Dormitorium

Yesterday I went to see Dormitorium | The Film Décors Of The Quay Brothers at the Swedenborg House - wonderful stuff. John Coulthart has written about it and included photographs on his site (he also has previous articles on the Quay Brothers). I took these shots of a mysterious landscape used in their film The Comb (1990). On the BFI site Michael Brooke called this 'one of the most inexplicably compelling of all the Quays' creations.'  

The most deliberately dreamlike of the Quay Brothers' films, The Comb is bookended by (and intercut with) a black-and-white live-action sequence of a woman asleep in bed, the implication being that these disconcerting, dislocating impressions of fairytale landscapes populated by decrepit puppets and an endless series of ladders (shot in colour) are taking place in the darker recesses of her mind. However, this is the only aspect of the film that's in any way easy to grasp, the rest setting out to wrong-foot the viewer at every turn, and the result wilfully defies verbal analysis. ...  Distortions visible in the background décor imply the existence of hidden images. At times it appears to be a discarded theatrical set, an impression given further credence by a camera pull-back to reveal what appear to be stage flats and a proscenium arch - though it could just as easily be a forest. 

In the film you never see the 'landscape' as it is presented in this case, so that undulating shape is rather surprising. The grain of wood is transformed into pools, shadows and bands of cloud. The painted trees here look like details in old German topographical prints or copper plate paintings, or Hercules Segers' 'mysterious landscapes'. I have mentioned on this blog before the Quay Brothers' cover design for Cosmicomics which appears to be a grisaille version of The Comb's wooden sculpture (see below). The literary source for The Comb is a fragment by Robert Walser, but I'm not aware of a precise text that might provide a literary equivalent for this landscape. Writing in Sight & Sound (1992), Jonathan Romney said 'the film is set to his work, rather than derived from it—so much so that the extracts from his texts, balefully whispered and muttered in several languages simply become part of the soundtrack, along with various drips, owl hoots, and strident orchestrations of string and wood by the Brothers' regular collaborator Leszek Jankowski.'