Quay Brothers

Featuring selections from the Quay Brothers’ compendium of short films, Phantom Museums spans their 30-year career. Renowned for their unparalleled contributions to the field of puppet film, identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay combine visual, literary, musical, and philosophical influences with a singular sensibility. Inspired by the films of Jan Svankmajer and Jiri Barta, the Quay Brothers bring together the quaintness and delicacy of early animation with painstakingly hand assembled sets in their films. Program:

• Street of Crocodiles - 1986, 20:32 min.
• The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer - 1984, 14:12 min.
• Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies - 1987, 14:29 min.
• The Comb (From the Museum of Sleep) - 1990, 18:04 min.
• Still Nacht IV - 1994, 3:56 min.
• In Absentia - 2000, 19:17 min.

Shadow Play is a series of films that tread nimbly between reality and illusion, acknowledging the artificial nature of cinema. Referencing the tradition of shadow puppetry, the origins of cinema in phantasmagoria, and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, each film draws on the metaphors of light as reality and shadow as artifice. In Plato’s The Republic, the allegory of the cave illustrates the difference between truth and illusion. Many writers have noted that Allegory of the Cave (written c. 360 BCE), bears great resemblance to the contemporary movie theater.