Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
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Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
2012. United Kingdom. Directed by The Quay Brothers. Held in conjunction with the exhibition Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets, these screenings of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka mark the North American premiere of the Quay Brothers’ newest film. Commissioned by Russian-born French pianist Mikhail Rudy in affiliation with Cité de la musique in Paris, where it premiered last March, the film is screened with live piano accompaniment by Rudy, performing the music of Czech composer Leo? Janá?ek. The Quay Brothers’ interest in Franz Kafka goes back to their days as design students at the Philadelphia College of Art in the late 1960s, and they originally conceived the notion of adapting Kafka’s best known story to film in the mid-1970s with a series of drawings currently on view in the Quay Brothers exhibition. Shot on digital video, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is an avant-garde combination of stop-motion animation, puppetry, and live-action pantomime, recalling the Quays’ earlier encounters with the music of Janá?ek, the theater of Michel de Ghelderode, and the experimental storytelling strategies used in their British television documentaries with Keith Griffiths in the early 1980s.