The stop-motion animation of the Quay Brothers – twins Stephen and Timothy, who were born in Pennsylvania but have long resided in London – operates on a nearly subconscious level, their abstract, surrealist imagery hopelessly confounding literal interpretations. Their uniquely fanciful shorts certainly live up to the glowing adjective used in the title of Kino’s The Brothers Quay Collection: Ten Astonishing Shorts, an invaluable compilation that culls together their classic output from the ‘80s and ‘90s. Concocted with coiled twine, slithering wire, rusty screws and nails, cracked doll faces, stringy hair, grimy nails, red meat, and haunting human actors, the Quay Brothers’ films are fueled by what might be dubbed “organic magic,” as almost all are defined by the stimulation of vigorous life in otherwise inanimate human debris. As evidenced by 1984’s “The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer,” the Brothers’ early films boast a distinctly European sensibility influenced by Czech animation master Jan Svankmajer, though it’s with their later shorts – such as the mesmerizing masterpiece “Street of Crocodiles” (a mythical portrait of madness and identity that also pays homage to turn-of-the-century cinematic techniques) and their two music videos for His Name Is Alive (in which the sonic and the visual seem symbiotically fused together) – that the duo’s highly eccentric individuality is most fully realized. With their jittery puppet physicality, shadowy black-and-white opaqueness and stunningly active cinematography, the shorts strive to recreate the irrational logic of frightening/alluring nightmares, an endeavor confirmed by their “narrative” focus on sleep and cerebral interiority (as in “The Comb”) and proven successful by their effects on this viewer, whose dreams are always more fantastical immediately after engaging with the Brothers’ work.
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