Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Through Jan. 7

Rare are the filmmakers who create “complete and resonant fantasy worlds,” said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Rarer still are museum retrospectives that “do these worlds full immersive justice.” Though not well-known in their native U.S., twin brothers Stephen and Timothy Quay have been awarded a show that should draw many new fans to the amazing, haunting stop-motion films they’ve been churning out since the late 1970s. “Rife with strange, sometimes frightening beings,” the Quays’ films combine puppets, dolls, and found miscellanea to create strange Gothic worlds. Despite a few “dead spots,” the exhibit “unfolds something like a good Quay animation,” toying with multiple levels of reality and “unexpected twists.” Not to be missed is the masterpiece Street of Crocodiles (1986)—one puppet’s “dream-like excursion into a tailor shop and the dusty, glass-walled spaces beneath it.”

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If you’re unfamiliar with the Quays’ work, think “Tim Burton scrubbed free of the pop gloss,” said Jesse Dorris in Time.com. They work in London in virtual isolation, a modus operandi that would seem “monkish” if the results “weren’t so often charming, sexy, and just deeply odd.” This is a pair of directors who “use dust the way film noir directors used shadows”—sometimes as landscape, sometimes as characters that suddenly coalesce and spring to quivering life. The MoMA show gathers together everything from the Quays’ drawings and calligraphy to their miniature sets, but the films and videos are the main draw, giving viewers a chance to “blow off the dust, so to speak, and see the Quays as American masters.”