Street of Crocodiles is a puppet film that starts with a
human, a caretaker of a lecture hall. His only contribution is to wind up the
puppet box and lean above it dropping his saliva into the dust of the marionette
world bringing it to life. He’s God, the great caretaker, his spit the life
force of the discarded toys. Inside we find a Heath Robinson labyrinthine world
powered by cotton reels and corroded sentient screws. The puppet master snips a
spindly man from his restrictive bonds allowing him to travel through the
streets in search of a Victorian doll child that guides him with mirrored
light. Once he's cut from his umbilical string his journey seems pointless, being
born is the only reason he’s alive. There are no ultimate goals or destinations
to reach. The world is mechanical and dark.
Conducting with needles.
Through dusted windows the labours of the subterranean
puppet world are viewed, from engineers with golf ball bulb heads trying to
revive light in others, to tailors stitching together raw slabs of liver and
maps to make new men. Cartographers of the body, the routes fused with the
marionettes yet the course is circulatory, the destination the departure point.
A line of travel that traces only borders. These architects of demarcation scurry
around with empty egg cup heads. Literally these are brainless geographical engineers
dividing new bodies of land with yellow lines in place of green.
This short film doesn't have any obvious plot and at times
it feels like the Quay Brothers simply wanted to construct a series of grotesque
vignettes in the tradition of East European stop motion as a curiosity piece. But
as a whole the feeling of despair, of being boxed in, in being reliant upon
gods and masters who send us on journeys with only fractured reflections of reality
to guide us feels like the world around us. The haunting sounds echoed
throughout by Leszek Jankowski musical montage only heighten this sense of segregation
and despair.
Lessons from the toy box?
Streets of Crocodiles is dusty and dirty. It’s unconnected even
though every part of its world is joined together. It relies upon loose screws and hastily
constructed maps of parchment stitched together to function. It could be about
conflicts in the Middle East to the threat of fascism. It could be about hierarchy
and class, politics and power. It may simply be about how humans exist on this
boxed in planet we inhabit. I personal tend to think it’s the latter while whispering
cautions about all the former possibilities. This short film could be viewed as an existentialist treatise or a siege horror. No matter how you look at it or what you take from it Street of Crocodiles will stay with you long after viewing, possibly into that workshop of horrors, your nightmares.
