Through the Weeping Glass: On the Consolations of Life Everlasting (Limbos & Afterbreezes in the Mütter Museum)

Jakob arrives at the Institute Benjamenta (run by brother and sister Johannes and Lisa Benjamenta) to learn to become a servant. With seven other men, he studies under Lisa: absurd lessons of movement, drawing circles, and servility. He asks for a better room. No other students arrive and none leave for employment. Johannes is unhappy, imperious, and detached from the school's operation. Lisa is beautiful, at first tightly controlled, then on the verge of breakdown. There's a whiff of incest. Jakob is drawn to Lisa, and perhaps she to him. As winter sets in, she becomes catatonic. Things get worse; Johannes notes that all this has happened since Jakob came. Is there any cause and effect?

Told in the form of a mock documentary in 92 short parts, nineteen million people are left obsessed with birds and flight following a strange occurrence. A documentarian analyses the lives of all the survivors whose surnames begin with FALL to uncover the truth behind the event.

The movie is set in a technologically developed but, at the same time, feudal world. Beautiful Duenna was created in order to carry out certain mission. However, she will be forced to choose between accomplishing the task she was created for and love.

In Prague, a professorial puppet, with metal pincers for hands and an open book for a hat, takes a boy as a pupil. First, the professor empties fluff and toys from the child's head, leaving him without the top of his head for most of the film. The professor then teaches the lad about illusions and perspectives, the pursuit of an object through exploring a bank of drawers, divining an object, and the migration of forms. The child then brings out a box with a tarantula in it: the professor puts his "hands" into the box and describes what he feels. The boy receives a final lesson about animation and film making; then the professor gives him a brain and his own open-book hat.

A porcelain doll’s explorations of a dreamer’s imagination.

A puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself.

A magnet moves on a floor. A moth beats against a window. A doll child watches the magnet; threads of metal filings gather around the magnet.

With harpsichord music in the background, a dandy, seated at a table, plucks a quill pen from a ceiling full of them above him, dips it in ink, thinks, then draws a straight line down the page in front of him, out of which sprout six more quill pens, each held by a hand. The calligrapher moves all the hands and pens in unison, drawing an elaborate feathered wing, which comes to live, peeling off the page, and, now a quill pen, slips in to his hand. He tucks it behind his left ear.

One of several collaborative dance films by the Brothers Quay & (dancer, choreographer) William Tuckett. Little enough info around on line, but there's briefly by way of Wikipedia entry. Adapted rather loosely from the works of the E.T.A. Hoffman. Familiar Quays' tropes, much in evidence: automata, trompe l'oeil effects, etc. No credit on the sound design (which is fairly elaborate), tho' that is possibly Larry Sider.

Dark fairytale about a demonic doctor who abducts a beautiful opera singer with designs on transforming her into a mechanical nightingale.

The story of Alice in Wonderland, explored in the stop-motion world of the Quay brothers.

A display at the strange and wonderful artifacts in a collection of medical curiosities.

Stop-motion animated short film in which a puppet on a trike captures a puppet bird-man.

In 2015, Christopher Nolan curated a selection of short films by the surrealist animators the Quay Brothers to be distributed as a touring 35mm presentation. The three films—"In Absentia" (2000), "The Comb" (1991) and "Street of Crocodiles" (1986)—were accompanied by this brief portrait of the brothers at work in their London studio.

Afraid of losing his wife, Horatio creates a replica he calls Hortensia. But things don't go as planned... Shot on 35mm and propelled by an impressive score by Michèle Bokanowski, the Quay Brothers evoke an intense drama of jealousy, betrayal and murder, revolving around a window dresser's obsession for a life-sized doll.

Guy Maddin, who has been nicknamed the Canadian David Lynch, is undoubtedly one of the last remaining Magi of cinema. Despite living in the middle of the digital age, this heretical director hailing from the snowy plains of Canada has spent 25 years transposing the uncommon and the uncanny onto screens over-saturated with naturalistic imagery. A lover of primitive cinema, he has cunningly summoned the light-and-shadow techniques and experimentations of the Golden Age of film to resuscitate a unique cinematographic language which plays with the spectator’s unconscious by means of visual trickery as disturbing as it is absurd. In an attitude as playful at that Maddin’s films this documentary follows the mediumistic experiments of this master of illusion, filmed during the ‘’spirit’’ shootings he presented in Europe.