‘Sublimity of a book in twelve songs on the wound [blessure]. I hear it as a blessing of the blessure, a great poetic treatise on the scar at the origin of literary writing—and no doubt of all writing.

‘I have often declared my admiration for Hélène Cixous, for the person and for the work: immense, powerful, so multiple but unique in this century. I have even written, I believe, that Hélène Cixous is in my eyes, today, the greatest writer in the French language. I shall only add two words for Stigmata—and about the said ‘French language’:

‘1. A weave of poetic narratives, this unprecedented book overflows our language, the ‘French language’, in every way, while nonetheless cultivating and illustrating it in a rare and incomparably new fashion. A practically untranslatable fashion. In order to speak of the wound, all wounds, some would say ‘traumatisms’, to name the scar in general, at the origin of Hélène Cixous’s writing and in her ‘primal scenes’, it overflows and scarifies the French language without sacrificing it, marking it while translating itself, in advance. It points poignantly in the direction of the stigma as scar, not far from pick, in the direction also of the stigma which comes from our Greek memory (stigmè: the point, the spike or the punctuality of the instant) with its sti resonating in English (stick and sting), no less than in German (Stechen), etc.

‘2. Stigmata is henceforth a great classic. It can be read as the best introduction to Hélène Cixous’s entire corpus whose strokes of genius it heralds and collects together as the becoming-literary of her life. But as her newest, most unforeseen book, its writing is also perfectly accomplished, its composition admirably orchestrated. One of her most recent masterpieces.’ — Jacques Derrida

‘The texts collected and stitched together sewn and resewn in this volume share the trace of a wound. They were caused by a blow, they are the transfiguration of a spilling of blood, be it real or translated into a haemorrhage of the soul.

‘Every character has been struck in a heart, one of our hearts. A letter stabs Bathsheba. My dog, an avatar of Job, lacerates my foot with his desperate teeth and forever prints his message of indignation in the flesh of my memory. None of the scenes that are played again here in painting, in language, in its several truths, avoids the cruel mark. At the same time, each of these scenes is a scene of flight in the face of the intolerable. But not only flight in order to ‘save one’s skin’ as French idiom says. In fleeing, the flight saves the trace of what it flees. This is why they flee: to maintain the horror unforgettable—the horror we would not live in the present although we want to keep its awful treasure, its proof, its testimony, its transfiguration.

‘Writing, like painting, engendering forms of art that lacerate the eyelids, writing at night to pierce it with lightning: this is my struggle to escape from and to face the terrifying thing, the spirit of crime that resides sometimes in you, sometimes in me. I write to conjure in all the meanings of this word in French and English, in a conjuration—a conspiracy of languages to produce tragic responses to the repetition of evil. Conjure(r) makes appear, makes fly, supplicates.

‘All these texts aim to flee the fatal nail, the sword, the knife, the axe which threatens to fix, to nail, to immobilize them in, by, death. Their first and best ally in the evasion is the poetic use of the languages of language. If only we listen, a language always speaks several languages at once, and runs with a single word in opposite directions.’ — Helene Cixous

 

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Further

Hélène Cixous @ Wikipedia
Film: ‘Ever, Rêve, Hélène Cixous’
Hélène Cixous and the myth of Medusa
Hélène Cixous @ Twitter
A MEETING WITH HELENE CIXOUS
VERENA CONLEY | NOTES ON NIETZSCHE AND HÉLÈNE CIXOUS
Juliet Jacques on Hélène Cixous: The Medusa gets the last laugh
Who is Hélène Cixous ?
‘The rights of men and women are not safe in France’
“I don’t regret attending the school that is Algeria”
KENNETH BURKE DANCES WITH HELENE CIXOUS
Hélène Cixous @ goodreads
Si près, de Hélène Cixous Rencontre
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, LE « CRI DE LA LITTÉRATURE »
Lettres et l’être du deuil chez Hélène Cixous
Hélène Cixous: écrire l’«encore», porte de sortie
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS – interview by OLIVIER ZAHM and DONATIEN GRAU
Hélène Cixous: ‘Conversations’

 

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Extras

Helene Cixous Interview (English)

Helene Cixous: The Flying Manuscript (English)

La Masterclasse d’Hélène Cixous (French)

Vu et vécu en MAI 68: Hélène Cixous (French)

 

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Interview
from Purple

 

OLIVIER ZAHM — Your own history lies at the crossroads of all of European history, of colonialism.
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS — In 1939, my father was mobilized. He was a physician-lieutenant, stationed on the front in Tunisia. He had a small problem, signs of pulmonary trouble… In 1940 he was demobilized and stripped of his French citizenship. In a single stroke, with the anti-Jew laws, we who had been French much longer than most of the French in Algeria or in France lost our French citizenship. My father was forbidden to practice medicine: professions were forbidden us in North Africa, as they were in France. Under the anti-Jew laws, the sole difference between what happened to us and what happened to the Jews in France was that we were “liberated” first because the Americans landed in Algeria in 1942. I didn’t go to school; it was forbidden. My father was no longer practicing medicine. That’s when my mother started working. She was a cutter and seamstress. Later, when the Americans came, the Jews did not have their rights immediately restored. My mother instantly took up with the Americans, doing secretarial work. The first square meal I had was when the Americans came. We suddenly had tins of butter, white bread, jam. I fell in love with the jam-bearing, loud-laughing Americans, like all the people liberated by them. We were raised on Roosevelt. I cried when he died. It was terrible. It felt as if we were losing a kindly person. We followed politics. My father was an atheist and a socialist. His close friends took up with De Gaulle. The word “Allies” was warm and sweet.

OLIVIER ZAHM — We go from the army to statelessness.
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS — That was a wound from which my father never recovered. He had been a socialist in the time of Blum, an idealist. That was when he lost his faith in the French Republic. After the war, he started practicing medicine again, left Oran, and moved to Algiers, where he opened Algeria’s first radiology practice, ordering in the equipment from England. He died in February 1948. My mother found herself alone in a city she didn’t know, penniless, with no family or friends around. She toiled like mad to support us, first as a secretary, then seeking out a profession. She undertook to become a midwife. I was 14 and studied along with her. She was 40 at the time.

DONATIEN GRAU — And thus you made your first approach to literature and poetry, felt your first desire to write.
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS — The desire to write was a great help to me when my father died. I had already been shaped by literature as a little girl. For one thing, my father was a reader, a man of extraordinary talent. When we were young he immersed us in the French language. He had memorized the Larousse dictionary. I recall feeling a shock of delight when I was six, because he taught me the word extraordinary. It was, I thought, an extraordinary word. I was swimming in a world of languages. My mother spoke German with Omi, who spoke to me in German and French. My paternal grandmother spoke Spanish around the house. My paternal father’s family spoke Spanish. I started learning English very early on. When I was 13, my mother sent me to England. I had to go from Algiers to Marseilles, and from there by train to Paris. Then from Paris to Dieppe, and from Dieppe by boat to New Haven. And from there by train to London. In London, I was taken in by one of the formerly German families on my mother’s side; they were now English. I liked England. In 1950, London lay in ruins; it was much poorer and in much greater difficulty than France. We were given meal tickets when we arrived, for instance. I went hungry in England, whereas in France people were already well fed. So I straightaway got the story of wartime England, of England’s resistance, of a marvelous England that I loved. When I returned to Algeria, I was fluent in English. And I soon had only one thing in mind: to leave Algeria as soon as possible; it was an abominable place filled with violence, hatred, contempt for other human beings. I was sure the place would one day explode, and I eagerly awaited that day. I was completely in favor of the Algerian people. My father had worked in solidarity with clients that were referred to as “Arabs.” My mother’s clientele was also essentially “Arab.” She worked in the casbah. I knew from the time I was a little girl: this is a world of total alienation, a world of people blind to their fellow human beings. My mother had found a purpose for herself, bringing babies into the world. I recently took the register in which my mother recorded births to Karim, the Théâtre du Soleil’s cook, who was born in 1963 by my mother’s hand. It made sense for my mother to be in Algeria.

DONATIEN GRAU — Your father’s death hastened your entry into the world of writing.
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS — When I was little, I wanted to flee; I wanted to get out of that repugnant world. I found a solution: I would climb a tree, taking books up with me. I realized very late, when I discovered his high school notebooks, that the choice to do medicine was not at all my father’s. Unbeknownst to me, he had taken a first prize in philosophy. He was a man of letters. He had amassed a library in the Proustian manner. He was a subscriber to the Nelson library and had the whole collection. He also owned the first Gallimard editions of Proust. I was absolutely mad for books and would read them in alphabetical order. For me, they were all equal. I could vaguely sense a small difference between Dumas and Edgar Allan Poe, but my reading was scattershot. I lived, then, in the other world. The second world was literature, and I was also fortunate in that my grandmother, although she had not carried her studies very far, had a passion for German poetry. Omi would sing and recite poems to me by Goethe and Heine, and I loved it. I said to myself: “That’s the path for me.” Down the path of languages, literature, and books. I’d be a reader; I’d live in books. It was a brutal thing when my father died. It was the apocalypse; the world was gone; I couldn’t even walk; the ground had vanished beneath me. It was terrifying. I wasn’t yet 11, I was in sixth grade, and the world had gone. When my father was carried away — he’d suffered hemorrhages and died within a few days — I started writing for him. I saw him one last time, through a window. Our relations were already fairly phantasmal. Knowing he was seriously ill, my father was already keeping a certain distance between him and us. He avoided contact.

DONATIEN GRAU — Is that when you began writing in earnest?
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS — Right then, at that moment, is when I began living in that world. That’s where I settled. Relations with my French professors quickly soured. I was inventive. I was very daring at the time, I realize. Sometimes it was well received, sometimes not. I never hesitated over the path I ought to take. I had to live by books. I couldn’t do otherwise. It was the only thing that could tolerate me and that I could tolerate. The political world I already knew. I had seen it up close. I was good in history precisely for political reasons, because I kept track of the fate of all the peoples I knew. I was an expert in evil. I dreamed of books: we were poor, and my father had left us in dire straits. It wasn’t until much later that my mother began earning enough of a living to support us. We lived off what my father had planted in the garden. We sold the flowers, which was terribly painful for us. We walked everywhere. I was very careful with my expenses. “I must help my mother as soon as possible.” So I earned my agrégation in a flash. I was in hypokhâgne [first of two years of post-secondary study in letters] in Algeria, and I got married, partly in order to get out of there. I was 18.

DONATIEN GRAU — You speak of politics: you’ve made your literary life into a sort of political proposal.
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS — I’ve always thought so. I knew, also, that it was a rather elitist way to go about it. There had to be books. The Algerians had no books; they didn’t go to school. Since the house my father had rented was in an Arab neighborhood, I was living in a world where there were only a handful of “Europeans.” The Europeans never ventured into those neighborhoods; they didn’t know them. Next door to us was a shantytown with 50,000 Arabs and a single fountain for water. At our gate there were “little Zarabes,” as they were called, barefoot and dressed in rags, who would ask us for bread. I was living amid misery and pain. It was frightful. Never the twain could meet, save some rare exceptions. For the little Zarabes, we were “French people” — we who were not French.

DONATIEN GRAU — Your literary and political lives don’t seem all that elitist in light of the impact that écriture féminine [women’s writing] has had.
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS — When I began turning my attention to women I was 22, 23 years old. I was no longer fleeing into literature. By then literature could become the most democratic of the world’s possible tools. One needed only have access to it. But I was living among a proscribed, banned people, who had no access to the tools, who were not admitted to the schools. I arrived in France in 1955. We were then entering a period of decolonization. There was the Algerian War, the so-called “events” in Algeria. I was relieved; it changed my life. I emerged from the plague, from that monstrous nightmare, and found I could develop a thirst for my own life. But I didn’t have a life of my own. Algeria had alienated me from it. Once Algeria had set about liberating itself, I found I was liberated as well. Landing in France at 18, I was greeted with a surprise: when I entered rooms or lecture halls nobody yelled out “dirty Jew,” the daily insult in Algeria. I was surprised. For that brief period, France was not anti-Semitic: there were no Jews left in France. For a few years, until 1962, the givens of anti-Semitism were attenuated. The Jews of France had been deported. French people of my generation had never seen any Jews. They were all dead. But when I went to the university, I encountered something that I had never known in Algeria: misogyny, everywhere. I was from a world that liked women. The women of my family were strong; they carried the family. And in France I suddenly realized that the world was split in two and governed by the pretentious cretins who played at being university professors. I understood then that the chief battle was going to be to deconstruct a phallocracy.

DONATIEN GRAU — And to construct femininity. A central component of your work over the years is the notion that gender is not in any way a limit but, rather, a liberty.
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS — Yes, of course. But for everyone: men, women, animals. As it happened, I completed my studies very quickly, in tribute to my mother. And immediately thereafter I was taken in hand by some excellent men, some exceptional men. My thesis advisor, a marvelous man, a great man of letters, and a former member of the resistance, was so removed from misogyny that he chose to take me under his wing. His name was Jean-Jacques Mayoux. I was truly fostered and respected by men of a certain age who were great doyens at the Sorbonne, and themselves members of minorities and marginalized.

 

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Book

Hélène Cixous Stigmata
Routledge Classics

‘Stigmata is work that gets away: escaping reader, writer, and book… This is a collection of recent short texts by Helene Cixous, who is hailed as a foremost contemporary writer and thinker of our time. World-renowned for her brilliant contributions to French feminism and acclaimed by luminaries such as Jacques Derrida, her writing, and in particular her fictional texts which constitute by far the greatest part of her work, has nonetheless been misunderstood and misread, often simply avoided, to a surprising extent. Cixous is extremely attentive to what language has to say and her playful, boundary-bending, and innovative style is what makes her work so exciting, powerful, moving, and suspicious.

‘A ‘wilful extremist’ according to the London Times, Hélène Cixous is hailed as one of the most formidable writers and thinkers of our time. Acclaimed by luminaries such as Jacques Derrida, her writing has nonetheless been misunderstood and misread, to a surprising extent. With the inclusion of Stigmata, one of her greatest works into the Routledge Classics series, this is about to change. Questions that have long concerned her – the self and the other, autobiographies of writing, sexual difference, literary theory, post-colonial theory, death and life – are explored here, woven into a stunning narrative. Displaying a remarkable virtuosity, the work of Cixous is heady stuff indeed: exciting, powerful, moving, and dangerous.’ — Routledge Classics

Excerpt

*

p.s. Hey. There are some things I keep forgetting to share here for anyone who might be interested, so here they are. This is a half-hour long Zoom conversation I had with the writer Jonathan Alexander about my books and ‘Permanent Green Light’ and other stuff for LARB re: ‘Wrong’s’ publication. There are two very good reviews of ‘Wrong’ at 3:AM Magazine and The Irish Times. And here’s newly published interview I did a couple of years ago with the super cool writer Marcus Mamourian for Heavy Traffic Magazine. ** Shane Christmass, Hey. I have a bead on the Dahmer film. Looks fairly accessible. Snow! Fucking lucky you! Well, from a here-based perspective. ** G, Hi, G! Thank you, my toe is gradually de-swelling and de-purpling. A submarine! Now that’s intriguing/pretty to think about. Oh, wow, I’m obviously chuffed to read your poem, which I will do post-haste aka post-p.s. Thanks you, kind comrade and friend! The wonderful writer Golnoosh Nour has a new poem published, and I guess it was inspired by my work, so I’m both shy and enthusiastic in directing you to it. Here. Have the awesomest day. ** David Ehrenstein, Thanks about my toe. You know it goes, I’m sure. Just have to ride, or, rather, tiptoe, or, wait, the opposite of tiptoe it out. ** Bill, There it was. I trust that ClicketyClack saw your thanks. Toe is inching towards normality, thanks. It’s true it isn’t smokey here. Oh, man, breathe shallow, etc. ** Misanthrope, ClicketyClack is surely thanking you for your thanks wherever they are. I’ve never watched Spongebob. Weird, right? Just one of those flukey things. It’s a very sneaky virus, that’s for sure. Good sleep is ace. My weekend was a bit hobbled, but it wasn’t so bad. Nice weather. ** Ferdinand, Hey, Ferdinand. MTV used to slip in both Quay clips and lots of Quay-derived clips, it’s true. I don’t keep up with Britney’s travails, but I like her. Her stuff, her thing, whatever. I know the guy who runs the James Dean Museum which is housed in JD’s childhood home in Indiana. Clean hands, masks, stand-offishness, and best of luck. And with your short story, natch. ** Maryse, Maryse! Holy moly, how awesome to see you here, pal! That Atlas Press book is of interest, you bet. yes, and what a great press, no? I should do a post about them just in general. My toe is incrementally better. I might try walking 15 minutes to the closest Naturalia today. I tried on Saturday but had to do a swift 180. How are you? How is everything, little and gigantic? xoxoxo, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Aw, delay. But only a week. You got a microphone. Yeah, that was a good idea. We like our Ben to be crystal clear. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! I do remember your impaired toe, yes. Well, you know precisely what I’m toughing out. I read your great conversation with Mark Gluth yesterday. Really so, so heartening that ‘Alone’ is being so extremely rightfully loved. Stay well and exuberant. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Oh, it’s not a doctor thing. Broken little toes are a dime a dozen in a way. I just take my paracetamol and walk gingerly, and it’s getting there. But thank you. I really liked ‘Institute Benjamenta’, but it’s been ages since I watched it, so … Have a fine one/day. ** Right. Today I’m spotlighting probably my favorite book by the great Hélène Cixous, a wild and gorgeous and whip-smart thing called ‘Stigmata’. Know it? If not, I recommend you do. See you tomorrow.

—–

 

‘Trained as illustrators, the Brothers Quay’s films give greater attention to mise-en-scène and the marginal, and are more associative than narrative: “We demand that the decor act as poetic vessels and be foregrounded as much as the puppets themselves. In fact, we ask of our machines and objects to act as much if not more than the puppets … as for what is called the scenario: at most we have only a limited musical sense of its trajectory, and we tend to be permanently open to vast uncertainties, mistakes, disorientations (as though lying in wait to trap the slightest fugitive encounter).

‘Their films reveal the influence of Eastern European culture: whether inspired by animators, composers, or writers, a middle European esthetic seems to have beckoned them into a mysterious locus of literary and poetic fragments, wisps of music, the play of light and morbid textures. Certain films can be considered homages to filmmakers whose work they admire (The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer), others present their own intuitive and visionary encounters with authors, artists and composers whose writings and compositions are transformed into the cinematic medium: Street of Crocodiles, is loosely based on Bruno Schulz’s short story, “Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies,” and was inspired by a print by Fragonard.

‘In scenes of elusive cinematic and literary reference which identify the Quays’ films, one is obliquely reminded of silent filmmakers Kirsanov, Murnau, the surrealist Buñuel and the Russian film poet Tarkowsky; of Kafka (who was greatly influenced by Walser) and of essential myth and fairy tale. Continuing collaboration with the Polish composer Leszek Jankowski supports and counterpoints their careful visual choreography, whether of puppets, exquisite objects or actors. Like Lisa Benjamenta, the images are simultaneously fragile and immortal. The films evade a postmodern context or interpretation, and their epiphanic moments and dreamscapes provide a momentary orientation, but are themselves even greater enigmas within the film’s poetic fabric.

‘Seen as a whole, the Brothers Quay’s works are independent of any definable genre; indeed, the imitation of their unique style which can be observed in films of other animators are a complimentary gesture to the auteur style they have developed. Throughout their opus, a continuity can be observed Quays’ devotion to the marginal, the nobody and the unnoticed, elevated into the sublime.’ — Suzanne Buchan, Shifting Realities

 

Interview (3:51)

 

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Some links

 

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Some imagery

 

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Some words

With the new addition of Maska, Through the Weeping Glass, and Unmistaken Hands to your Blu-ray, is there anything left to add?

The Quay Brothers: Apart from the three new films, and a musical score restored to The Phantom Museum, yes, there are a few others. But these have been left out, as they work better with live performances of the music of Witold Lutosławski, Leoš Janáček, and Bela Bartok, which is how they were commissioned.

Taking in the breadth of your work over time, what kind of statement have you made about independent animation, and staying true to your vision, however dark and singular?

The Quay Brothers: You’d have to admit that at the beginning when we first started out, some of the commissioning bodies like the British Film Institute, Channel 4, or MTV were quite willing to take chances on us, by commissioning projects that clearly were going to explore the marginal realms that appealed to us. But now, having gained a bit more of a reputation, it seems even perversely harder to convince these very same bodies, or newer bodies, to support our newer projects. That perhaps already tells you, and us, a lot that the routes that we’ve taken are decidedly not the routes that these people want to be seen supporting any longer. Our three new films were disparately supported by The Polish Cultural Institute in London, The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, and the Wexner Center in Ohio.

Even today, I still see arguments that stop-motion is for kids, or isn’t proper animation. What do you think of that? Meanwhile, Shaun the Sheep Movie has been compared to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, while Charlie Kaufman’s R-rated Anomalisa could be up for an Oscar.

The Quay Brothers: We’re not sure we understand the notion, as we’ve never heard that stop-motion is not considered animation. But we’re very happy to be enlightened. Although we have yet to see Anomalisa, from our own experience puppets and eroticism are very fascinating territory that we too have explored.

Although a good portion of our films may use puppets, we’ve never exclusively courted this domain. We have always incorporated and blended live-action, pixilation, time-lapse, object animation, and traditional stop-motion animation, to the point where, in some of our films, one would be sometimes hard-pressed to know where one realm gave off into the other. And that’s not even mentioning the two feature films we’ve already done.

What have been the struggles, and triumphs, you’ve experienced in pursuing your art and vision through the decades?

The Quay Brothers: The crucial element in our journey has been to know how to stay small, and how to keep the all-important studio going. Because it’s there where our worlds get fabricated, where we have the chance to explore, experiment, and discover. There will always be the huge corporate side of animation, but there will also always be the more artisanal side of animation, with more individual voices. The history of animation has amply proven this.

 

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Some films

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Punch And Judy: Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy (1980)
‘Following Punch and Judy from their malevolent medieval personas through their much-mollified assimilation into English folklore, this film finally restores the odd couple to their rightful roles as hair-raising anarchists. It is a stunning mixture of mime, mask, painting, crudely animated documents and mischievously reanimated newsreels, as well as the demonic atonalities of a modernist opera by Harrison Britwistle brought to “life” in a puppet fantasy/nightmare.’ — apartbrut

Entirety

 

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Leoš Janáček: Intimate Excursions (1983)
‘In a similar vein, but more successful, is this portrait of Czech composer Leos Janácek. This uses the same cut-out character style but places the composer in Eastern European settings similar (down to the floating tram pantographs) to those seen in the very first Quay film, Nocturna Artificialia (1979). Among the other puppet characters there’s one figure singing an aria who later appears as Enkidu in This Unnameable Little Broom (1985).’ — John Coulthart

Entirety

 

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The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer (1984)
‘The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer is the Quays most explicit interpretation of influence as it is a direct homage to the Czech master animator. Constructed as a sequence of nine lessons, the narrative features a puppet Svankmajer who teaches both a puppet child and the viewer “the importance of objects in [the animator’s] work, their transformation and bizarre combination through specifically cinematic techniques, the extraordinary power of the camera to ‘make strange’, the influence of Surrealism on [his] work, and the subversive and radical role of humour”.’ — Senses of Cinema

Entirety

 

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The Epic of Gilgamesh, or This Unnameable Little Broom (1985)
‘The film takes some of its key visual motifs and develops them into a series of complex constructions: the use of drawers and tables as devices and as mechanisms, the transformation of meaning within an object through juxtaposition and the influence of Surrealism to create a psychosexual drama. Unlike Svankmajer’s ordered, clean white library of objects and meaning, the Quays describe Gilgamesh’s kingdom as one that is “an entirely hermetic universe literally suspended out of time in a black void”. The pale yellow shadow-mottled walls are inscribed with calligraphic text and its seemingly vast expanse is randomly broken up by square holes from which medical hooks occasionally project. A table – a mechanism and a trap – concealing female genitalia within one of its drawers, stands at the centre of Gilgamesh’s domain. High above this space are strung high-tension wires, vibrating in the wind, one caught with a broken tennis racquet.’ — Senses of Cinema

Entirety

 

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The Street of Crocodiles (1986)
‘The Street of Crocodiles is a piece of unsurpassed filmmaking. Aside from the delicate and disturbing movements of this ghetto’s inhabitants, it demonstrates the Quays’ reflexive approach to the process of animation itself. Often referred to in articles and interviews as the liberation of the mistake (for example, in Suzanne H. Buchan’s “The Quay Brothers: Choreographed Chiaroscuro, Enigmatic and Sublime”), the brothers developed a range of visual strategies which not only seek to complicate the physical space in which the characters move but also to extend the mise en scène of the narrative. The Street of Crocodiles develops their use of the camera as “the third puppet” by creating a parallel between the protagonist and the camera itself. Through a combination of macro lenses, shallow focal planes and fast pans, the majority of the images within the film appear as point of view shots. By allowing the camera to become the protagonist’s vision, the environment and its inhabitants slowly shift into uneasy forms, where the furtive glance of the camera echoes the protagonist’s sharp turns, catching glimpses of occurrences that hover on the edges of the frame: unsure of his – and, by implication, our – position within this darkened warren, the film has a palpable paranoia.’ — Senses of Cinema

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1988)
‘As a subtle theme within the Quays’ work, insanity quietly drifts through their narratives. Appearing in both a physical form, as in Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, and as source material itself, madness seems to further the emotive quality of their work. It almost appears as another texture, another layer in the abstraction of the images and the narrative. This is, perhaps, most evident in RfEA; the film is shot in a combination of black and white and colour, live action and animation, and features another lone figure, this time a woman who repeatedly writes a letter with a broken piece of lead. Outside her window, the constantly changing lighting conditions intimate her emotions. In conclusion, the Quays dedicate the film to “E.H. who lived and wrote to her husband from an asylum.”‘ — Senses of Cinema

Entirety

 

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Stille Nacht I, II, IV, V (1988- 2001)
‘Of these works, the Quays have said that they are, in some way, connected to their personal output with “just the same dark drift, basically inscrutable. It’s gently mysterious”. Michael Atkinson describes the Stille Nacht series of music videos as “shorts [which] seem to function as working junk drawers, using up whatever the Brothers couldn’t squeeze into their larger films”. Atkinson continues by stating that the music video Can’t Go Wrong Without You (Stille Nacht IV) “may be one of the Quay’s most disturbing pieces, a bizarre Easter suite with the resourceful stuffed rabbit from Stille Nacht II battling the forces of evil (a pixillated human in horns and skullface) for the possession of an egg”.‘ — Senses of Cinema

 

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Unmistaken Hands: Ex Voto F.H. (1989)
‘An extremely obscure minute-long short by the Brothers Quay in 1989. Animation appears to be done in ‘Cutout’ style, is abstract and plotless – more a moving painting than anything else. Featured on the ‘Inner Sanctums’ blu-ray boxset featuring a vast collection of shorts by the Quay brothers.’ — letterboxd

Trailer

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The Comb (From The Museums Of Sleep) (1990)
‘The Comb opens in the shadowy bedroom of a sleeping beauty and seems to enter her mind and burrow into her dreams. Based on a fragment of text by the Austrian writer Robert Walser, The Comb is an exploration of the subconscious visualized as a labyrinthine playhouse haunted by a doll-like explorer. A mesmerizing and resonant blend of live action and animation, The Comb is set to a sensuous score of violins, guitars and attic room cries and whispers, and bathed in a gorgeous golden glow.’ — Zeitgeist Films

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De Artificiali Perspectiva, or Anamorphosis (1991)
‘Uses animation to explore anamorphosis, a method to put hidden images within an artwork, by distorting it using the rules of perspective.’ — IMDb

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The Calligrapher (1991)
an ident commissioned for the BBC2 television channel, but never broadcast

 

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Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995)
‘For their first live-action film, the Quays adapted Robert Walser’s novel Jakob von Gutten into Institute Benjamenta. Apart from the obvious relationship between Jacob’s lessons and the physical act of animating an object for film, Institute Benjamenta’s sublime moments once again play out the obsessions of the Quays. Like the Unnameable Little Broom, the Institute is a symbolic structure that is infused with latent sexual tension, most obviously, within the growing attraction between Jacob and Lisa Benjamenta. Further moments lie within a vial containing powdered stag semen and in the anamorphic representation of rutting deer on one of the Institute’s walls. To return from the dead, to be reanimated, is the essence of the Quays’ work. Taking found objects and constructing them into new forms with new meaning is only the beginning of their dark material. In their fictions narratives need not move as smoothly as we would like and nor should their imagery be as obvious. In all, these films are like their makers: identical enigmas, a life within a life, and a dream within a dream.’ — Senses of Cinema

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Songs for Dead Children (2003)
‘Another short, grainy film from the Quay Brothers. This one has funny singing in it.’ — letterboxd

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The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2006)
‘Their second live action film, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005), satisfies this possibility in many ways. Like a true auteur, the Brothers consistently return to similar themes, similar narratives and to similar techniques, with each film not necessarily being different from but an extension of their primal narrative. For the Quays that primal narrative is tragedy, a failed attempt to escape from beautifully sinister and arcane mechanisms. When such a narrative is sited within a world constructed and populated by the lost, the lonely, the rejected and the damaged, then an intense melancholy descends and the dream becomes a complex shifting of realities: narrative is given over to imagery and story dissolves into timeless myth. It is here that The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes exists, a film that surrenders its narrative to the beauty of the image in order to create the mythical.’ — Senses of Cinema

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The Making of “The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes”

 

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Inwentorium śladów (‘Inventorium of Traces’) (2009)
‘In the Renaissance castle of the Polish count – Jan Potocki – in Lancut, the modern traces of a past glory persevere and become visible again at the tones of Krzysztof Penderecki’s music and Brothers Quay’s imaginary animation.’ — ligotti.net

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Maska (2010)
‘Maska is a 23-minute digital animation based on Stanislaw Lem’s short story, The Mask (1976), which the producers have recently made available on YouTube. It was perhaps inevitable that if the Quays were going to venture into science fiction they’d use an Eastern European source. Lem’s story concerns a sophisticated technological society which is nonetheless still a monarchy. The narrator is an artificial woman who the aristocracy have created for a special mission; her human exterior conceals a robot interior, but this is no Maria from Metropolis. Midway through the story the robot breaks free of its human shell and is revealed to be a mantis-like creature. … Vast budgets demand simple-minded narratives with mass appeal so it’s left to animation and low-budget films to venture into areas that would be off-limits elsewhere. Maska is an impressive film, one of the best Quay shorts I’ve seen for some time.’ — John Coulthart

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The Metamorphosis (2012)
‘The Quay Brothers’ interest in Franz Kafka goes back to their days as design students at the Philadelphia College of Art in the late 1960s, and they originally conceived the notion of adapting Kafka’s best known story to film in the mid-1970s, in a series of drawings currently on view in the Quay Brothers gallery exhibition. Shot in digital video, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is an avant-garde combination of stop-motion animation, puppetry, and live-action pantomime that recalls the Quays’ earlier encounters with the music of Janáek, the theater of Michel de Ghelderode, and the experimental storytelling strategies used in their British television documentaries with Keith Griffiths in the early 1980s.’ — AWM

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p.s. Hey. This weekend a thus far silent, very generous reader of this blog who has decided to call themself ClicketyClack gifts you all with a very finely wrought Brothers Quay Day. Please give some portion of your weekend over to exploring or even scouring the goods on display and put forward your thoughts therewith in the commenting arena, thanks. And ClicketyClack, you’re a kind and fine upstanding human if there ever was one, thank you. ** David Ehrenstein, The Japanese are pretty much the masters of the form or so it seems to me. ** Tosh Berman, Oh, yes, Tosh, I visited Kappabashi more than once. I went there planning to buy a favourite, but there were so many hundreds of genius fake foods that I couldn’t decide. It was like walking on the sidewalks of heaven in so many words. Definitely making a beeline back there the minute Tokyo becomes a possibility again, and this time I’ll just go eeny-meeny-miny-moe if it comes to that. ** tomk, Hi, Tom! Yes, I well remember and miss C. It’s sad that so many beloved d.l.s are so long lost and untraceable. But such is the nature of this beast. Slatted Light is on Facebook, so I see his ongoing thoughts there once in a while. Teasers, I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it. There’s a piece of it in an anthology that Chris Kelso edited called ‘I Transgress’. But otherwise it’s pretty interconnected, and I’m not sure pieces of it would really work on their own. But we’ll see. Thanks for wanting. Off the top of my head and knowing almost nothing, it would seem like moving to the UK might be a really great idea, at least in the sense that you’d be less isolated and more connected up, not that I have any idea that you feel disconnected, etc. Hardened can be helpful as long as it doesn’t transmute into despair. Hm, interesting post idea. The commenters here these days aren’t the tight knit group we had back in the days when I did group posts, but let me throw your idea out there and see what happens. Everyone, The excellent writer and longtime blog d.l. tomk aka Thomas Kendall has an idea/proposal that he would like you to consider. Will you? If you’re interested, give shouts. Here’s Tom: ‘I’ve an idea for a day. If people are interested. Everyone submits one sentence. One sentence of something they’ve written that they like. Totally context free. Maybe an image. Anyone up for it?’ ** _Black_Acrylic, Ha ha, I love Haribo, and I especially love the Haribo candies that are lightly brushed on one edge/side with marshmallow, but that’s a helluva lot of marshmallow, so I don’t know. ** G, Hi! I always think of Sabrina the Teenage Witch when I hear that name, but I guess a lot of people do. I wish I’d met your Sabrina. My Sabrina, like me, is a huge fan of dark rides and haunted attractions. Painting your radiator! I don’t know why that sounds fun and exotic because I’m sure it isn’t. I stupidly banged my foot against something yesterday and broke my little toe, which is now very swollen and purple and painful, so I’m not sure how much I’ll get out and about in a pleasurable way this weekend, but I intend to try/hobble. Mm, well, I’m betting people out there will be totally into your non-fiction piece, and they’ll either not even think about the delayed appearance or else the timing will even enhance the piece. I can’t wait to read it. Oh, gosh, that’s super kind and a true honour that you’re writing about my stuff. Thank you so much, that’s amazing. Ha ha, I like long comments, no sweat. I hope your weekend is joyful in some/every shape and form. ** Misanthrope, If I was rich and had a huge mansion, I think I would collect fake food. Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo collects fake food, or used to at least, and I hear his collection is world class. Well, from what I understand from the news and talking with my LA friends, the mask mandate has not in fact been widely followed, so there’s one reason. And besides that, all but the most pro masks leak a little and are not perfect protectors. Pretty much everyone in France wears masks as commanded, and our cases are starting to go up too, so there you go. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! Yeah, I like fake everything too pretty much. But I think the discrepancy between looking at something that triggers a wish to put it in your mouth -> stomach and the thing itself being a chunk of plastic has a special kind of transgressive charge or something? Oh, the podcast was awesome. So happy to see all the really great attention for ‘Alone’. I hope you’re happy. I sure am. ** Steve Erickson, It’s not a huge surprise that your eyes need time, I think, especially since they’re constantly in use. Hang in there. No, I haven’t heard or read anything re: that controversy about ‘Cuties’. I don’t think it’s caused any kind of fuss whatsoever over here, or maybe a very marginal one that didn’t make the headlines. ** Okay. I leave you all in the capable hands of ClicketyClack and the capable visual fodder of the Brothers Quay. Have some kind of blast. See you on Monday.