If, as we are told in Genesis, God created form from formlessness, and gave spirit to blank matter, then it is the puppeteer whose powers achieve something like the divine. Manipulating fingers, strings, hidden voices, shadows, paper cut-outs, or carefully placed lights, the artist crouches beneath or behind the stage and transforms into a kind of demiurge, animating the inert and imbuing a previously inanimate figure with movement, character, and life. This process is a form of transference, a physical transmission of energy and dexterity from puppeteer to puppet. The puppet is a hollow vessel, to be filled with our life force. Hence why puppets are so creepy: they require our life to live out their own. Yet no matter how cheap, how threadbare, how see-through their mechanisms, they fascinate us. In some strange and ancient way, perhaps, we recognize ourselves in them. This is how I feel, anyway, watching the films of the Brothers Quay. Surrealists, junk collectors, fetishistic recreators of a mythical Middle Europe: since the early 1970s, these identical twins from the Philadelphia suburbs have co-created some four-dozen shorts and three full-length features, on top of music videos, commercials, stage sets, and installation pieces. They are like almost nothing else. But Stephen and Timothy Quay are known, above all else, for their work with puppets: those ragged, remaindered figures scavenged and repurposed into a run of dreamlike stop-motion films. If a typical puppeteer uses their movements to simulate life, the Quays use theirs to question life, and the reality that contains it. Their mannequins dance to outside music, ascend through dream-towers, battle enemies and compulsions within plainly-artificial dioramas — all while under the sway of forces from the beyond. The Street of Crocodiles, from 1986, begins with a live-action man slicing a puppet free of his strings, loosing him into a district of mirrors and display cases. This quarter is home to a good many other puppets, automata who act according to their own desires, without anyone to direct them. Rather, each is at the mercy of its particular design, condemned to enact a particular purpose, without the freedom to search for more. Everything is shot very closely. The effect is uncanny and unforgettable. The Street of Crocodiles is adapted from a series of short stories by the Polish writer Bruno Schulz, and this clash — between constraint and desire — is as Schulzian as it gets. Born in 1892 in the provincial city of Drohobycz, Schulz spent the early part of his life trapped beneath his merchant father, unable to pursue his art, and unwilling to enact his expansive sexual fantasies in his life. So he channeled them into his illustrations and his stories, a short corpus of domestic myths which transformed his hometown, his family’s house, and his father’s shop into zones of mysterious and magical simultaneity. In Schulz, everything is at once self and opposite: the miraculous is also the cheap; the present is also the past; the dead can, through some magical suspension, hover still on the border of life. A kind of humdrum animacy hangs in the air, an immanent sense that secret and profound truths might express themselves on shop shelves, in mildewed attics, in cracked and rusted objects, and in the life that thrives and multiplies on junk heaps, or a hidden crevice in the garden wall. Schulz’s writing, alongside the illustrations of postwar Polish surrealists like Roman Cieślewicz, helped the Quays to unlock their art. Reading him taught the pair “that matter was never dead; that it contained infinite shades and nuances; that it was in a constant state of migration”— and that it might be manipulated into any number of potential forms. Their aesthetic — which, in its insistence upon the life force in dead matter, is a junk-shop coexistence of unlike things: flatness and depth, texture and artifice, paper cutouts and frogspawn. They salvage their puppets and sets from flea markets and sidewalk sales, discerning vitality in tawdry things that others have cast aside. The Quays work alone in their London studio. They have spent the past twenty years piecing together an adaptation of Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, from 1937. In the story, a man travels by train to a town in the high mountains. His father, long-dead in our world, survives up there as a patient in a peculiar sanatorium where time is “late by an interval whose length is impossible to define.” Both dead and not dead, Father has reactivated past time, postponing the moment of his own extinction, living on in a liminal gap between what has already happened and the possibility of what might not. It is a strange and strangely plotty story, a shapeshifting lethargic narrative where nothing can or cannot happen, and every development is eventually undone. The drowsing narrator has seemingly entered someone else’s dream, full of phantasmagoric symbols which belong to everyone except him. The Quays follow the story’s essential beats, beginning with a prolonged train journey, an encounter with the sanatorium’s odd director, a night spent with Father in his coffin of a bed. They mix this in with symbols of their own: a paper theater in a valise; an examination room viewed through a peephole; repetitive, stuttering footage of a woman’s leg projected onto a wall. Using a variety of optical and editing effects, the animators are attempting to capture the postponed, refracted time of Schulz’s sanatorium, tripling images within the frame or harshly running them back, like the skipping of a scratched DVD. For the first twenty or so years of their career, the Quays displayed a musical virtuosity, bringing their surreal images to something approaching life. The Street of Crocodiles is a degraded ballet of twirling screws and unwound thread that enacts Schulz’s constituent animacy. Their adaptations of Robert Walser turn that graphomaniac’s microscriptic tales into fables of subconscious conflict, the yearning of an imprisoned mind to ascend to a realm of magic. Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence