The Quay Brothers’ films play tug-o-war with the viewer’s credulity, shifting between the real, ordinary world and the realm of the fantastic. Should the audience believe what’s on the screen, that puppets have come to life and sewing pins are scurrying over the furniture and not see the difference between the skeletons of a crocodile and a dragon, stretching the truth to magical heights? The Quays’ sets, constructed both like real, verifiable museum dioramas and the Surrealist boxes of Joseph Cornell, beautifully synthesize true and false. The brothers, Stephen and Timothy, use their own handmade, found-object scenery and puppets to tell non-linear stories about searching, awareness and, in their own words, “marginalia.” The films are poignant but not sentimental, rooted in the aesthetics of decades past, and tangential in the sense that the happy accident is their creators’ guiding principle.Quay Images: Collected images from the Quay brothers exhibit.

Scenery and sets are major players in all of the Quay Brothers’ films – they, along with active lighting and sound effects, are protagonists with whom the films’ figures conspire. The puppets themselves walk, run, wheel and hover freely, but their environments are expressive and eloquent in ways that the puppets’ eternally frozen eyes, mouths and digits cannot be. A selection of these dioramas, on view in Sibley Hall’s Hartell Gallery through next week, colors and informs the attentive viewer’s experience of these films. None of the sets are any larger than a small bureau, and all of them seem particularly rigid and antiquated in comparison to the often fluid movements the Quays achieve in their animations. The presence of the sets on campus, and the experience of seeing them almost at the same time as the films, also heightens the film viewer’s awareness of the omnipotent, invisible hand implicit in each frame’s construction. This omnipotence raises a rather ambiguous juxtaposition, however, between stop-action and live-action filming in the Quays’ work. The tentative intersection between the lives of puppets and humans — whether implicit in the filming process or as part of the finished film itself, as in The Comb and Street of Crocodiles — begs the question of authority. Is The Comb’s sleeper the master of her dreams, or is she at their mercy? One gets the feeling that the characters she dreams are more conscious of her than she is of them, and that they tiptoe around her so as to prolong their own little lives.

Not only does the balance of power between dreamer and subject fluctuate between waking and dreaming, the tangible scale of the action also refuses to be pinned down. The sets in Hartell Gallery indicate one relationship between “us” and “them” while the 35mm projections at Cornell Cinema speak to another. In addition, each jump from puppets to real people and every zoom of the camera complicate the scale, establishing three distinct universes: that of the set, several feet wide, that of the expansive dream world to which the viewer can certainly relate, and that of the mere distance between two neurons firing in the sleeper’s brain.

Watching the six short films in succession (the others include The Phantom Museum, The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, The Epic of Gilgamesh/This Unnameable Little Broom and Stille Nacht I) is like waking up from one dream into another, an experience quite common within each individual film as well. However, The Phantom Museum is strikingly different from the five that follow. Here, the Quays take well-verified and carefully-documented objects from the Wellcome Institute in London and make them fantastic through animation, carrying them from the real to the decidedly unreal. The other films, meanwhile, make expressive but inanimate puppets real, inviting the viewer into a world in which the puppet’s actions are believable. An act most seemingly fraught with symbolism to the viewer is straightforward and literal to a Quay character; conversely and most importantly, that which seems highly unusual to the viewer is just an ordinary day for a puppet.