Two special programmes of short films by the Quay Brothers. The first programme will be followed by a Q&A with the Quay brothers.
Programme 1 - 14.00:
Stille Nacht I
Street of Crocodiles
Stille Nacht II
In Absentia
Stille Nacht III
Kinoteka Ident I
Alice Is not so Wonderland
Including a Q&A with the Quay Brothers
Programme 2 - 16.15:
The Calligrapher
Kinoteka Ident II
This Unnameable Little Broom
Unmistaken Hands
The Comb
Surely the world’s greatest practicing stopmotion artist animators, the Quay Brothers have been painstakingly crafting their own unique, interlinked universe of astonishingly imagined animated worlds for over 45 years. Creating across the short, medium and long form, as well as in production design for opera, ballet and theatre, theirs is a startling cosmology, one informed and inhabited by the mystery and melancholy dreaming of Central and Eastern European artists, writers and wayward wanderers, most notably from the Polish constellation.
This March sees a gathering of works across London that articulates this extraordinary imaginary at first hand. In a London premiere – and a world first for an assembly at this scale – 23 of their immaculately hand-crafted puppet film décors will be on display in the suitably supportive environs of the main hall in Bloomsbury's Swedenborg House. It is vanishingly rare to encounter the material source of animated creativity in this way, and in a space so dedicated to metaphysical reverie.
Alongside the exhibition, two programmes of the remarkable short films that the sets have enabled will be shown a short walk away at Covent Garden's Garden Cinema, an essential and independent addition to London’s cinema landscape, with the Brothers in attendance, while Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, their latest, hybrid feature, adapted from the writings of their beloved Bruno Schulz and two decades in the crafting, will show very large indeed at BFI IMAX just across the river.
Please take the chance to encounter these singularly atmospheric works of art at first hand and at all the scales offered. Once seen, never forgotten – they will haunt both your sleeping and waking hours in the most poetically unsettling of ways.
— Gareth Evans, series co-curator
