The Noose.The first scene in Wojciech Has’s filmography belongs to an accordion. The instrument is shown in a contracted state, dangling from the ceiling of an antique shop. Outside the shop, a little boy ogles it through the window; he dreams of playing it. Later in Has’s debut fiction short, Harmonia (1947), he dramatizes that dream. Has’s understanding of cinema as an oneiric canvas is apparent from the very beginning, and his sense that its narratives were meant to trip over themselves through elisions, reversals, and collapses reinforced itself throughout his career. His films are frequently in a state of mutation and his characters always on introspective journeys; objects are the only constant, as their material weight exhibits more solidity than his stories’ whims or his characters’ souls. All the while, Has’s camera acts like an accordion, playing in its own time, starting wide and pushing...
- 3/21/2024
- MUBI
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Andrzej Żuławski's The Most Important Thing: Love (1975) is showing November 22 - December 22, 2017 in the United States.The DevilKiedy wszedłeś między wrony, musisz krakać jak i one.
(‘When among the crows, caw as they do.’)—Polish sayingAndrzej Żuławski’s That Most Important Thing: Love (1975) is unlike any film he ever made, and was certainly a departure in his visual sensibility relative to the feature films he had made previously in his native Poland: The Third Part of the Night (1971) and The Devil (1972). Narratively and visually, the film is at once an oddity and a turning point in Żuławski’s oeuvre, and in viewing it, it would benefit the viewer to understand the director’s experience with the French cinematic tradition and its effect on his own cinema.Żuławski was born into a well-known family of artists that spanned several generations in Poland,...
(‘When among the crows, caw as they do.’)—Polish sayingAndrzej Żuławski’s That Most Important Thing: Love (1975) is unlike any film he ever made, and was certainly a departure in his visual sensibility relative to the feature films he had made previously in his native Poland: The Third Part of the Night (1971) and The Devil (1972). Narratively and visually, the film is at once an oddity and a turning point in Żuławski’s oeuvre, and in viewing it, it would benefit the viewer to understand the director’s experience with the French cinematic tradition and its effect on his own cinema.Żuławski was born into a well-known family of artists that spanned several generations in Poland,...
- 12/1/2017
- MUBI
Shock looks at the Blu-ray release of 1973 Polish surrealist film The Hourglass Sanatorium. Cannes Special Jury Award Winner The Hourglass Sanatorium is a journey within a jaunt perpendicular to a peregrination and overlapped with a transmigration; Wojciech Has’ sumptuous adaptation of the works of Polish writer Bruno Schulz results in a strongly visualized odyssey…
The post Review: Polish Mind-Bender The Hourglass Sanatorium on Blu-ray appeared first on Shock Till You Drop.
The post Review: Polish Mind-Bender The Hourglass Sanatorium on Blu-ray appeared first on Shock Till You Drop.
- 11/27/2015
- by Chris Alexander
- shocktillyoudrop.com
Above: Franciszek Starowieyski’s 1970 poster for Mademoiselle (Tony Richardson, UK/France, 1966).In Christopher Nolan’s new short film about the Quay Brothers (titled—with Nolan’s predilection for mono-nomenclature—simply Quay) he gives us a clue to some of the twin animators’ influences in the film’s opening shots. After drawing back the curtains in their curiosity shop of a studio, Timothy Quay opens a glass cupboard to remove a book. Blink and you’ll miss it, but on the shelves are books on Marcel Duchamp, Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz, Czech artists Jan Zrzavy, Vlastislav Hofman and Jindrich Heisler, and—most prominently—a book on Polish artist Franciszek Starowieyski.I wrote a few years ago about the Quays’ love of Polish film posters and Franciszek Starowieyski (1930-2009) is one of the indisputable later masters of the Polish school. From the mid 50s until the late 80s he produced some 100 film...
- 8/30/2015
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
It’s a cliche to say that there aren’t many filmmakers quite like insert-director’s name, but in the case of the American identical directing duo known as the Quay Brothers, there truly isn’t another voice in the world of cinema that is quite like theirs.
For over 30 years, the pair of Pennsylvania-born filmmakers have been turning out some of cinema’s most original and breathtakingly unforgettable feature films, mixing a love for Eastern European literature with an equally deep affinity for puppetry and stop motion animation. Marked by a dark sense of humor and an assured hand in mixing live action and animation, the Brothers Quay have, with films like The Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes, become some of the most interesting names in the world of film, genre be damned.
However, as the medium of short film becomes more and more widespread and well regarded, a new...
For over 30 years, the pair of Pennsylvania-born filmmakers have been turning out some of cinema’s most original and breathtakingly unforgettable feature films, mixing a love for Eastern European literature with an equally deep affinity for puppetry and stop motion animation. Marked by a dark sense of humor and an assured hand in mixing live action and animation, the Brothers Quay have, with films like The Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes, become some of the most interesting names in the world of film, genre be damned.
However, as the medium of short film becomes more and more widespread and well regarded, a new...
- 8/19/2015
- by Joshua Brunsting
- CriterionCast
The Quay Brothers aren't your typical American directors. The identical twins moved to Europe during their college years and have stayed in the UK since the late Seventies, creating a varied body of work for a mainly European audience. But in a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Stephen and Timothy Quay will finally get serious recognition on our shores.
We spoke to Ron Magliozzi, the associate film curator at MoMA, where their latest exhibition, "On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets," debuts this weekend. Magliozzi and his team at MoMA resurrected about 50 minutes of “lost films” from the early years of the brothers' work, as well as excerpts from their stage productions and multiple television commercials.
The Brothers Quay are perhaps best known for their 1986 film, "Street of Crocodiles," which was based on the short novel by Bruno Schulz. After that, they got a call...
We spoke to Ron Magliozzi, the associate film curator at MoMA, where their latest exhibition, "On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets," debuts this weekend. Magliozzi and his team at MoMA resurrected about 50 minutes of “lost films” from the early years of the brothers' work, as well as excerpts from their stage productions and multiple television commercials.
The Brothers Quay are perhaps best known for their 1986 film, "Street of Crocodiles," which was based on the short novel by Bruno Schulz. After that, they got a call...
- 8/11/2012
- by The Huffington Post
- Huffington Post
★★★☆☆ Time behaves in unpredictable ways, notions of reality and fantasy collapse and painful personal and national histories are examined in two films by Polish director Wojciech Jerzy Has, The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) and The Saragossa Manuscript (1964). Both films are based on works of literature; the latter from Jan Potocki's historical novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa and the former drawn from several short story collections by Bruno Schulz, most notably Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.
Read more »...
Read more »...
- 3/20/2012
- by CineVue
- CineVue
The Tree of Codes cover. There’s something about Jonathan Safran Foer that drives a certain breed of dyspeptic New York writer/blogger to drink—more so than usual, anyway. They chafe at the six-figure advances, the visiting professor gigs at Yale and Nyu, the majestic Park Slope brownstone. There’s even a catchphrase for it—Schadenfoer! However, those hoping for a colossal career misstep might want to pour another highball, because his latest book, Tree of Codes, is a quietly stunning work of art. The first major title by new London-based publisher Visual Editions, Tree of Codes was created by slicing out chunks of text from Foer’s favorite novel, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish author Bruno Schulz. The result is a spare, haunting story that appears to hang in negative space on the page. Pretentious? Possibly. But it is also very, very cool. Vf Daily spoke with...
- 11/10/2010
- Vanity Fair
The twin animators Stephen and Timothy Quay made their name based on a stunning set of short films such as The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer and Street of Crocodiles. The latter was based on the short story collection of the same name by Polish author Bruno Schulz. Now the Quay Brothers are embarking upon the production of their third feature film, which will be based upon Schulz's other published work: Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Twitch reports on the film with a synopsis, which I've pasted below. The film will be a mixture of live action and animation, as has been the case for their previous features. (Institute Benjamenta and The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes.) This sounds like it might be more of a 50/50 split between the two formats than has been the case before. Schulz, by the way, is a great writer with a tragically tiny collection...
- 2/22/2010
- by Russ Fischer
- Slash Film
Bank on this: If the proposed new feature from iconic animators The Brothers Quay gets the green light to move ahead it will be very strange indeed.
The proposed film is a homage and adaptation of Bruno Schulz s novella: Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass and will be set squarely within the enigmatic realm of a ghostly Sanatorium and a 13th freak month. The main subject of the narrative is a journey through a somnambulistic world by the son, Jozef, to visit his purportedly dying Father in a Sanatorium. Once there, Jozef reports on the confusions and horrors of this ever shifting Limbo. Little by little the tissues of reality loosen around Jozef; he becomes subject to a different clock and to the peculiar experiments with Time presided over by a mysterious Dr. Gotard[and a ventriloquizing Auctioneer]: "......here, we are always late by a certain interval of time of which we cannot define the length.
The proposed film is a homage and adaptation of Bruno Schulz s novella: Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass and will be set squarely within the enigmatic realm of a ghostly Sanatorium and a 13th freak month. The main subject of the narrative is a journey through a somnambulistic world by the son, Jozef, to visit his purportedly dying Father in a Sanatorium. Once there, Jozef reports on the confusions and horrors of this ever shifting Limbo. Little by little the tissues of reality loosen around Jozef; he becomes subject to a different clock and to the peculiar experiments with Time presided over by a mysterious Dr. Gotard[and a ventriloquizing Auctioneer]: "......here, we are always late by a certain interval of time of which we cannot define the length.
- 2/20/2010
- Screen Anarchy
The eccentric stop-motion geniuses (and identical twins) the Quay Brothers, aka Stephen and Timothy Quay and/or the Brothers Quay, create mesmerizing and wonderfully creepy stop-motion films since their first films in the '70s. With a wild assortment of esoteric influences from Polish animators, Kafka and Bruno Schulz (whose book The Street of Crocodiles inspired their short film by the same name), and an assortment of Eastern European composers and puppeteers, the Quay Brothers could be (and have been) studied in great detail by film scholars -- or just enjoyed by viewers who love their dark and uncanny worlds of broken dolls, over-loved stuffed animals, and clockwork creatures.
One of my favorite short films of theirs is a video they did for the song "Are We Still Married?" by the haunting Michigan group His Name is Alive. The two groups of artists mesh perfectly, and in fact did collaborate on another video as well,...
One of my favorite short films of theirs is a video they did for the song "Are We Still Married?" by the haunting Michigan group His Name is Alive. The two groups of artists mesh perfectly, and in fact did collaborate on another video as well,...
- 10/17/2009
- by Jenni Miller
- Cinematical
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