Stephen and Timothy Quay sat with AWN for a rare interview last night, a day before their appearance as guests of honor at the 10th Marc Davis Celebration of Animation. The Brothers Quay are set to be feted at the Marc Davis lecture on Friday, April 21, 2006, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills.
The lecture will mark the first time the brothers have appeared personally to discuss and present their work to an audience in their native United States, where the identical twins were born near Philadelphia in 1947.
The Quays, cited as an influence by scores of today's stop-motion animators, settled in London in the late 1970s. Their body of work includes some of the most enigmatic and darkly lyrical surrealism committed to film, including THE CABINET OF JAN SVANKMAJER, STREET OF CROCODILES and THE COMB.
"When you accept the language of poetry, you realize that you're dealing with meter, rhyme, rhythm, and a very coded language," say the Quays, who requested that their quotes, like their movies, be attributed to them collectively.
"You accept that when you're going to read poetry, it's going to be a little more difficult than prose, because you're speaking in a much more condensed language. That's a style that we feel more at home with.
"I think we base our films not on dramaturgical models but on musical models. You never question music. You don't say to music 'What does it mean?' In the Prinzhorn-Collection [of the Psychiatric University Hospital in Heidelberg], there's the famous Swiss madman called Adolph Wolfli. There's these amazing, dramatic drawings. And [Walter] Morgenthaler, who ran this psychiatric asylum, approached him at one point and pointed to one of the drawings and said 'Adolph, what does this mean?' Wolfli just rolled up a piece of paper into a trumpet, and trumpeted the answer.
"It's true, because it defies verbalizing in any concrete way. Like I said about music, it's very hard to say, 'What does it mean?' Emotionally, you run a gamut of powerful emotions that you've sensed about something. And yet you never say, 'Well, I understood that!' It's useless to say that."
The lecture begins at 7:30 pm and costs $5 to the general public, $3 for Academy members and students. The program includes works from all periods of the artists' filmography. Full details on the event are available at www.oscars.org.
They will also be appearing at a free screening at the Eileen Norris Cinema Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday, April 23 from 10:00 am to noon, presented by the USC School of Cinema-Television Division of Animation and Digital Arts. The theatre is located at 3507 Trousdale Parkway. For more information, directions and parking info. go to: www.usc.edu/about/visit/upc/event_venues/norris.mtml or www.anim.usc.edu. Taylor Jessen
