[In the following excerpt from a review of Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies and Patrick Bokanowski's L'Ange (1982), Brown examines the sexual imagery in the Quays' film.]

Those waiting patiently for Gödel, Escher, Bach the movie probably should catch what looks like a made-for-each-other double bill at the Film Forum: Patrick Bokanowski's L'Ange and Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies by the Brothers Quay. This may be where the cinema of science-surrealism-music stands today. The Pennsylvania-born, British-based Quay twins have built a cult following here—meeting even the dopey pretentions of Connoisseur—whereas the French Bokanowski is virtually unknown in the U.S. Unlike the Quays, he isn't strictly an animator—and he's undoubtedly more esoteric—but the sensibility of all three harks back to early atmospheric, poetic cinema: to Méliès, the Germans of the '20s, and the dreamscapes of Buñuel and Cocteau. One hallucinatory image—a black-and-white striped, heavily patterned Vuillardian room—pops up in both L'Ange and Rehearsals. (It should be noted that Bokanowski's film was finished in 1982; Rehearsals appeared six years later.) Both of these wordless, meticulously crafted works rely heavily on scores for strings—L'Ange's is by Michele Bokanowski and Rehearsals's by Polish composer Leszek Jankowski. And thematically, both seem to have rape on the brain….

Compulsion and obsession are venerable, even intrinsic film subjects. They're the source of crime. With his figures invariably caught inside ritualistic actions, Bokanowski manages to suggest crime—murder, theft, rape—without ever producing a corpse. L'Ange is more interested in the semantics of mystery than in solutions.

Kinkier is the Quays' claustrophobic 14-minute Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies—a cerebral cloak with a pubic fur lining. Personally, it reminds me of an illustrated manual on sublimation or the masturbatory origins of intellectual activity. In interviews, the brothers locate the project's initial inspiration in an engraving after Fragonard's Le Verrou (The Bolt)—that sinister painting showing a rake in white stretching toward a window lock, either before or after he's raped the woman lying on the bed. During research and development, however, the brothers got sidetracked by the "other" Fragonard, the painter's nephew, a meticulous anatomist. Not that source material here prepares you for what you see.

Rehearsals's mad impresario or conductor, plucking at the strings of a bar code, is a puppet with body of bent metal and a wildly spinning cyclopean eye, who pauses only to agitatedly finger a growth on his head. This activity links him to one of the two puppets locked together inside a fetid little room where a fan whirs, a weary-looking figure propped against the door compulsively stroking a sore—or is it a sweet spot?—in the middle of his forehead. Later we catch him scrubbing frantically at a stain on his clothes. As Lytton Strachey is reported to have queried, apropos of a spot on the young Virginia Woolf's skirt: Semen?

The significant Other—genders here are difficult to distinguish—palely loiters on a rumpled bed. Surrounding their hermetic box of a room, like the outside world, is a vastly sterile white space with Escher-like staircases and calligraphy graffiti. The relation of the two interior/exterior spaces seems to make a crucial point, though I'm hard pressed to tell you what it is. The climax comes when the standing puppet lends a hand to the masturbating bedridden one. Or is he operating? (Is this Dead Ringers?) And it's not really a hand but something that looks like a pendulum or even an inverted metronome. Well, I've only seen the film once.

Instruments for reluctant mechanisms? "Extinct anatomies" may refer to our limited human anatomies, our poor flawed bodies—as if (I'm extrapolating) privileged twin-ship offers more evolved, less capricious forms of being in the world. Like the twin zoologists in Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Naughts—inspired, says Greenaway, by a magazine photo of the Quays—the fashionably hermetic filmmakers conduct abstruse experiments in decomposition, decay, and desiccation. In any case, two figures, hardly distinguishable, locked in a junk-filled studio, surely points to an autobiographical component. The hubris of twins notwithstanding, it's tempting to hear Rehearsals sending off muffled cries of "help."