Skulls, Diseases, Forceps etc.

Creepy experimental animators the Quay Brothers (Brothers Quay?), have been commissioned to make a film at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. I visited the Mutter recently – it’s the museum of the Surgeon’s College of Philadelphia and full of antique medical curiosities originally used for teaching medical students. It’s really neat – I liked the drawers that catalogue objects extracted in patients airways, sorted by size and type.

The Quay Brothers film is using the museums’ artifacts as the basis for stories in “the latest attempt by a museum to expand its audience by enlisting artists to interpret its collection” and is being funded by a $287,000 grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage (this is all from the New York Times article about the project). It’s a very fitting, Halloween-appropriate collaboration between the filmmakers and the museum’s collection. Maybe more filmmakers should be looking for new ways to collaborate with institutions that have built-in interesting content like the Mutter.  Rare historical collections? Libraries? Natural history and science museums?

Share this Article