The Quay Brothers: Composing Between Music and Dance

The films of Timothy and Stephen Quay, an invitation into strange and touching life-worlds, are, in their own words, more inspired by music and dance than by conventional cinema. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s body-centered phenomenology, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s thinking in movement, Claire Petitmengin’s listening from within and Robert Bresson’s definition of film as le cinématographe (writing of movements), reveal an approach to film based on the perceiver’s body as a sense of movement, resonating with and moving along with visual and audible dynamic movements. From this perspective music, choreography and film come together as compositional arts. Institute Benjamenta (1995) highlights the transmodality of visual and dynamic movements in the films of the Quay brothers. For this film, they incorporated Jankovski’s music as an energetic canvas for their moving multi-layered audiovisual composition, evoking a dream-like life-world.