The Automaton’s Passion, or «In These Machines is Contained the Dream: The Piano Tuner of EarthQuakes» by the Quay brothers.

Abstract

The brothers Stephen and Timothy Quay are two extremely versatile filmmakers of arthouse cinema: In The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes (2005), their second feature, real actors interact with objects that come to life. The film freely recreates one of the major works of modern Latin American literature, The Invention of Morel (Adolfo Bioy Casares, 1940), from the animist perspective suspected in the original book. This point of view allows us to define a privileged relationship between the novel, the haunting device by Morel, the film and animation. This essay will first consider The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes from a viewpoint of the reworking of the story and its characters; then it will examine the relationship between the initiatory path of the protagonist —which in the film adopts the form of a labyrinth— and the metaphysical machinery that mark this passage; and finally, the article will address the fatalism inherent in the automaton and the idea of repetition that dominates the film.