I took the opportunity to go and visit Stephen and Timothy Quay, the American-born identical twins who have taken the art of animation to places one might never have imagined it could go. My piece about them is somewhere in the Independent today, but here is the longer director's cut, with plenty of bonus material.
Here's a taster...
The Quay Brothers’ studio looks unassuming enough
from outside on its south London side-street. Go in, though, and it feels like
an evocation of an imaginary eastern Europe. One half is the workspace where
the twins film their animations. The rest resembles the second-hand bookshops you
might stumble across in old Krakow or Budapest, with a table for coffee and browsing
amid laden, dimly lit shelves. A wooden-cased clock abruptly grinds, then
chimes and keeps chiming. I could almost swear it strikes 13. Timothy Quay quips: “It only goes off when it hears
the word ‘Kafka’.”
The American-born identical twins Stephen
and Timothy Quay, 67, have long been associated with cutting-edge multi-media
projects, often mingling animations with music in a sphere beyond the
capabilities of words. Now their interpretation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis – the
story of an ordinary young man who finds himself transformed into an insect – is
due for its UK premiere on 27 March at Kings Place, in the Institut Français’s festival
It’s All About Piano. The Quays’ images meld with music by Leoš Janáček, Kafka’s
older contemporary and Czech compatriot, performed live with the film by the Russian
pianist Mikhail Rudy.
The Quays eschew contemporary computer
animation in favour of, among other things, handcrafted puppets. These adorn virtually
every surface in the studio, spooky little presences that might resemble
witches, demons and more. The brothers often make the puppets themselves: “The
heads might be carved out of balsa wood, with real eyes,” says Stephen, then clarifies,
“Real glass eyes. We put olive oil on
them so that when the lights are on them they gleam.”
Rudy’s own multi-media projects include a
theatrical adaptation of The Pianist (the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman) and
animations of Kandinsky and Chagall to which he plays live. He originally commissioned
Metamorphosis from the Quays for Paris’s Cité de la Musique. “We had six months
to do it, but 30 minutes of music would normally take us about a year,” says
Stephen. “We decided therefore on a mixture of live action and puppets, which
was something new for us.” From Rudy’s recording of Janáček’s piano music they
selected pieces to build the narrative. “In that sense we choreographed to what
he laid out for us,” says Timothy.
Shot in sepia and black and white, the film
is on the creepy side of sensitive – or the creepy-crawly side, since the Quays
have been relatively literal about the insect. “Kafka specified that the book
illustrator shouldn’t show the insect,” says Stephen, “but that’s literature. I
don’t think you could get away with that in film.
"We decided we'd make a kind of cockroach, because for us that would be the worst thing to be turned into. We grew up with them around in Philadelphia and it was upsetting when you saw one rambling over your utensils in a drawer or darting round the room or, even worse, just a huge one walking down the centre of a street. It's an extraordinarily adaptable insect - a creature like a rat - and we even read that in those days in New York if you opened up the back of the TV they'd be in there, eating the wires..."
Oof. Back to Kafka. “We’ve always adored Kafka’s work,” Stephen says. “At first with Metamorphosis we flinched, because everybody knows it. At
the same time, it was no problem to come to the story, and we knew Prague both
physically and in our imaginations, especially through the black and white
photos by Karel Plicka.”
Here they are at MOMA in New York, discussing their major retrospective exhibition there three years ago:
The Quays’ films are steeped in Eastern European
influence, where rich traditions can be found of both puppetry and animation;
they pay tribute to figures such as the Czech animator Jan Švankmejer or Walerian
Borowczyk
from Poland. One of
their great-grandmothers was from Upper Silesia: “The twins tendency comes from
her family,” they note. “In a sense you feel those ghosts to have manifested in
us.”
They grew up and initially studied in
Philadelphia, but after winning scholarships for postgraduate work at the Royal
College of Art in London, they found themselves “on the doorstep of Europe,”
and never looked back. “We got out of America – it couldn’t propose anything
for us,” says Stephen. “A friend said that if we could wash dishes in
Philadelphia, we could wash them in Amsterdam – and that was sufficient.”
In one celebrated collaboration (in 2000) the
BBC teamed them up with the giant of experimental electronic music, Karlheinz
Stockhausen, in a 20-minute piece for the Sound on Film series. “It felt like
being placed on the train tracks with something the size of Karlheinz rolling
down towards you,” the brothers recall. “But he was immensely tactful and very
open; he made no restrictions. At one point he asked us to add a touch of blue.
We didn’t.”
They recall that on first viewing their creation, Stockhausen was disturbed by the image of a woman seen only from the back, which they had chosen to represented a psychiatric patient from Heidelberg, whose letters to her husband had been so intensely written and written across that they became a "field of graphite". Stockhausen, they say, thought instead that the image represented his mother, who had been murdered by the Nazis. "He thought we were telepathic," the Quays remember. "We hadn't known anything about it."
Their next big project is with the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen
on his new work Theatre of the World, which will be premiered in Los Angeles in
May. Creating animation is a slow, detailed
business; the brothers are habitually in the studio before 5am. “We’re
exhausted by the end of the day,” they acknowledge, “but that’s what it takes.”
At first working together was a practical solution: “At art school, each guy
has a piece of paper and a pencil,” remarks Stephen, “but when someone gives
you money to make a film, they don’t fund two films, only one. Still, who
better to collaborate than two guys who can put their heads together, and their
hearts too?”
For the Quays’ audience, the results may be
startling, sometimes hair-raising, but always richly rewarding.
Metamorphosis,
Kings Place, 27 March. Box office: 020 7520 1490. It’s All About Piano, 27-29
March. http://institut-francais.org.uk/itsallaboutpiano/
Finally, here's a teaser for Mikhail Rudy's latest film and animation project: bringing the ceiling of the Paris Opera to life
