“We use virgin olive oil, and oil the eye”: the Quay brothers on the method behind their uncanny worlds

In the world of the Quay brothers, all matter is viewed through – and transformed by – lenses. In Dormitorium, the current exhibition of the animators’ models and film decors at London’s Swedenborg House, some of the items on display take the form of peepshows. But these are not the traditional kind, with tiny holes to squint into. Instead, they have large lenses on the front: gaze into them and you see distended masses of foliage, or a twisting assemblage of horns unfurling like octopus tentacles, or an unclassifiable being with a potato-like head, its single baleful eye staring back at you.

Then there are the large vitrines, sets for the Quays’ stop-motion animations over the years, including The Comb (1991), Street of Crocodiles (1986) and their long-awaited third feature, part animation part live action, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Looking at these sets and the delicate-looking puppets poised within them, frozen in mid-gesture, it is hard to imagine them set in motion. But in the films, these seemingly fixed constructions are brought alive by sudden shifts of light, and by the camera dissecting every corner of their spaces, with the precision of keyhole surgery.

Mounting these displays for exhibition purposes “becomes another creative act,” Stephen and Timothy Quay tell me when I visit them in their studio near Old Street. “Four or five of them,” they say about the peepshow boxes, “demanded close-ups. Sometimes adding a lens approximates movement – you move your head slightly and you get the sense that the space is being animated within.”

The Dormitorium show comes to London as part of Kinoteka, the Polish Film Festival. The particular Polish connection here is that Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is the Quays’ second film to be inspired by the 20th-century writer Bruno Schulz, following Street of Crocodiles. Schulz, also an artist who illustrated his own stories, was a master of the hallucinatory, transforming his home town of Drohobycz in Galicia into a haunted private realm of the imagination; his legendary status is furthered by his tragic death in 1942, shot by a Gestapo officer.

With live action sequences shot in a studio in Warsaw, the Quays’ film – premiered last autumn in Venice and playing this week at BFI IMAX – is inspired generally by Schulz’s imaginative style, and specifically by the title story of the collection Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. The protagonist Jozef travels by train to visit his father in a sanatorium – where he discovers that the old man, though already dead, is still alive in a place governed by strange fluidities of time.

While both are inspired by Schulz, there is no direct connection between the Quays’ Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium – the latter is not a sequel. But they are stylistically and thematically related: in both, the action is framed through uncanny viewing machines of arcane, archaic design. Sanatorium involves the auctioning of an item listed as ‘Maquette for the Sepulchre of a Dead Retina’. To quote the Quays’ notes, it features “a skilfully hidden puzzle drawer purportedly containing the deceased retina of its owner.”

The retina is one of the most disturbingly material objects in the Quays’ armoury, seen in close-up pulsing, liquefying and drying out in ways not easily explained by the customary techniques of stop-motion animation. In reality, the Brothers clarify, the mysterious object is a sheep’s eyeball from a butcher’s. And the pulse? “You just have to know how to use a hairdryer. We use virgin olive oil, and oil the eye.”

The dialogue in Sanatorium is in Polish, to catch the tone and texture of Schulz’s world. It is a language that the Quays themselves don’t speak, which perhaps accounts for the otherworldliness of the film’s dialogue – a distant, incantatory quality, as if the words were themselves found objects suspended in dusty air.

Aside from their two predominantly live-action features Institute Benjamenta (1995) and The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005), the Quays have intermittently used human figures in their animation shorts; here they decided to mix actors and puppets because “we definitely wanted two parallel universes”. Sanatorium was originally conceived as being 75% live action, 25% animation, until their long-term producer Keith Griffiths suggested reversing the proportions.

Hence the film’s prelude, involving a group of top-hatted chimney sweeps and the auction. The human actors in Sanatorium include a briefly glimpsed woman (played by ballet dancer Zenaida Yanowsky), an allusion to Schulz’s one-time fiancée Josefina Szelinska. But the actors do not only frame the narrative: their presence leaks into the main action. “You frame the live action world within the décor of the puppets, there’s a blur.”

This human presence also involves a series of erotic rituals enacted by a woman, played by Wioletta Kopanska, and her male admirers. These sequences are based on The Book of Idolatry, a cycle of 20 images that Schulz made using the ‘cliché verre’ or glass print technique, for sale to private collectors: sadomasochistic scenes in which groups of men (some clearly modelled on Schulz himself) kneel or crawl in abject adulation around regally unconcerned female figures.

Given the brilliance with which the Quays have developed their singular animation language over some 45 years, it is all the more extraordinary that they only ventured into this area at the age of 32. “When we were making early films in 8mm, we were working with actors before we did puppets.”

The turning point came when Keith Griffiths suggested they make an experimental film. “We said, ‘We don’t do experimental films’. He said, ‘Well, just write something.’ We wrote something for puppets and it became Nocturna Artificialia (1979).”

 “When we were doing a lot of our drawings, we always felt that we wanted to give depth, sound and music, those elements. We thought that with a tabletop, the two of us could experiment and try things out and make it like a laboratory.

“Puppets are only this high. They’re not going to rock anybody’s boat, they’re not going to cost a lot of money. Nobody would trust us with a crew, we were rookies. So we just said, ‘Let’s work with puppets’.”

That has not been an easy path to follow, given the minuteness of the Quays’ artisanal approach, while the determinedly anti-mainstream tenor of their dreamlike (not to say nightmarish) worlds is not an obvious magnet for investment. Sanatorium took 19 years to reach completion, much of that time spent on other projects (shorts, stage and opera design, advertising work).

“There was never money up front, so we started in 2005. We did a pilot, we did some live action scenes – and then, you know, you get hooked into doing something else. Sometimes there was a four-year gap; we never gave up and just kept doing it whenever we had a good chance of a clean run, where we could really build up the momentum.”

While they now shoot in 4K, the Quays retain an analogue imagination, a tenacious residue of antiquarian spirit in the face of hyper-modernity. The Quays’ worlds and the beings that inhabit them are made of other objects and their fragments: scissors, feathers, doll heads, the detritus of flea markets. Then there’s the recurring landscape with a train in Sanatorium: “It was a little HO train that we found on eBay and the mountains are all cork. We bought 20 kilos of cork – you can just carve them and set them in and they become the landscape.”

The traditional methods and values endure – matte, materiality, manipulation by hand. “It’s all silent cinema,” say the Quays.

Dormitorium: The Film Décors of the Quay Brothers exhibition is at London’s Swedenborg House until 4 April, as part of Kinoteka Polish Film Festival.

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, backed by the BFI Filmmaking Fund, screens at BFI IMAX with a Q&A with the directors on 26 March.