are read­ily appar­ent in other aspects of their film­mak­ing, par­tic­u­larly in their use of stop-frame ani­ma­tion, hand-made pup­pets, and elab­o­rate décors which often fea­ture etch­ings, adver­tis­ing bills, bar codes, and other printed ephemera. As they them­selves put it in an inter­view: “We’re not writ­ers but we respect writing.”

You can see a selec­tion of the stills in the Broth­ers Quay gallery.

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• Zeit­geist Film’s Broth­ers Quay page
• André Habib, “Through a Glass Darkly: Inter­view with the Quay Brothers”

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Tagged: Brothers Quay, experimental film

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