It starts with a snip. Not of film, but of thread, severing a dangling, almost organic-looking piece of meat. This simple, visceral act by the live-action Kustos (Museum Caretaker), played with weary intensity by Feliks Stawinski, opens a peephole into a world operating under its own dusty, decaying logic. Watching Stephen and Timothy Quay's 1986 masterpiece, Street of Crocodiles, again after all these years feels less like revisiting a film and more like carefully reopening a creaking, long-forgotten curio box found in the deepest recesses of the video store – a place few dared to venture, but discovery promised something utterly unique.
Based loosely on the 1934 short story collection by Polish writer Bruno Schulz (whose own life ended tragically during the Holocaust, a shadow that arguably permeates the Quays' adaptation), this isn't a film you watch for plot in the traditional sense. It's an immersion. Clocking in at just 21 minutes, it plunges the viewer into a hermetically sealed realm of twilight, grime, and unsettling mechanical ballet. Forget bright colours and clear narratives; this is the stuff of half-remembered dreams, rendered in sepia tones and filmed through layers of meticulously applied dust and shadow.
### Peering Through the Grime
The Quay Brothers, identical twins whose work often feels like a transmission from some alternate, perhaps Eastern European, dimension (drawing heavily on influences like Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer), are masters of texture and atmosphere. The world of Street of Crocodiles is tangible. You can almost smell the decay, feel the grit coating every surface. The central puppet figure, released into this world by the Kustos, navigates a landscape populated by eerie, tailor dummy-like figures with hollow eyes and heads filled with screws. They perform repetitive, obscure tasks – polishing glass eyes, manipulating threads, cycling through endless, pointless motions within grimy, intricate dioramas.
What makes it stick, what burrows under your skin, isn't just the strangeness but the incredible precision. This isn't haphazard weirdness; it's meticulously choreographed decay. The stop-motion animation is breathtakingly fluid yet deliberately jerky where needed, giving the puppets a disturbing semblance of life. Every screw turning, every doll's head swiveling, feels deliberate, part of a larger, inscrutable machine. It’s a testament to the Quays' obsessive attention to detail – rumour has it they specifically collected dust to layer onto their sets, achieving that perfect patina of age and neglect. Funded by the British Film Institute and Channel 4, this was clearly a labor of intense, personal vision, not commercial calculation.
### The Mechanics of Meaning
So, what's it about? Trying to pin down a single meaning feels like trying to catch smoke. It evokes Schulz's original themes: the allure and danger of cheap illusion, the decay of tradition, the hidden life pulsating beneath the mundane surfaces of reality. The "Street of Crocodiles" in Schulz's story was a district of cheap imitation and tawdry commercialism. Here, it feels more like a subconscious landscape where desires and anxieties are made manifest in clockwork figures and perpetual twilight. Is the central puppet figure an explorer? A victim? An embodiment of Schulz himself, perhaps? The film offers no easy answers, inviting interpretation rather than dictating it.
The sound design, composed by Leszek Jankowski, is crucial. It's a symphony of scrapes, whirs, clicks, and unsettling ambient tones, punctuated by sparse, melancholic melodies. It doesn’t just accompany the visuals; it is the atmosphere, deepening the sense of unease and otherworldliness. It enhances the feeling that we're witnessing secret rituals in a place long abandoned by conventional time.
### Retro Fun Facts & Lasting Shadows
Discovering Street of Crocodiles back in the day, perhaps on a compilation tape or a late-night arts program, felt like uncovering forbidden knowledge. It wasn't Raiders of the Lost Ark or Ghostbusters; it was something quieter, stranger, infinitely more haunting. Its influence, however, ripples outwards. You can see echoes of the Quays' aesthetic in the work of filmmakers like Terry Gilliam (who famously listed it as one of the ten best animated films ever made) and even in the darker corners of music video artistry. It proved that animation could be deeply personal, unsettlingly adult, and artistically profound without sacrificing its handmade, almost tactile quality – a world away from glossy mainstream animation. Finding this gem felt like a secret handshake among cinephiles who appreciated the truly different.
The performance of Feliks Stawinski as the Kustos, though brief, anchors the piece. His weary gaze and deliberate actions provide the human portal into this mechanical purgatory. And the "performances" of the puppets themselves, imbued with such specific, unsettling life through the animators' painstaking work, linger long after the screen goes dark. Doesn't the meticulous, almost ritualistic movement of those tailor dummies speak volumes about conformity or the hollowness of certain societal roles?
***
Rating: 9/10
Street of Crocodiles isn't "entertaining" in the way a summer blockbuster is. It doesn't offer easy catharsis or clear resolutions. Instead, it offers something arguably more valuable: a purely cinematic experience that is utterly transportive, deeply atmospheric, and artistically uncompromising. Its technical brilliance in the service of such a unique, unsettling vision is undeniable. It achieves precisely what it sets out to do – create a haunting, unforgettable world – with masterful precision. It's a cornerstone of surrealist animation, a dusty, mesmerizing jewel box that continues to fascinate and disturb.
What truly stays with you is that feeling of having glimpsed something hidden, a secret world operating just beneath the surface of our own, powered by forgotten mechanisms and illuminated by perpetual twilight.