Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword, by Jonathan Rosenbaum
- Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Art and Craft of Interviewing
- I Going Hollywood: Masters of Studio Style
- II Tickets to the Dark Side: Festival Favorites
- III Blows Against the Empire: Indie Godfathers
- IV Edgeplay: Avant-Garde Auteurs
- 12 An Actionist Begins to Sing: Otto Muehl, by Andrew Grossman
- 13 “They're Panicking, Look at Them!” The Brothers Quay
- V Women in Revolt: Artist-Activists
- VI The Canon: Brilliance without Borders
- Contributor Biographies
13 - “They're Panicking, Look at Them!” The Brothers Quay
from IV - Edgeplay: Avant-Garde Auteurs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword, by Jonathan Rosenbaum
- Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Art and Craft of Interviewing
- I Going Hollywood: Masters of Studio Style
- II Tickets to the Dark Side: Festival Favorites
- III Blows Against the Empire: Indie Godfathers
- IV Edgeplay: Avant-Garde Auteurs
- 12 An Actionist Begins to Sing: Otto Muehl, by Andrew Grossman
- 13 “They're Panicking, Look at Them!” The Brothers Quay
- V Women in Revolt: Artist-Activists
- VI The Canon: Brilliance without Borders
- Contributor Biographies
Summary
Ever since their Palme d'Or-nominated Street of Crocodiles brought them to the attention of critics and new fans in 1986, identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay (born 1947) have parlayed their willfully weird stop-motion animation into a dazzling array of projects for film, music and theater. Disciples of Czech surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer and early pioneers like Ladislav Starevich and Walerian Borowczyk, the Brothers Quay are masters of a dreamscape all their own, creating phantasmagoric fables literally cobbled together from the junk-box detritus of yesteryear: wire, string, spools, buttons, forks, doll parts, flywheels, and other antiquated oddities and homemade mechanisms. Equally inspired by the pessimistic strain of Continental literary fabulism (Kafka, Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz), their hermetic, quasi-mythic visions of madness and existential distress have an Old World patina that makes them as beautifully otherworldly as they are beguiling.
Natives of Philadelphia, the Quays attended the Royal College of Art in the 1960s for graphic design and soon acquired a taste for Eastern European animation and puppetry, especially the tradition of marionette theater extolled in German Romantic Heinrich von Kleist's famous 1810 essay, “On the Marionette Theatre.”
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- Chapter
- Information
- Action! , pp. 207 - 224Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009