Night Nursery

The Quay brothers hold a separate place in movie-making. That of eccentricity and the bizarre, whose cult they have maintained since their first films, in the late 1970s, Nocturna Artificialia for example. Stephen and Timothy Quay, identical twins, were born in Philadelphia in 1947. It was in their small Southbank studio in London, with its jumble of odd objects, bits of unusual sets and puppets, that they filmed on a miniature stage parts of their animated films, inspired by a universe devoted to the ghosts of the eccentric and the phantoms of nonconformity. There are the influences here of Mitteleuropa, the writers Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz and Franz Kafka and the film-makers Jan Svankmajer, Ladislas Starewicz and Jiri Trnka, but also Franju, Luis Buñuel, Lewis Carroll, Karl Stockhausen and the Belgian surrealists. It is this museum of the weird, kept like a curiosities cabinet, that a large number of short films have come from over the last 30 years among which are The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984), The Street of Crocodiles (1986), Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1987), the Stille Nacht series, Anamorphosis (1991), In Absentia (2000), The Phantom Museum (2003) as well as two long films, Institute Benjamenta (1995) and The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2006), masterpieces of utterly strange feature-length films.

In this cinema installation, forgetting reason, guided by his sensations, giving up narration to travel through the regions dedicated to visual affections and sound impressions, in a darkness pierced by luminous streaks, the visitor will be able to abandon himself, his senses awakened, to the sleep of the imagination. The Quay brothers invest, in Avignon, the Hôtel de Forbin La Barben, an old building in the centre of the city, to install, on several floors, Night Nursery, Those who Endlessly Desire, made up of extracts from their very recent films and productions – such as the shorts Orpheo and Eurydice, film-ballets inspired by Monteverdi's opera –, sets and objects. In each nook and cranny may be found this inimitable manner of breathing life into matter, of having brand-new visual impressions emerge, of exploring the strangest stains, deposits, cracks, folds and objects, of having unknown sounds heard, hissing murmurings, muffled music, or of filming dolls as though they were touching human beings damaged by time and the ups and downs of existence. We could think that the ghosts of this private mansion of old Avignon would love these intruders who play with our sensations, invite us to experience the semi-consciousness of the projections and disturb the habits of theatre and dance through these images that come from nowhere.

conception et réalisation: les frères Quay

production: Festival d'Avignon
remerciements: à la Fondation Calvet