#PIANO TUNER OF EARTHQUAKES SERIES#

The out-of-joint temporal qualities.The degree to which youвЂ™re able to fully invest in the Brothers QuayвЂs new full-length вЂњ The Piano Tuner of EarthquakesвЂќ may well depend on your relationship to their earlier works. Droz appear driven by wounds disembodied, by memories and desires that persist and haunt despite their embodied absences. The melancholia of the abducted opera singer Malvina van Stille and the fetishism of her abductor Dr. In The Piano Tuner the uncanny effects of the animation-deanimation dyad spread to the conflicts between self and other, interior and exterior, within its narrativeвЂ™s characters. Such images potentially contest the photographвЂ™s arresting effect by underscoring its paradoxical animation: the stuffed animals appear to have been alive when the photograph was taken. The qualitative difference between the living and dead collapses in the still images of taxidermied animals caught midsnarl or in midflight in La JetГ©e.

#PIANO TUNER OF EARTHQUAKES SERIES#

Just as this process allows the still image to animate or reanimate detritus in the QuaysвЂ™ films, the series of still images in La JetГ©e promises to bring back to life beings that do not move in their present reality, such as the taxidermied animals and statues depicted in MarkerвЂ™s film. Through the technique of stop-motion animation a succession of still images are edited together to create an illusion of live-action motion, bringing puppets to life and permitting inanimate objects to move seemingly on their own.

Working with theorizations of MarkerвЂ™s notion of вЂњa wound disembodiedвЂќ introduced in his 1983 film Sans Soleil, this essay explores how the body distinctly figured in The Piano Tuner marks the intersection of SallustвЂ™s paradoxical claims, at once subject to historical events that happen, or never happen while also resisting the singularity of these events with a psychic locus that posits alternative possibilities through the memory of and desire for those things that never happen.

SallustвЂ™s words illuminate the philosophical dimension of the QuaysвЂ™ process of stop-motion animation as well as the desires that consume the characters in their film. The epigraph from Sallust that opens The Piano Tuner-вЂњThese things never happen but are alwaysвЂќ-reveals a set of connections between Marker and the Quays regarding the haunting effects of temporal conflicts between past and present, history and memory, event and duration.

The spirit of Marker haunts their cinema, and attention to MarkerвЂ™s traces in this film illuminates the manner in which their stop-motion animation techniques and the cinematic apparatus it intimates produce a commentary on history and time. Looking at the QuaysвЂ™ film in the context of MarkerвЂ™s oeuvre clarifies how the uncanny intersections of the animate and inanimate and, by extension, life and death, function in their work.

This musical choice suggests more intrinsic and, so far, critically overlooked sympathies between the work of Marker and the Brothers Quay. The Quays tell us in the interview that accompanies the DVD of The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes-hereafter referred to as The Piano Tuner-that the last thing they wanted was a вЂњlove themeвЂќ for the film, but that it was their вЂњhomage to Chris Marker.вЂќ 1 They go on to explain that the song was originally written for a ballet titled The Unwanted, which was fitting because when they located the original recording in the Boosey and Hawkes music library it was in such poor shape that it had to be restored for use in their film. The song evokes that boy on the pier at Orly before World War III, his confinement by the victors and his memories, frozen in time, of encounters with a woman, the image of whose face has marked him. The Brothers Quay set their 2005 film, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, to a memorable theme song, the very same one that accompanies the still images of a manвЂ™s memory of love and loss in Chris MarkerвЂ™s La JetГ©e (1962). Sallust, quoted in the epigraph to The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes

Piano tuner of earthquakes