DVD Review: Favorites of ‘The Dark Knight’ director

If you’ve never seen a Quay Brothers film, it’s a pretty safe guarantee that you’ve never seen anything like a Quay Brothers film ... which makes it surprising that Christopher Nolan — whose films (including three “Batman” films, “Inception” and “Interstellar”) you’re a tad more likely to be familiar with — claims them as favorites and an influence.

Twins by birth, animators by vocation, the pair were born in Norristown, a village outside of Philadelphia best known for its huge State Psychiatric Hospital. They moved to England 30 years ago and have since turned out a series of distinctive surreal short films, with bizarre titles like “The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer,” “Street of Crocodiles,” and “Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies.” They’ve made two features, the second of which, “The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes,” is fascinating in its own right, but their unique style is best represented by these shorts.

According to Nolan’s introduction to the new Blu-ray collection of their shorts, the Quays themselves were surprised (or acted that way) when Nolan apologized for appropriating their imagery in “The Prestige.” In any case, Nolan put together a traveling program of the Quays on 35mm; and included in it his own eight-minute documentary of his visit to the Quays’ studio.

That led to this Blu-ray, their third video collection on disc. Each one has repeated the old material and added whatever they’ve done since; each has represented an improvement in video and audio quality. This release does omit a few (relatively trivial) extras from the previous collection; in their place we get Nolan’s documentary.

The Quay Brothers: Collected Short Films (Zeitgeist, Blu-ray, $34.99)