Stephen Quay Movies

Enigmatic, stop-motion, animated story of a man's day.

With harpsichord music in the background, a dandy, seated at a table, plucks a quill pen from a ceiling full of them above him, dips it in ink, thinks, then draws a straight line down the page in front of him, out of which sprout six more quill pens, each held by a hand. The calligrapher moves all...

The original 54-minute documentary, as broadcast by Channel Four on 20 June 1984, after which the animated links by the Quay Brothers were recompiled as a separate short.

One of the best Czech composers of film soundtracks is often described as a genius of film scores. He was not afraid to experiment and the timelessness of his work is proven by the admiration of the world, including the generation who came to know his music only after his death.

VadeMecum is a new short produced by the Palme d’Or-nominated animators Stephen and Timothy Quay. The film shows the life and works of Polish poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid, and offers a great introduction to his legacy ahead of the bicentennial of his birth in September 2021. The Brothers Quay say:...

Two men seek to negotiate an agreement of international significance.

An unbroken sequence of fragments, last thoughts, elegies and absences by Schubert, Mozart, Wagner, Janáček, Stravinsky, Jacquet de la Guerre and Schumann, inter-leaved with movements from John Woolrich's Pianobooks. The programme is performed alongside images from the Quay Brothers.

A short documentary on the life of Polish author Bruno Schulz by Stephen and Timothy Quay, who adapted his work for their 1986 animated film Street of Crocodiles, made in honor of the 80th anniversary of his death.

A bird acts as an alchemist in an enchanted forest, selecting different kinds of wood to combine them in a parquet floor.

In the Renaissance castle of the Polish count - Jan Potocki - in Lancut, the modern traces of a past glory persevere and become visible again at the tones of Krzysztof Penderecki's music and Brothers Quay's imaginary animation.

This short documentary documents the making of the film the Quay Brothers shot at, and on the subject of, the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the first film the internationally-known filmmakers have made in the U.S.A.