The Brothers Quay Take Christopher Nolan’s ‘Quay’ Documentary On Tour
Stop-motion influentials, and identical twin brothers, Timothy and Stephen Quay, are hitting the road with a well-deserved retrospective — courtesy of a cerebral cinema auteur.
Beginning this Wedneday, August 19, in Manhattan, Christopher Nolan (Inception, Memento) curates The Quay Brothers in 35mm, a national tour of the animators’ selected shorts — as well as the U.S. premiere of Nolan’s short doc, Quay. The 70-minute program kicks off a one-week run at New York City’s Film Forum, screening new 35mm prints of Brothers Quay’s haunting In Absentia, The Comb, and Street of Crocodiles, as well as Nolan’s behind-the-scenes peek at their painstaking process. On Wednesday, Nolan himself will be on hand to merge minds with the Brothers Quay, who in turn will also appear at Thursday, Friday, and Saturday’s stands in New York.
Other cities on the tour include Dallas (Alamo Drafthouse Richardson, 9/3-7), LA (Cinefamily, 9/4-10 with appearances by Nolan), Houston (Museum of Fine Arts, 9/12-13), Austin (Alamo Drafthouse Ritz, 9/17), Cleveland (Cleveland Cinematheque, 9/24-27), Boston (Brattle Theatre, 9/25-10/1), Detroit (Detroit Institute of Art, 10/9-11), Seattle (SIFF Film Center, 10/9-15), Chicago (The Music Box Theatre, 10/16-22) and Toronto (TIFF Bell Lightbox Theater, 10/27).
Through critically acclaimed work over three decades and counting, the Quays’ short and feature films are hallmarks of uncanny imagination, often assembled from discarded parts and materials, that have little in the way of contemporary analogue. From full-lengths like Institute Benjamenta and The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes to shorts like The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer and Street of Crocodiles, which Terry Gilliam called one of the ten best animated films of all time, the Brothers Quay have amassed a defiant but dazzling credibility.
Those who would prefer an exhaustive retrospective to take home can check out the Blu-ray debut of The Quay Brothers: Collected Short Films, which unlike its DVD twin exclusively includes Nolan’s doc. The dark bounty arrives October 20 during The Quay Brothers in 35mm’s final week in America, before shipping off to Toronto for an October 27 wrap.
