As a young child, I sensed that there were secret rooms in my family's house. The suspicion first arose when I stood between the doors of my parent’s bedroom and the bedroom I shared with my brothers, studying the wall that separated the rooms. It didn’t seem as if all of the physical space between the bedrooms was accounted for. I believed that there must be another smaller room hidden somewhere in that wall. When I asked my mother how I could get into the secret room between the bedrooms she laughed and explained that there was no such thing. Her answer didn’t reassure me. I thought that one probably needed to be older to be shown the door and I began to search for it on my own. I continued my investigation in public spaces as well. In a clothing store, I pulled racks of coats aside to search the wall behind for a hidden door. I found intriguing child-sized doors in my elementary school, likely small storage closets, but they were always locked.
Around age ten, on a family visit to my aunt and uncle’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, my cousin Rebecca led me into a closet in her parent’s bedroom. We pushed through the hanging shirts and overcoats, smelling of cigarette smoke, and arrived on our knees before a little door. Becky invited me into her secret room, which was essentially a smaller closet filled with her playthings. This regression from the house to the bedroom to the closet to Becky’s retreat confirmed for me the existence of the parallel reality I had sensed.
In 1986, having forgotten my childhood preoccupation with the hidden rooms, I was unexpectedly shown the door again at a screening of Street of Crocodiles at the Walker Art Center. The strings confining the main puppet character were cut and a glass wall slowly lifted. I’ve had powerful subjective reactions to many films over the years, but my introduction to the world of the Brothers Quay was a uniquely physical experience, more of an ordeal than a viewing. I felt as if I had been turned inside out and exposed, that something private to me had been made publicly manifest. I was at once the source of the imagery, projecting the half-remembered shadows of my former obsession upon the screen, and also the viewer observing these scenes with detachment. I smiled as I realized that I had dwelt all along in the mysterious spaces I had been seeking. Just as I did in my second viewing of Walkabout at age 20 a few years before, I woke into a subconscious place that felt as real as the world of my daily life. The Brothers Quay had revealed the secret rooms that I had once sensed so strongly, a suspension between place and thought, between dream and waking, simultaneously metaphorical and physical.
My immediate reaction was one of immense possibility; Street of Crocodiles was a call to action. As my film obsession had developed during my years with the Lawrence University Film Club, I had begun fantasizing about making my own movies. Initially, I imagined that path led through graduate school, but I wasn’t sure that I had the temperament for what seemed to be primarily a social activity. My equivocation was resolved after that screening. A remarkable film like this could be made by a pair of brothers, or by a single person; one didn’t need to organize an army of technicians to produce animation. At festivals today, a dozen of my own films behind me, I still acknowledge that I make animated films because I saw Street of Crocodiles in my early twenties. I even had the opportunity to thank Timothy Quay directly in 2002 when I met him at the Rotterdam Film Festival.
My friend Dave Herr had been at the Walker screening with me and the earth had also shifted under his feet. We appropriated the loft of his family’s barn near Somerset, Wisconsin as our studio and began to shoot Super 8 experiments in homage to the Quay Brothers’ style. We shot between dusk and dawn when we could control the lighting in the barn. Dave bought two white lab jackets at a surplus store which we wore while we worked, taking notes on clipboards as we shot and again later while we watched the developed film. Absolute beginners, everything was possible and joyful. We exposed single frames of film with a German-made shutter release, a black box with a toggle switch and the words ‘Ein’ and ‘Aus’ in white letters. We chanted ‘Ein Aus’ as we shot and I eventually adopted the phrase as the name of my production company: Ein Aus Animation. In the absence of formal film or art school, this was the beginning of my education in animation, woodshedding in jazz vernacular, in a barn in rural Wisconsin.
When I watch Street of Crocodiles now, as I did recently in the History of Animation class that I teach at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, I see the film with greater objectivity. I appreciate the meticulous attention to detail in the sets, lighting and puppets, the intricate peculiarity of the stop motion animation, and the grimy, derelict beauty of the Quay’s design. I also feel that the contact of the physical materials with the hand directs the thinking of the filmmakers more than any predetermined plan; the Quays develop visual ideas and motifs intuitively rather than rationally, a structure more musical than narrative. I'm also more familiar now with the influences on the Quay’s film aesthetic: German expressionism, Luis Bunuel, Eastern European surrealism and, most notably in that regard, Jan Svankmajer. In 1984, the brothers produced a tribute to the older filmmaker, The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, in which a young apprentice receives instruction from his master in a fantastic playroom/laboratory. Dave Herr and I imagined ourselves apprenticed to the Quays in the same manner that they had served their spiritual master Svankmajer.
The most essential idea that the Quays inherited from Svankmajer is the awareness of an ontological subtext to stop motion animation. Inert materials invested with soul (anima) convey an inherent strangeness, that which is not alive brought to life. The characters of Street of Crocodiles are generic doll heads mounted on clothed armatures. The dolls that we play with as children have life because we project life into them. The Quay's puppet animation evokes for me just this sort of play. Rainer Marie Rilke wrote an essay in 1914, “Dolls: On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel,” which could also have been written about the Quay's work:
For they themselves took no active part in these events, they just lay at the edge of childhood sleep, filled with nothing more than rudimentary thoughts of falling, letting themselves be dreamed, just as they were accustomed to being inexhaustibly lived during the day by alien forces.
In my most recent viewing of Street of Crocodiles, nearly 30 years after that first screening at the Walker, one sequence affected me most. Three quarters through the film, one of the empty-headed dolls rotates its arm in a circle repetitively. In a wider shot, we glimpse the metal armature of the puppet beneath its clothing. The Quays then intentionally draw our attention to the armature by cutting to a close-up of the screw that holds the shoulder joint together. We’ve seen screws extricating themselves from wood throughout the film and this shot occurs as plated contraptions and gears fall to pieces after the screws that hold them together unwind. To a now middle-aged man, who had lost his friend and youthful collaborator Dave Herr to a brain tumor, I felt a new vulnerability in the scene. The animators reveal the mechanisms by which they bring their characters to life and, also within the visual language of the film, the inevitable means by which everything disintegrates and returns to dust. Sitting in the secret room of my childhood imagination, the logical question was, “who is animating/dreaming me and how long will the materials that I am made of hold together?” The power of Street of Crocodiles (and the intuitive genius of the Quays) is that the film ages with me and continues to reflect back the experience that I project into it.