Heinrich Holzmüller – { feuilleton }

Quay Brothers posters

This Sweet Sickness (1977).

Looking around for Quay Brothers designs turned up an item I hadn’t seen before, a poster for the UK release of a French film by Claude Miller, This Sweet Sickness, starring Gérard Depardieu. I’ve not seen the film either, nor have I read the Patricia Highsmith novel on which it was based although a copy of the book has been sitting on my shelves for some time, together with a couple of other unread Highsmiths. The poster dates from just before the Quays started to get serious about their own film-making.

Nocturna Artificiala: Those Who Desire Without End (1979). The organ pipes, which don’t appear in the film, are an allusion to the improvised organ score by Stefan Cichonski.

Being graphic designers as well as film-makers puts the Quay Brothers in a very rare class, one where they not only make the films but also design the posters used to promote their films. Offhand, I can only think of the late Eva Svankmajerová as being in the same company so it’s perhaps fitting that her husband and artistic collaborator, Jan Svankmajer, was the subject of an early film by the Quays.

Street of Crocodiles (1986).

Stille Nacht: Dramolet (1988). An early use of Heinrich Holzmüller’s typographic designs.

Continue reading “Quay Brothers posters”

Inner Sanctums—Quay Brothers: The Collected Animated Films 1979–2013

In previous posts about the Quay Brothers’ films I’ve expressed a hope that we might see a new collection from the BFI that gathers together more of their recent works. That’s what we have now in a 2-disc Blu-ray set that will be released in the UK on 10th October.

Quay (2015) directed by Christopher Nolan.

The new collection repeats the contents of the earlier BFI DVD set, The Short Films 1979–2003, while adding some of their recent commissions including Maska (2010), Through the Weeping Glass (2011), and Unmistaken Hands: Ex Voto F.H. (2013). Among the extras there’s a short portrait of the brothers, Quay (2015), directed by Christopher Nolan. This shows the Quays at work in their Southwark studio where they discuss the technical details of animation and puppet-making a little more than I’ve seen in other interviews. Nolan’s film is both beguiling and frustrating, the latter for being so inexplicably short. When I first saw Quay announced I thought it might be a feature-length documentary rather than a fleeting glimpse; the Quays have been interviewed regularly over the past few years so they’re not exactly unforthcoming. I’m hoping now that Nolan’s public enthusiasm for the brothers might at least help them to make another feature, a decade having elapsed since The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005).

Street of Crocodiles (1986).

As to the films, seeing them in high-definition is certainly a plus although the earliest ones were all made in 16mm so they don’t gain a great deal. Street of Crocodiles, however, looks superb, and I found myself noticing details that I’d earlier missed despite numerous viewings. I’m disappointed that two early shorts, Igor: The Paris Years (1982) and Leos Janácek: Intimate Excursions (1983), remain unreleased due to apparent problems with music copyrights. (See this post for YouTube links.) Also uncollected are their other music videos apart from the two produced for His Name Is Alive, together with a handful of other short pieces. (See this post for further links.)

Street of Crocodiles (1986).

Of the longer films on the second disc, Maska has become a favourite, with its combination of a baroque science-fiction scenario (from Stanislaw Lem) and a score by Penderecki. Through the Weeping Glass, a 30-minute documentary about the medical oddities housed in the Mütter Museum in the Quays’ home city of Philadelphia, is a kind of companion piece to The Phantom Museum (2003), a similar study of the Wellcome Collection in London. This is the first film the Europhile Quays have made in the US, and comes with a short documentary showing them at work on the film, and an interview about the production. I’m still getting used to their shift to digital video—I miss the grain and texture of their films—but since I’ve been working digitally myself for many years now I can’t complain if others choose to do the same.

The preview discs of the new collection came without the booklet which will be present in the package. This will include an updated Quays Dictionary by Michael Brooke (as featured in the previous BFI collection), and the 2012 “interview” by the deceased calligrapher Heinrich Holzmüller, On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets. The latter appeared in the catalogue for the Quays’ MoMA exhibition where it was printed at an eye-straining point size. I’m hoping the BFI version will be an improvement.

The Films
Nocturna Artificialia (1979)
The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer (1984)
This Unnameable Little Broom (1985)
Street of Crocodiles (1986)
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1988)
Stille Nacht I: Dramolet (1988)
Ex-Voto (1989)
The Comb (1990)
Anamorphosis (1991)
The Calligrapher (Parts I, II, III) (1991)
Stille Nacht II: Are We Still Married? (1992)
Stille Nacht III: Tales from Vienna Woods (1993)
Stille Nacht IV: Can’t Go Wrong Without You (1994)
In Absentia (2000)
The Phantom Museum (2003)
Songs for Dead Children (2003)
Eurydice, She So Beloved (2007)
Alice in Not so Wonderland (2007)
Kinoteka Ident (2008)
Inventorium of Traces (2009)
Wonderwood for Comme des Garçons (2010)
Maska (2010)
Through the Weeping Glass (2011)
Unmistaken Hands: Ex Voto F.H. (2013)

Special features
Introduction by the Quay Brothers (2006, 20 mins)
Quay (2015, 8 mins): a film by Christopher Nolan
Quay Brothers audio commentaries for This Unnameable Little Broom, Street of Crocodiles, Stille Nacht I-III and In Absentia
The Falls [excerpt] (1980, 5 mins)
BFI Distribution ident (1991, 30 secs)
The Summit (1995, 12 mins)
No Bones About It: Quay Brothers (2010, 12 mins)
Behind the Scenes with the Quay Brothers (2013, 31 mins)
Unmistaken Hands: Ex Voto F.H. trailer (2 mins)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Quay Brothers archive

Holzmüller and the Quays

US one sheet (1996).

Heinrich Holzmüller (also spelt Holtzmüller) was a German printmaker and calligrapher active during the 16th century. He may have been dead for centuries but this inconvenience didn’t prevent him from appearing as an interviewer in the catalogue for the MoMA exhibition of artworks by the Brothers Quay that ran throughout the end of 2012.

Film tie-in edition of Jakob von Gunten (1995).

One of the more informative pieces of information to come from that interview concerned the Quays’ resurrection of typefaces designed by Holzmüller in his Liber Perutilis, a book about lettering and calligraphy published in 1553. The Quay versions were most visible around the time of the production of their first feature, Institute Benjamenta (1995): you can see them on the posters, on the cover of the Serpent’s Tail tie-in edition of Jakob von Gunten and also inside the rare soundtrack CD which the Quays designed for Lech Jankowski.

Institute Benjamenta soundtrack booklet (1998).

I’ve had the MoMA catalogue since it was published, and more than once had searched half-heartedly for Holzmüller’s book without success. A more recent search turned up the goods, however (sometimes it helps to keep following leads from one page to another): a copy of Liber Perutilis may be found online at the Universitätsbibliothek Basel.

Liber Perutilis is only a short book compared to some in the field, but it’s also much more varied and original than others I’ve seen. Among the alphabets which the Quays digitised there are sets showing the letters doubled and tripled in the manner of monograms. The Quays have often signed themselves using a double Q so this may explain the attraction. The undoubled alphabet is especially striking for Holzmüller’s distortions of the letterforms which make them seem like characters viewed under rippled glass. At a time when most books about lettering and calligraphy were showing alphabets produced by careful and elegant hands this is a feature which to our eyes seems surprisingly advanced. The Quays have copied the alphabets fairly closely, making minor changes such as rounding off an E and adding the J and U which are always missing in Latin alphabets of the period. Elsewhere in the book there are many examples of calligraphic flourishes and some unusual pieces of decorative knotwork. As for Holzmüller’s posthumous interview, copies of the MoMA catalogue are still available, while the interview itself will be reprinted in the booklet for the BFI’s forthcoming Blu-ray collection, Inner Sanctums—Quay Brothers: The Collected Animated Films 1979–2013.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Quay Brothers archive