Quay Brothers

Surreal events take place in a training centre for manservants. The Quay Brothers bring objects to life with great patience, much love and a manic eye for detail. A milestone in the synthesis of a diversity of film genres: animation, literary feature films and experimental films.

In this playful documentary, one of their many early commissioned works, the Brothers Quay provide us with an important key to their oeuvre: a materialist game with the rules of perspective and the confusion that can result from monocular viewing.

The first part from the four-part work Stille Nacht started as an 'art break' for MTV.

Puppet animation. Far-reaching variations on an engraving by Fragonard (Le Verrou). Study of lonely creatures imprisoned in a calligraphic setting.

A beautifully portrayed choreography between a man and a woman, made more powerful thanks to the impressive music of Arvo Pärt.

Inspired by Stockhausen's Zwei Paare: the mental portrait of a woman who continues to write incessantly to her absent lover.

The dying E.T.A. Hoffmann is cared for by his dedicated nurse and doctor. Then a demonic character looms up from one of his own tales to finish the story. With music by Kurtag and Janácek.

A puppet play filled with unabashed eroticism and rebellious repetitiousness. Fifth in a series of cinematographic enigmas.

Random wanderings through Sir Henry Wellcome's medical collection.

Incomparably designed combination of animation and live action tells the bizarre story of the opera singer Malvina, who is killed and brought back to life by Dr Droz on a desert island where machines driven by the tide define events.

The Quay Brothers are filmmakers, but they also work as graphic designers and create eccentric sets for the opera and dance world. The curious peepshows form a very original retrospective of their varied and yet very characteristic oeuvre.

This beautiful new animation from the Brothers Quay is a dark, terrifying fairytale after the eponymous story by Stanislaw Lem.

Sometimes you can almost smell the Brothers Quay's astounding, animated world. Particularly if they are helping launch a perfume.

The Brothers Quay were challenged twice by classic soloists to create a counterpoint for a live performance. Inspired by Bartók and Janácek and their respective interpreters Alina Ibragimova and Mikhail Rudy, they open up unexpected spaces and dimensions.

The Brothers Quay constructed an octagonal scale-model with little mirrors, inspired by de Chomón’s animated short film, The Electric Hotel (1908). An additional looped projection serves as an intertextual anchor.

With this unique, immersive installation the Quay Brothers introduce a number of motifs, images and objects from their film-in-the-making. Otherwordly.