Brothers Quay – Page 6 – { feuilleton }

Butcher’s Hook, a film by Simon Pummell

“Butcher’s hook” is Cockney rhyming slang for “look”, something alluded to in this short and wordless blend of live action and animation. But it also has a more sinister connotation when the fate of the taxidermist becomes apparent. As with Pummell’s earlier Secret Joy of Falling Angels, animal skeletons and silhouettes predominate. The film was co-written by novelist Simon Ings while the sound is by regular Quay Brothers collaborator Larry Sider.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Secret Joy of Falling Angels, a film by Simon Pummell

The Mascot, a film by Wladyslaw Starewicz

A recent interview with the Brothers Quay mentioned The Mascot (1933), a Starewicz animation I’d not seen, so here it is. IMDB has a summary:

A toy stuffed dog has just been sewn together when it hears a young child ask for an orange. The child’s mother explains that they have no money, and so she cannot buy any oranges. The dog is then packed up along with a box full of other toys to be sold, but it soon winds up in the street. The dog picks up an orange from a curbside stand, and hopes to take it home to the child. But that night, before the dog can get back to the child’s home, it must face a series of strange and frightening adventures.

A toy’s separation from its owner followed by a fraught journey home is essentially the plot of all the Toy Story films, but Starewicz’s short is rather more grotesque than anything you’ll get from Pixar, especially in the carnivalesque second half. There’s a choice of viewing (and quality) at YouTube, Ubuweb or the Internet Archive.

Weekend links 273

Byronic I by Boris Pelcer. Via Full Fathom Five.

• “Music determines everything in terms of our narrative. Music demands, music suggests. Whereas traditional Hollywood animation is all based on character development—you know, there’s Toy Story and it’s Tom Hanks’s voice pushing the thrust of the action. For us, décor is all part of it. It’s the objects, a sense of atmosphere, the stimmung (mood) of what’s happening in this landscape where the puppet is just, invariably, a tiny element.” The Brothers Quay talking to JW McCormack about their films, and about Quay, a short documentary by Christopher Nolan.

• Croissants with Cthulhu: Stephanie Gorton Murphy reports on the Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast at last week’s NecronomiCon. I didn’t attend this: abject silliness is the last thing I want at 8 o’clock in the morning.

• “…a light daze for the rest of the afternoon, detrimental to studying but advantageous for daydreaming.” Italo Calvino on his cinema-going youth.

Only in that brief moment of absolute uncertainty – when both options seem equally plausible and implausible, when neither thought can be accepted or rejected, when everything can be explained and nothing can be explained – only in that moment do we really have this horror of philosophy, this questioning of the principle of sufficient reason. It is for this reason that Todorov qualifies his definition by stating that the “fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty.”

Eugene Thacker in an extract from Tentacles Longer Than Night (Horror of Philosophy, vol. 3), Zero Books, 2015

• It’s always good to hear some new rumblings by Emptyset. The Guardian has a stream of side 1 of the latest release, Signal.

• David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen receives a film screening at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, on Saturday, 5th September.

• Sea Calls Me Home, another song from the forthcoming Julia Holter album.

• Digital visualizations of imagined future landscapes by Mike Winkelmann.

• Mix of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. IX by David Colohan.

• Cherchez la femme: Women and Surrealism at Sotheby’s, NYC.

• At It’s Nice That: 50 years of A Humument by Tom Phillips.

• April 16, 1963: Housewife on LSD

• Tentaclii: a Lovecraft blog

• Signal (1981) by Phew | Signals (1983) by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno | Signals (2010) by The Soundcarriers

The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, a film by the Brothers Quay

A busy week here (for a change) so this is a bit of a lazy choice but there is a Wunderkammer present. The Quays made this in 1984 for a Svankmajer documentary, and it’s still one of my favourites: Svankmajer as subject, lots of Prague references, and wonderful music (borrowed from Svankmajer’s own films) by Zdenek Liska. This is also one of the few films you’ll see with animated characters demonstrating some film animation of their own. Watch it here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Quay Brothers archive

More Brothers Quay scarcities

Look What the Cat Drug In (Long Way Down) (1992).

More short films by the Brothers Quay that haven’t yet appeared on their DVDs. Look What the Cat Drug In is a music video for Michael Penn that I was unable to find last time I did a YouTube trawl. It’s a good one.

Dolls (1994).

A 30-second warning about the perils of AIDS, made for the Partnership for a Drug Free America. Watch for the bizarre detail of a puppet snorting coke. The Quays made a lot of commercials and idents during the 1990s but few of them surface.

Black Soul Choir (1996).

A music video for 16 Horsepower featuring animated nails and pieces of chalk.

Alice in Not So Wonderland (2008).

Another short warning—climate change this time—made for Live Earth. How much of the message makes it through the surrealism is debatable but it’s good to see the Quays’ take on Lewis Carroll.

The Metamorphosis (2012).

Mikhaïl Rudy plays a piano piece by Leos Janácek (the subject of an earlier Quays film) while Gregor Samsa deals with his traumatic awakening. The previous scarcities post found a trailer for this piece which apparently runs for 33 minutes. The version linked here is only the first 5 minutes but it gives a better idea of the film as a whole.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Quay Brothers archive