Stop-motion decay, dust and dread. A puppet animation of Bruno Schulz's story, all rusted screws, tarnished mirrors and obsolete machinery moving with autonomous menace.
Why the Bureau files it. The Quay Brothers build a world of decay made animate: dust, tarnish, rusted screws and dead machinery that twitches into motion on its own. The texture is the dark-ambient and death-industrial texture rendered as object, the same aesthetic of corrosion the tradition works in sound, here given physical form in puppet, glass and metal. The film is short, roughly twenty minutes, and almost wordless, carried by atmosphere and the unease of objects with their own intent.
Drawn from Bruno Schulz's story, the animation moves with a logic closer to ritual than to narrative: screws unscrew themselves, a figure is led through a derelict arcade, machinery performs functions no longer attached to any purpose. Leszek Jankowski's score is original rather than industrial, so the link is one of sensibility, the obsolete machine as a thing of dread, the abandoned and the decayed as the proper subject.
The Quays stand entirely outside the tradition's personnel, but few works in any medium match the death-industrial and dark-ambient imagination as closely in feel. The Bureau files Street of Crocodiles as the influenced field's purest statement of decay-as-subject, machinery and dust filmed as if they carried their own menace.
This film is filed in the influenced field: cinema that shares the industrial, noise and avant-garde tradition's sensibility without being made by tradition figures. It is adjacent to the tradition, not of it. The canonical Film entries (Decoder, Halber Mensch, Pig) are tradition-internal works made by or with tradition artists; the influenced field collects the cinema that runs alongside the tradition and feeds the same imaginative reservoir.