Born in 1947, the Quay Brothers studied art and graphic design first at the Philadelphia College of Art and then at the Royal College of Art in London, the city where they have lived and worked since 1969, which at least partially accounts for the decidedly European feel of their work. If one didn’t know better, one might assume that they are Cold War-era Eastern European artists, as many of their most well-known films evoke a sense of uncanny dislocation and urban industrial decay that is often associated with life behind the Iron Curtain. It is not surprising, then, that they count among their primary influences a number of Eastern European artists, including Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, Polish animators Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica, Czech puppeteer Richard Teschner, Czech composers Leoš Janáček and Zdeněk Liška, and Polish composer Leszek Jankowski, the latter of whom scored a number of their films. Their use of Latin and German in their titles and intertitles, ornate calligraphy, and various elements of Old World culture connects them to an ancient tradition of art even as their avant-garde sensibilities locate them directly in the realm of the postmodern.

While their first films were live action, they have always dealt in the experimental, eschewing conventional narrative in favor of a dream-like flow of images that evoke the patterns and sensations of music and dance, which they claim as their primary inspirations. Starting in 1979 with their first credited film Nocturna Artificialia, they began developing their artistic voice via the art of stop-motion animation, whose limits they continued to refine and push over the ensuing decades. Zeitgeist Films’ excellent new collection The Quay Brothers: Collected Short Films allows one to experience the growth of that artistic voice, as it includes more than a dozen of their short films, starting with The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer (1984), which is arguably their first fully mature work as stop-motion animation artists, and ending with Unmistaken Hands (2013), their most recently completed and released film. The simultaneous allusion to Švankmajer, one of their biggest influences, and the German Expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1924), in the title of The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer illustrates the dexterity of their approach, which stitches together bits and pieces of art and history and film techniques, transforming them in alchemic fashion into something entirely new and different.

Their true masterwork, however, is Street of Crocodiles (1986), which has come to stand as their signature work. The 21-minute film builds on the look and feel of their earlier, shorter films, and the world it creates is even more detailed and immersive, partially because they began moving the camera with increasing flexibility. While their earlier stop-motion works tended to present their artificial worlds from a static position just outside the Décors—the name of their intricately detailed miniature stages—in Street of Crocodiles they take the camera directly into the film’s world of rusting machinery, dust, articulated dolls, and raw meat, tracking and panning and dollying within the space while employing shifting focal planes. It’s a work of enormous artistry and uncanny horror—a direct port into a subconscious that fascinates as much as it unsettles.

As they refined their art, the Quay Brothers continued to experiment and elaborate on their previous works. Like all great auteurs, they retained a signature look and feel without becoming static. They mixed live action and stop-motion in films like The Comb (1990), In Abstentia (2000), and The Phantom Museum (2003); they mixed black-and-white and color photography in Street of Crocodiles, The Comb, and In Absentia, the latter of which also was shot in CinemaScope; and they collaborated with art scholar Roger Cardinal on Anamorphosis (1991), a unique educational film about the art of creating images that have to be viewed from a skewed perspective in order to make sense (which, in effect, is what the Quay Brothers do in all of their films). The soundscape of their films is just as important as the visuals, and over the years they have worked with numerous composers to create unique, gorgeously unsettling scores and intricate, dense sound designs that mix ambient noises with muffled voices and indeterminate echoes and hums.

The Quay’s films have been displayed in museums all over the world, with their biggest retrospective being held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2012, but they have hardly been relegated to restrictive cultural spaces. Many of their films played regularly on British television, particularly Channel Four, which funded a number of their early films; they worked on several music videos for the American experimental rock band His Name Is Alive; and Stille Nacht I: Dramolet was commissioned by MTV to play as an interstitual in their programming, which was one of my first exposures to their work as a teenager. Their work has also shown up in television commercials for Doritos, Nikon, Honeywell, and Fox Sports, although the Quays are keenly dismissive of those efforts, describing them as a “pact with the devil” that allows them to fund their other projects.

One can deconstruct the Quays’s films and see the threads of surrealism, tactilism, and expressionism, the influence of the Gothics and the Victorians, the impact of Franz Kafka and Raymond Durgnat. Yet, in the moment of watching one, the specifics of their inspirations and allusions fade away as we are confronted with an experience that can only be described as dreamlike. They’re sometimes nightmarish, sometimes oddly amusing, sometimes gross, sometimes unsettling, but always provocative and strangely beautiful. The Quay Brothers have since become extremely influential in their own right, and we can see the impact of their work on everyone from Tim Burton, to Henry Selick, to David Lynch, to Christopher Nolan, which alone is testament to their impact on cinema. Once you’ve seen one of their films, you’ll never see anything quite like it again.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Zeitgeist Films and Syncopy