Manufacturing Dreams in Street of Crocodiles (video)

Last week my first video essay for Fandor was posted. From now on I will be contributing videos regularly to the site, probably in addition to videos for my own YouTube and Vimeo channels. So after the break following Journey Through Twin Peaks, I am very much escalating the video pace this year. You can read the introduction to my contribution on Fandor (although the video in this link no longer works), and I would also encourage you to check out the short story linked in my description:

The Quay Brothers’ stop-motion masterpiece Street of Crocodiles presents a dream world composed of eerie objects, sharp movements and cryptic visual associations. The film borrows its title and one of its scenes from Bruno Schulz‘s avant-garde short story about a small-town neighborhood that imitates big-city life (select “Ulica Krokodyli” to read the story here). Likewise, the onscreen puppets experience both uncanny promise and frustrating limitation. “Manufacturing Dreams” is an open meditation on Street of Crocodiles, exploring the Quays’ techniques and dramatic motifs through a series of questions and observations.

The video follows the jump, along with some pictures...

The Weird Eighties 1984 - 1986 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 25

Twenty-fifth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films

(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)


View "Chapter 25: The Weird Eighties"

The Weird Eighties

On the morning of my fourth birthday, I innocently tuned in to a Saturday morning cartoon based on "The Pied Piper of Hamlin." Apparently I was not familiar with the story, because when the piper led all the children off to, well, candyland, or death, or oblivion or whatever awaited them away from the safety net of parental observation, I became greatly distressed. As I recall I even wanted to put off my birthday party, though by the time the guests (and their presents) had arrived I had moved on. The version of "Pied Piper" I saw was, I recall, a fairly straightforward animation and thus not the version you will see in today's chapter.

If I'd seen that in my tender youthful condition I probably would not only have postponed that day's party, but all future ones as I curled up in a ball in my room, a nervous wreck for all time (seriously, it's pretty creepy - and cool; see for yourself). But the film featured below reminds us of a crucial fact, and one that ties in to some of my other childhood frights (namely the bizarre and ghoulish "Hansel & Gretel" episode of Shelley Duvall's "Faerie Tale Theatre"), if not this particular one. It's a fact that people sometimes forget but those of us who were young enough to live through the era with the fresh, easily perplexed eyes of childhood certainly remember: the eighties were weird.

(continued below, along with NSFW warnings)

My #1 animated film: Street of Crocodiles

Six weeks ago, as the Wonders in the Dark "Horror Countdown" reached its conclusion, I responded by writing about my own pick for "favorite horror film" - The Shining. In three days, the same website's "Animation Countdown" will end so I'm repeating my previous tribute and selecting my own #1 animated film. The countdown, conducted by Stephen Russell-Gebbett, has been a real treat: marching to the beat of his own drummer, but with a deep knowledge and appreciation of the history and tradition of the form. Stop-motion, sand animation, hand-drawn cartooning, and CGI are all included, as are selections from the United States, Canada, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Russia, and a slew of other nations. Features, shorts, even television shows were considered, ranging from straightforward narratives to pure abstraction. And only three Disney films made the cut - two fairly offbeat selections and one so canonical that, given the idiosyncracy of the rest of the countdown, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs managed to be the major surprise of the series! Moreover, Stephen was able to include clips or even entire films at the end of many entries, so you can watch the films he discusses. His style is concise, erudite, and deeply personal - very engaging and highly recommended. By the way, the genre countdowns are still in their infancy - a noir countdown is scheduled for January, so stay tuned! Without further ado, my own pick for #1 animated film...

Street of Crocodiles (1986) opens not with animation, but with black-and-white live action. An older man walks into a room and sets up some sort of machine, perhaps the "mechanical esophagus" the onscreen chapter heading indicates. Only when he peeks into the contraption do we see in color, and only when he gently spits into the mechanism do the gears start turning. A puppet comes to "life" and the man guides a pair of scissors in through a slit in the box and cuts the puppet's strings - from there we only see the puppet and the strange world he explores, a world filled with cavernous baby doll heads, mounds of meat, and robot creatures with blinking light bulbs for heads. Screws dance as if magnetically controlled, the puppet-man crouches and crawls like a spider and the camera capturing all of this moves with a fluidity rarely seen in live-action films, let alone stop-motion animation.