"When we began Street Of Crocodiles, the BFI insisted that we if we were going to do another film with them, that we had to base it on a piece of literature which had more..." "They were leery of our sense of errant narrative, and therefore said we should adapt a piece of literature, so we chose Bruno Schulz's Street Of Crocodiles, which probably in the end is the least narrative..." "He himself is the least narrative of writers." "Here we see a scene with..." "played by Feliks Stawinski, who was the caretaker at the Polish Institute in South Kensington." "We used to haunt this place every Friday night with our friend Ian Nicholas, and he of ten would translate letters from Lech Jankowski," "the musician of this film, who would be constantly writing to us in Polish." "Feliks would try to translate as best he could." "Here we see a map which demarcates a very specific vague area of a map of the town... which comes up only as white - i.e. that it's a zone that can't be marked off," "and is sort of mysterious and unknown." "We see the price of admission here is one drop of saliva, which actually sets the machinery in action." "The thing which deeply fascinated us about Bruno Schulz's writing is that he wrote about a 13th apocryphal freak month," "and we've always felt that, metaphorically, animation could occupy this area beautifully," "and it was one that sort of became a gentle banner for us to fly under." "The zone..." "Here we have a feeling that it's entirely criss-crossed with wires and strings." "And here we have our explorer of the zone," "who makes his entry, and here he sees a knot coming from the prompter's box, a knot of string," "and just under the longest reach imaginable " "(and some of the ropiest animation!" ")" "he'll release the knot with one gentle touch of the finger." "And of course it's the sort of "open sesame"" "which now will lead us into the depths of the zone." "I know, as part of our method in the themes of exploring Schulz," "was that the objects that we would use would be a sort of... as Schulz called it, a "degraded reality", and we, for ourselves, set the task, more or less, that it had to be things that..." "For instance, like rubber bands, dust, screws - all those things that would be sort of passed by," "but which we wanted to give a kind of poetic ascendancy of the everyday." "These sequences with the screws emerging was something that we never scripted, and it inadvertently came upon us that they were easily animatable." "And as we..." "You'll notice that there's so much dust, that we were constantly holding our breath as we would go in to animate." "I remember that on some of the longer shots, when we had to reach into the actual mouth of the décor," "that you took one deep breath, you reached in, you animated, then you came out." "And it just simply exploded with loss of breath... just to keep the dust from moving, because it was so... volatile." "I mean, even a sequence like this..." "I remember when the screws with the child fell down." "It was like a four-hour shot." "And even then we didn't use invisible thread." "We were just using sewing thread." "I'm astonished how crude we were." "I know one of the elements that Schulz talked about in the zone was the quality of light, which was a kind of dead light as though drifting down through skylights of an old passage," "and I know we were powerfully influenced by those beautiful passages in Paris with their glass roofs, and this was something that very much became a part of the whole set." "It was riddled with glass, and we had an awful time with reflections." "And I think we felt that, between every shot," "every time we exposed one frame, just as we were about to shoot we had to duck, and we figured, probably out of..." "We spent six months shooting this film - we ducked for about a month!" "Here we sense the child's sense of play playing with light, but at the same time almost..." "He's able to make all objects respond to light, and to agitate it," "and in a sense, he also will ultimately lure our intrepid stalker figure" "deeper into the zone." "A lot of the research that we did on the film did happen in our trips to Poland." "We first visited Poland back in 1974, with our friend Andrzej Klimowski, who invited us there." "Here you see the rubber bands, again..." "An element from this machine, a kind of a "bachelor machine" which..." "The rhythm and the sound of this machine is what, as it were, rules the whole inner courtyard of this commercial zone." "If I remember correctly, I think Larry said it was made up of 48 tracks." "And I know that when we did the animation for that, we did it on a very specifically timed rhythm, which was something like..." "You know, it might be over 40 frames, a certain rhythm would hit, but that we timed every sequence within each shop-front window," "that they would work to this rhythm." "So, you felt that the whole commercial zone was ruled by this deep current of a deeper... rhythm," "a commercial rhythm, as it were." "To go back to our trips to Poland we spent some time in the area of Warsaw called the Praga district," "which was where the market was, but we would find these very anonymous shop-front windows, that would be..." "You might see only one single element, like one high heel, the heel of a shoe," "and then arranged in a beautiful fan of an arc, just the cleats that could be attached, variously-sized cleats," "to these... to this one high-heeled shoe." "Or you might see a shop-front window with just different sizes of bolts or..." "It could be various elements, but they deeply impressed us for their sort of beauty and yet anonymity." "And the other district that we spent a lot of time in was in Kraków, in the Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarters." "So, the film was in a sense for its... for the quality of its décor, was researched by us, and we'd make photographs, as we always do on our trips." "You can see in the background some tennis rackets, which look like they were from Gilgamesh." "I think it was at this time... part in the film where it's as though the..." "what we call the Schulz puppet arrives at an intersection in a void, where you sense that these mysterious strings" "lead off deep into a void of black." "And it's almost like, here, by touching the strings, he can stop time." "And we see that, actually, the strings actually begin to go in reverse, and he begins..." "A light will come up, and he'll... shortly look through... the window here." "And now we see an element of objects" "that, as it were, try to reassemble themselves, resuscitate themselves from the dust of their former existence." "So, here we see a dandelion, that we shot in reverse, reforming, but we gave it a kind of flux of... of..." "making it always sort of, in a sense," "just elusively going beyond our ever being actually able to apprehend it... and again, ruled by this repeated dark rhythm of this machine." "We sort of called it..." "it was a "bachelor machine", a machine for breaking rubber bands." "But of course when you shot it in reverse, it reforms the rubber bands." "But I think it was a feeling here, in this part of the film that the stalker figure actually sees himself through all these elements, where he becomes trapped in the zone within the glass, within the mirror, as it were." "And in the Schulz story, the journey ends up in a dubious tailor's shop." "And here we see the sense of the tailor, as it were, reeling in both the camera, as a tracking shot," "and the Schulz puppet." "In 1982 we met the composer Leszek Jankowski at the Half Moon Theatre," "where there was the theatre ensemble Theatre Of The Eighth Day." "And it was part of the international theatre season, and they were performing two pieces." "And we went, not because we'd heard about how famous they were, but we went with Andrzej Klimowski, for one, and we watched this theatre piece." "And Leszek was playing guitar, and there was two other musicians." "And we were so impressed that we went back the second night, this time with a tape recorder, and we sat literally next to him, sort of illicitly recording the theatre piece." "And afterwards, we met a translator and said, like," ""Could we meet Leszek and just talk?"" "And the next day we met outside of Stockwell underground, and we sat down with Leszek, with the translator, and we more or less gently said that if one day there was a chance to compose music for a film, a puppet film," "would he be intrigued?" "And he probably thought, "Well, it's come to this!"" "He'd have to lower himself to do puppets." "But he was thoroughly engaged by the idea, and three years later, when this film was finally able to be conceived and done," "we immediately approached him, and he said yes." "And he sent by mail a cassette." "Usually it was smuggled out through friends, because it was quite illegal to have done that at the time." "So, these cassettes would arrive through friends or something." "Here is a sequence that..." "Our conception of the tailor was that he should be a sort of megalomaniac, where, ostensibly our visiting explorer is just essentially a piece of meat," "symbolically, to be dressed." "But we did it over a map of Poland, because we sort of felt that as a homage to a country" "that has been carved up through its history, and had many suture marks and shifting boundaries, that it's almost as though the tailor too had performed some of these butcheries." "Here the tailor..." "Now, we realise that the front room of the shop is really just the pretext for the rear room, which is really where the dubious material is concealed." "And the girls now retire and escort our explorer into this part of the tailor's shop where of course the darker imagery starts to be exploited." "You'll see in this next scene what we call in animation terms "boiling"." "It's our reflection being caught in the glass as we were animating." "And as it was so hot in our room, of course we don't have a shirt on, and so it catches the skin tones." "But that's just because we didn't duck!" "And here you'll see the girls moving forwards with that kind of fluidity." "We had a horror of making our puppets walk, so our instinct, to preserve ourselves, was to add wheels to them on dollies," "so it could give them that kind of elegant, cruising fluidity about themselves." "Of course, the ultimate thing is the screw as a part of a high heel, which he gives as a gift a souvenir of the zone." "We realised that the zone had to break down, as it does in the original Schulz story." "And I remember one day that the two of us couldn't quite work things out, and we said..." "We took a bicycle ride down to the zoo the London Zoo in Regent's Park." "And we walked around through the different houses, and there was the one reptile house, where we came upon this one very, very small animal called the axolotl." "It's the first time we really had ever seen one." "We knew about it through the Cortázar story." "And here you'll see this gesture." "While we were staring at the axolotl, it was very immobile, just staring back, and then suddenly it just made its arm do this one little movement, just like this here," "and we looked at each other, and we both said... you know, quietly acknowledging that this is how the zone has to break down." "And now the camera slowly pulls out of the entire zone." "There's one quote from Bruno Schulz that always impressed us, with respect to this." "He said, "There is no dead matter." "Lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hides unknown forms of life." "The range of these forms is infinite, and their shades and nuances limitless"." "And I know that, for a fact, has made us wander this path " "even now we're doing a newer film, based on Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass by Bruno Schulz." "(Voice-over in Polish)" "We had asked Lech to... to have somebody speak the final lines here," "but in the end he said he couldn't find anybody, so he spoke them himself." "(Voice-over in Polish)" "There's a line, also of Schulz, at the end of Crocodiles, where he says," ""We will always regret that, at a given moment, we had left the slightly dubious tailor's shop." "We shall never be able to find it again." "We shall wander from shop sign to shop sign and make a thousand mistakes." "We shall wander along shelves upon shelves of books, look through magazines and prints, confer intimately and at length with young women of imperfect beauty, with excessive pigmentation, who yet would not be able to understand our requirements." "Our hopes were a fallacy." "The suspicious appearance of the premises and of the staffwere a sham." "The clothes were real clothes, and the salesmen had no ulterior motives." "The women of Crocodile Street are depraved to only a modest extent, stifled by thick layers of moral prejudice and ordinary banality." "In that city of cheap human material, no instincts can flourish, no dark and unusual passions can be aroused"."