http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/504906825

Street of crocodiles

A decrepit caretaker enters a museum and, by accident or design, lets a drop of saliva fall into the eyepiece of an ancient peep-show kinetoscope. Inside the aged projector, mechanisms are activated, wires are drawn by pulleys, hatches open. The puppet figure of a man is conjured into motion. The man severs the wires from which he hangs and begins an exploration of the "Street of Crocodiles," a suite of abandoned rooms where screws turn of their own volition at his approach. In a strange workshop, he observes robotic figures. He is harassed by a small boy and eventually finds himself dissected, remodelled, and re-clothed. The Quays utilize three-dimensional puppet animation and use the techniques of expressionism and surrealism to capture the echo of Central Europe's wars and the repression of the ruling classes as evoked in a quote from the Schulz story: "In that city of cheap human material, no instincts can flourish, no dark or unusual passions can be aroused. The Street of Crocodiles was a concession of our city to modernity and metropolitan corruption. The misfortune of that area is that nothing ever succeeds there, nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Obviously, we were unable to afford anything better than a cardboard imitation, a photo-montage cutout from last year's mouldering newspaper."

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