Tag: stopmotion

The Kick-About #52 ‘104.286’

Welcome to this anniversary edition of The Kick-About, marking two years of creative activity undertaken by an international community of artists… which, when you put it like that sounds very impressive indeed! While those of us who participate in these fortnightly challenges might not regard ourselves as grandly as all that, this is my opportunity to thank everyone for their continuing creativity and companionship over this last year. I also want to reflect on the very real and demonstrable benefits of ‘kicking about’ together: yes, it’s another thing we have to think about, and yes, things don’t always run smoothly or go to plan, but ‘making work’ is always a magical act, and life-affirming too. Thanks again to everyone in the KA community for your boundless imagination and sticking power. Look at what we did!

Tom Beg

“What I found the most gratifying about The Kick-About this year was that, for the first time in ages for me personally, it felt like I could take any small idea that I had and bring it to some form of a conclusion without feeling like there was a whole load of mental and skill barriers in the way.

One of the most satisfying projects out of all the ones I produced was the animated short film inspired by Marie Menken for The Kick-About #34. After a very long time of not really making any moving image it felt quite rewarding to just let go and make something with the same kind of ‘just do it and see what happens’ attitude that always felt so inspiring to me as a creative, but perhaps, over the years, got lost in the shuffle of life and other such boring things! These days, just producing work and art is anything but boring for me, so I’m looking forward to seeing what else might become a makeshift goalpost in the park with all the other fellow Kick-Abouters in the future.”

twitter.com/earthlystranger / vimeo.com/tombeg / tombeg.com

Kevin Clarkson

“I had not heard of Brian Rutenberg (Kick-About No. 32) and the first impression was ‘Wow! Very powerful!’ So I spent quite a bit of time ‘deconstructing’ his technique. The apparent abstract nature is, of course, in reality highly stylised landscapes. If you put aside the idiosyncratic drawing style they are quite simple compositions. The cleverness for me is the use of colour; he has substituted primary or secondary colours for tone on most of the pieces, enhancing the abstract qualities. The texture and randomness is the product of palette knife work – that said, given the size of the canvases, it was more likely a large trowel!  A lot of my work is marine in subject, so for the first piece I took an image of reflections on water and upped the colour values and worked largely with a palette knife. I think you can still just about make out it is meant to be liquid. For the other piece, I chose a lake surrounded by trees and threw away the tonal values, replacing them with primary colour. I failed to match the stylisation of Rutenberg, but I think they are just about going in the right direction.”

kevinclarkson.co.uk / artfinder.com/kevin-clarkson / kevinclarksonart.blogspot.com

Chris Rutter & Evelyn Bennett

“We really enjoyed doing the Marie Menken’s ‘Lights’ one (Kick-About No. 34). It was great to use so many media – video, painting, music – in one short, improvised response.”

rutterandbennett.com / instagram.com/rutterandbennett

Judy Watson

“The prompt could hardly have been more suited to me and my natural inclinations. It’s inky and leafy and Australian. What strikes me most is the combination of the loosest of ink splatters with far more careful and detailed patterning. I was going to explore some inkiness yesterday (Yep! Last minute again!) to see where an observation of Mungkuri’s work (Kick-About No.37) might take me, especially with regard to the use of white ink patterning over the top of the looser ink layers. But before I could begin something happened… Our bees swarmed!  Later, I had a bit of a go at my inky exploration of Peter Mungkuri’s plant drawings, but my mind was full of bees. And joy. So it became an illustration of Hugo and me, arms uplifted to the swarming bees.”

judywatson.net / Instagram.com/judywatsonart / facebook.com/judywatsonart

Marion Raper

For the Kick-About No. 41 ‘La Ville’ ~ “I used one of my daughter’s photos of an event when Lady Gaga walked down the red carpet, which I firstly painted in watercolour and then recreated it in the style of ?? (You can see why I nearly failed my Art O’ level!) Anyway, I enjoyed creating art in this way and using such zingy colours!”

Colin Bean

From The Kick-About No. 51 “Print them out and colour in your very own folk art postcards. I used google to translate the English titles into Ukrainian, so apologies for any grammatical errors.”

Emily Clarkson

“Of the prompts I participated in, I think my personal favourite was Kick-About Number 31, Lotte Reiniger. The traditional form of silhouettes and stop-frame animation was more hands-on than my other prompt responses. Less abstracted. And less rooted in technology, which was an invigorating change.

Cutting things out of paper for craft projects is something I’d been doing since I was little, much like Lotte did, so I ran with the nostalgia. Plus, the rudimentary camera setup resulted in an animation with some wonky charm that I quite like!”

instagram.com/eclarkson2012 / twitter.com/eclarkson2012 / linkedin.com/in/emily-clarkson

Phil Cooper

“For the second year anniversary post I’ve chosen a little film I made for Kick-About #28. The prompt that week was the garden created by Derek Jarman on the shingle spit of Dungeness. Derek started making the garden during a period of personal crisis, shortly after he had been diagnosed HIV+ in 1986. Back then there was no treatment available for HIV and it was fatal in almost all cases. The garden was a tremendous act of creativity and of defiance in the face of a terminal diagnosis, not least because he built it in one of the most unlikely places in the country, the arid, salty shingle of Dunegness, directly in front of a nuclear power station. And, despite his failing health, the garden provided the backdrop to one of the most dynamic and prolific periods in his life; he crammed in more living and working into those last few years before his death in 1994 than most do in a whole lifetime. 

I used the words that close his book, At Your Own Risk, writing them in wax crayon, before brushing some black ink over them. The resist technique didn’t work very well and the words aren’t very legible, so here they are:

‘I am tired tonight. My eyes are out of focus, my body droops under the weight of the day, but as I leave you Queer lads let me leave you singing. I had to write of a sad time as a witness – not to cloud your smiles – please read the cares of the world that I have locked in these pages; and after, put this book aside and love. May you of a better future, love without a care and remember we loved too. As the shadows close in, the starts came out.  I am in love.’

As he wrote those words in the early 1990s, he foresaw a better future for the world. Sadly, I’m not sure if this has come to pass, at least not yet. The crisis of AIDS in Derek Jarman’s time has been resolved across most of the world, but the climate crisis and war in Europe threaten chaos on an even greater scale. I wonder what he would make of the world today? I confess I’m pessimistic about what lies ahead for humanity, but Derek’s life provides a kind of blueprint to at least try and deal with the terrible state we’re in; speak out, respond, fight, create, work, and make a little garden to face down the dark forces.”

instagram.com/philcoops / hedgecrows.wordpress.com / phil-cooper.com

Francesca Maxwell

“I love abstract paintings (Kick-About No.32) particularly as I know what a challenge they can be for composition and colour, light and movement. In my work I also strive to keep the first creative impetus with its full emotional strength before it becomes too cerebral. So this is one of my abstract painting that deals with space, macrocosm and microcosm. Thank you Phil and all the extraordinary artists who make this creative experience so special.”

www.FBM.me.uk

Kerfe Roig

The Kick-About No. 30: “It was so hard to choose.  But I decided to go with the Fundus Photography. The photos themselves are magical, and I feel the watercolors I did inspired by them are some of the best I did all year.  They are still hanging in my office, almost the first things I put up when I moved, and every day I enjoy looking at them.”

kblog.blog / methodtwomadness.wordpress.com

Phil Gomm

“I’m choosing my short story, Nasturtiums, to include in this anniversary edition for two reasons: the first being that, at first glance, Sheila Legge’s Phantom of Surrealism (Kick-About No.36) left me scratching my head and worrying at the efficacy of my imagination. My second reason for sharing it is because, once I’d stopped worrying, this short story arrived with surprising ease, and for all its inherent strangeness, felt, in some way, inevitable.”

You’ll find a PDF version here.

(I wanted to offer up a little birthday bonus with this edition of the Kick-About, so with the assistance of voice artist, Catherine Bradley, I’m happy to present a little audio-book adaptation of Nasturtiums. Enjoy!)

philgomm.com

Vanessa Clegg

“My favourite kick about this year has got to be the Stezaker prompt (The Kick-About No. 47) I loved the challenge of creating two parallel stories and then putting them together as one piece. Having said that, the Louis Baldwin took me to new areas of finding and stitching and Splendor Solis gave a rare opportunity to become immersed into a drawing over a long period of time. I just enjoy them all!”

vanessaclegg.co.uk

Gary Thorne

“May 2021 – KA #30 Fundus Photography – has to be the right choice at the right time, with May approaching and a garden offering seemingly endless delights of colour. A reawakening of the senses and added energy by way of summer approaching seems a timely reminder to exploit the daylight hours, be observant, and delight in making use of such inspiration.”

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Charly Skilling

“I have enjoyed so many of our KA prompts this past year, it is difficult to choose a favourite.  But I have opted for Kickabout #30 “Fundus Photography”, because I found my “Alien skies” and the poem “Forward, Hover, Focus, Click” flowed so readily and so smoothly that I revelled in the process and now, all these months later, I can still look on the  work and be happy. It is very rare for equal pleasure to be found in conception, execution and retrospection (for me, anyway!) so I cherish this!”

Graeme Daly

“I have decided to choose a recent response for the two year anniversary, which is the prompt of contemporary textile artist – Louise Baldwin (The Kick-About No.48). The outpouring of photography was completely transfixing, utterly intoxicating, but also very unpredictable. It was one of those times where something awoke in me and the tunnel vision of this bizarre creative pursuit was exhilarating – especially because the uncertainty of dumping all those household ingredients into a jar and photographing the bubbling frothy results is a practice I certainly wouldn’t have even attempted if it wasn’t for The Kick-About. But it is one byproduct that the Kick-About can and does unlock, as I do think being an artist means experimenting, breaking the status quo and playing to see what can flourish.  So thank you all for the art, the making, and the doing, and helping me to produce things I would never have dreamed of, and thank you Phil for always curating our pursuits into a post I always look forward to.”

@graemedalyart / vimeo.com/graemedaly / linkedin.com/in/graeme-daly / twitter.com/Graeme_Daly / gentlegiant.blog

James Randall

“So good to be a part of the KA and see all your fabulous work over the last year – lots to be inspired by and challenged to undertake! Personally I got an enormous amount out of the Sheila Legge challenge (KA 36 – Phantom Of Surrealism). I felt a bit aimless at the start but once my mind began wondering about, while trying to recreate Sheila’s surrealist mask, I zeroed in on the parallel stresses between her era and ours – big scary times. That’s when my image took an environmental posture and I cobbled together imagery to represent power and disaster. I also added ground charcoal textures and hand writing to my photographic images and broke up the framing of the image with staggered photo stripes in the background. It was one of those surprising outcomes that seem to happen so effortlessly its almost as if someone else was giving me a hand. I was also happy that the flower head felt a bit Covidish. Looking forward to the next KA.”

Jordan Buckner

“As many have written over this past year, our lives have become perhaps a tad too much like a De Chirico or Hopper painting. The empty, beguilling landscapes feel a little too familiar for comfort, but nonetheless, these sorts of spaces are my stomping ground. The unease of architectural space has always been an inspiration in my work, and so here are a few strange tableaus inspired by De Chirico’s The Song of Love (Kick-About No. 27).”

instagram.com/jordan_buckner / twitter.com/jordan_buckner / linkedin.com/in/jordan-buckner / jordanbuckner.co.uk

Phill Hosking

“This piece started life as a digital painting, in the style of Rutenberg’s paintings (Kick-About No.32). The more I’ve gotten into his work over the last few years, and as I’ve listened to him speak about his work and process, I’ve absorbed a lot of his wisdom and theory. Painting in Photoshop, from some recent photos I took on holiday in Somerset, I realised that without all the elements of thick oil paint, walnut oil, textured canvas and the monumental scale, this just wasn’t going to cut it. The sense of depth and light depicted in Brian’s work always astounds me, so I took the idea of his interplay of horizontals and verticals into ZBrush. I used the original digital painting to create the colour on the 3D. I made a rough approximation of the artist himself, just as a homage to a bit of a hero of mine, then created a tangle of intersecting forms. I encased this in a glass box to contain this in a 3D space, something the artist conveys so well on his canvases. A departure from my comfort zone on this one, another lesson learned from Rutenberg himself.”

instagram.com/eclecto2d / linkedin.com/in/phill-hosking / phillhosking.wordpress.com

Jan Blake

“After a bit of pondering I have chosen the Matisse Kick About (No.38) for the anniversary of this last year’s offerings. I really liked Phil Cooper’s introduction about Matisse and his joy of playing with scissors as an exuberant response to nature. The fact he made these cut outs in later life reminded me of where I am in my own life and the joy I found doing these cut outs and playing with colour, shape and movement.  I think I will be going back to them as they have been left out on the desk asking for more from me…”

janblake.co.uk

And, so as to launch us into another cycle of creative show-and-tell, I’m offering up a night at the circus, courtesy of Toulouse-Lautrec. Send in the clowns!

The Kick-About #31 ‘Lotte Reiniger’

Our previous Kick-About together was inspired by images of the human eye, resulting in an abundance of other-worldly imagery and one short story, in which an elderly man vanishes magically away in the middle of an art exhibition. The pioneering silhouette animations of Lotte Reiniger are likewise preoccupied with all things magical: magical lamps, magical slippers, and magical beings. This week’s showcase of artists’ work riffs on Reiniger’s unique aesthetic and narrative milieu. Happy browsing.

Tom Beg

“I always enjoy looking beyond the silhouettes of Lotte Reiniger animations and into the exotic and intricate backgrounds that she made. I get a simple sensory pleasure from the illusion of depth that can be achieved in black and white, just using the basic principles of foreground, midground and background. Visualising big worlds is not something I am particularly good at, but as I started to develop these images, I couldn’t help imagine them as big structures in some vast desolate landscape, where few living things remain.“

twitter.com/earthlystranger / vimeo.com/tombeg

Phil Cooper

“I live in Berlin, just round the corner from where Marlene Dietrich was born, and I’m a big fan of Lotte Reiniger and early German cinema. love the theatricality, the creativity and technical ingenuity that went in to making these animations, as well as the fairy tale subject matter.

A few years ago I was involved in creating some animation sequences and images for screen projection for a stage production of Hansel and Gretel. Lotte Reiniger’s 1955 film of the story, as well as earlier German expressionist cinema were certainly in the mix when I was making this work, and I thought it would fit the bill for the Kick-About prompt this week. I’ve included some images that were made to project onto a screen behind the performers during the scenes when Hansel and Gretel were lost in the forest.”

instagram.com/philcoops / hedgecrows.wordpress.com / phil-cooper.com

Graeme Daly

“When doing research for the Howard Sooley – Prospect Cottage prompt, I came across the inspiring work of Lotte Reiniger, and since then I have been busy cutting, glueing and making for a shadow puppet animated short entitled The Lighthouse Keeper, which centres around the peculiar landscape of Dungeness and a couple of burly blokes. Creating something for the sake of creating and figuring out the hurdles and bumps along the way is what is most enjoyable about delving into a fresh medium I have yet to attempt. The stage is now set, the characters are ready to move, the lights are on and with it, the sheer joy of seeing the cut-out shapes and silhouettes lit up, ablaze. Moving from behind the messy, makeshift backstage to the front brought the biggest smile to my face, which makes the absolute bomb site of my shrinking bedroom all worth it! I am sharing the majority of the cut-out shapes, the stage and silhouettes that will feature in the film, as well as some lighting and staging tests with the main protagonist – while I wait for the delivery for the all important light source before the real fun begins.”

@graemedalyart / vimeo.com/graemedaly / linkedin.com/in/graeme-daly / twitter.com/Graeme_Daly / gentlegiant.blog

Kerfe Roig

“I realized immediately I had seen Lotte Reiniger’s work before. It did not surprise me to hear Reiniger say, ‘I could cut out silhouettes almost as soon as I could manage to hold a pair of scissors’. Her work is, yes, ‘astonishing’. Me? I never had that dexterity, not even when young. I also don’t work in film, which was Reiniger’s medium. So how to respond to this prompt? I was going to work with simple bird silhouettes, but was unhappy with the ones I made myself. Once again, I had constructed a 3-D collage environment with cardboard pieces inside a paper bag. I decided to use photos of bird silhouettes, and hang them from strings at the top so they would move. I used circles to enclose the bird forms so I could put different photos on each side–the images would change when the dangling circles turned. Using the ceiling fan to create more movement, I began to take photos.”

that song that your words called
into my mind, that song is like
a lost world, just images
in fragments, suspended like
a raincloud without rain,
a weight that refuses
to dissipate–I can almost
feel the memory but it won’t
land, it keeps circling
through the things that aren’t
quite there–like a bird
call I can’t locate, disembodied
wings hovering invisible
inside my head

kblog.blog / methodtwomadness.wordpress.com

Emily Clarkson

“Lotte Reiniger’s beautiful silhouette works appeared to largely focus on fairy tales, so I wanted to come at it from a different angle. Taking inspiration from something short, like a poem, I delved into some of my childhood books and lit upon Edward Lear’s ‘Complete Nonsense.’  With my poem selected I created the scene with some coloured paper, and rigged up my phone for stop frame-animation. This was quite the challenge without a proper lighting set up, or the ability to ‘onion-skin’ my images, so there are some interesting colour variations caused by cloud cover and some rather choppy movements. But perhaps that adds to the charm of the ‘Young Lady of Portugal’! (Or perhaps I need some more practice and MANY more inbetweens!).” 

instagram.com/eclarkson2012 / twitter.com/eclarkson2012 / linkedin.com/in/emily-clarkson

Marion Raper

“Silhouettes have been around for many years and I know that they are very tricky to work convincingly. Lotte Reiniger must have been a very clever mistress of this craft and way ahead of her time. I decided to do some cut work on the facade of a decorative little theatre and inside put a small montage – since my animation skills are nil and it uses up some of my mountain of collage papers! I’m not sure if The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear is still as well known as it was in my schooldays, but its entertaining characters are great for paper modeling, plus the tiny details of jars of honey, runcible spoons etc. So now all that’s left to do is settle back and sing along – ‘The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat…'”

Jan Blake

“I loved these early animations. So full of energy and passion. I remember the fascination I felt as a child when adults amused me by making rabbits with their hands on the walls when the sun was out, and in the evenings with little table lights. I love watching moving shadows, and when I was in Mexico there were always shadows, as there never seemed to be a day without sun. A little different here in the past two weeks, so here are a few snatched mages and sounds of PLACE. Guess the Mexican one!”

janblake.co.uk

Gary Thorne

“Thank you, Graeme, for the inspiring venture into action. Months have passed without life drawing so, the recreation ground provided observation of the figure in motion. This playful solitary kick-about prompted a series of sketches, which later, shifted to paint in the studio. Perhaps a bit of Lowry, if I may indulge myself. The second motion-based work is a spin off from the online RA Saturday Sketch Club which thankfully James Randall introduced me too, I’ve added in the mask which dates the work.” Oil on prepared paper 24 x 65 cm.

linkedin.com/in/gary-thorne

James Randall

“There is an apartment block just across the road from ours – floor to ceiling glass – a very Rear Window stage. Nice simple shapes too. And a jumping off point for fantasy and metaphor.”

Phil Gomm

“I remember the first time I watched Reiniger’s Cinderella, thrilling at the moment when we see the ugly sister cut off her own toes in order to make the glass slipper fit her foot – a reminder that fairy stories, as written originally, were hardly short on violence and darkness. Take that Walt Disney, with all your syrup! Inspired by folk-tales, and by those who live in the shadows, I’ve written my own fairy story for the Kick-About, crammed with impossible things presented as commonplace, thought probably not anyone’s idea of a bedtime story…’

You can read a PDF version here.

With thanks to kick-abouter, Phill Hosking (who has just recently started this new blog), we have, as our new prompt, a 2010 oil painting by American artist, Brian Rutenberg, Low Dense, which is just a little over four metres wide! What a welcome kick of mouthwatering colour. Have fun.

Film: Ink (2021)

It was while producing these images for the Kick-About No.18, that I picked up the wrong sort of marker pen, which reacted to the spritzing of alcohol in some fascinating ways. I noticed how the solid lines of ink blossomed unexpectedly into a squirm of tendrils or fine feathery hairs. I noticed too how some consequence of the varying drying times of the ink and the alcohol produced a creeping tide-mark that moved across the surface of the tile – before suddenly retreating again. It was a bit like observing some organism in a petri dish or under a microscope. Suitably-inspired, I set about capturing these evolving ‘Art Forms’ through time-lapse photography.

Photographing the interaction of the ink and alcohol taking place on a ceramic tile, frame-by-frame.

With Ernst Haeckel’s beautiful and often bizarre zoological illustrations as my prompt, it was difficult not to think about images of virology and bacteria (I suspect the global pandemic might have something to do with it too!) and my affection for the b-movies of the 1950s surfaced as quickly, producing something moodier and more ominous than I’d originally planned. 

What’s fascinating is a technique, which previously gave rise to a sort of image suited to tasteful greetings cards, should now produce something so tonally different. However, given what we know about some of Haeckel’s other ideas, perhaps the underlying menace is not so wide of the mark.

The many individual photographs comprising the film were originally in colour, but I ultimately took the decision to produce the finished film in black and white. It was one of those instances when the sum of the film won out over its parts, with the music and the vintage flicker of the images crying out for monochrome. I’ve included the colour alternate version here for your curiosity.

The Cat With Hands (2001)

Stop-motion has a very special power of strangeness; stop-motion is to motion what the undead is to the living – not an opposite state, but something not quite opposite enough. The Brothers Quay understand this with their hollow-headed dolls and imminent toys. Jan Švankmajer understands this with his clawing clay heads and dancing meat. Robert Morgan understands this too, and in his celebrated 2001 short, The Cat With Hands, the substantive horrors of the story are all the more unsettling because the technique manifesting them has an exquisite queasiness of its own.

MFT #2: Street Of Crocodiles (1986)

Street of Crocodiles is one of my favourite things. Here’s why.

Back when I had a pudding basin haircut and jumble sale clothes, I pestered my parents for a Purple People Eater.

The Purple People Eater was a toy in which the aim of the game was to rescue a clutch of small plastic people from underneath the titular monster, which was a rubbery blob with a valance of tentacles sitting over a battery-operated mechanism. In what essentially was a pimped-up version of the old wire loop game, you had to feed the little plastic people back out of the mouth of the Purple People Eater while avoiding whatever bit of the mechanism that would otherwise cause the rubbery blob to startle very suddenly into growling, flashing life.

I wanted a Purple People Eater more than anything and I was beyond thrilled when I got one – and then I played with it. I tried to enjoy myself. I wanted to enjoy myself, but the truth I dared not name was simple; my Purple People Eater scared the living shit out of me, and not because of the way it looked, for I was the sort of boy who happily spent his pocket money on giant rubber centipedes. What frightened me was the prospect of my Purple People Eater coming so shockingly to life, the horrid jolt of it, this jump-scare in-waiting. The Purple People Eater scared me, not because it was horribly alive, but because it was always about to be.

A child hopes and dreams their toys are alive. This same child fears it’s true.

This contradiction lives on in my fascination for the Brother’s Quay 1986 stop motion animation, Street of Crocodiles, an adaptation of a short story by Bruno Schulz peopled by broken dolls, forlorn clockwork toys, and mannequins.

Freud’s theory of the uncanny is used to explain the special queasiness we save for humanoid effigies, for the puppets, the dolls, the mannequins and the waxworks, and as explanations go, it feels right. The cultural unease we reserve for this category of objects is special because it is an unease we’ve known before. It is not surprise we experience when, as sensible, right-thinking grown-ups, we’re compelled to glance twice at the ventriloquist’s dummy, but familiarity. As children, we knew very well to regard our person-shaped playthings with a degree of ambivalence. We knew an act as simple as turning off our bedside light could reveal the Janus-faces of our poppets, our moppets and our beloved unblinking homunculi. When we experience the uncanny as adults, we are returned to that precautionary knowledge and we don’t like it much; few adults care to confront gladly the frailty of their hard-won rationalism.

The trope of the scary toy has been bludgeoned into harmless hokiness by all the many horror films that seek to press this ready-made button. I am immune to the likes of Chucky and to Annabelle. I watched the 2012 adaptation of The Women In Black in a mild state of annoyance, feeling cheated out of a more complex experience by the gratuitous shots of sinister toys. When I want my button pressed, I return to Street of Crocodiles, and not to the animation’s many sightless dolls or mannequins, but to the monkey toy with its skitter of cymbals that looks out at us from within its grubbied vivarium of glass and which comes so suddenly to life. In these moments, I’m back in my room in the house of my childhood kneeling opposite my Purple People Eater, wishing it into life, wishing it dead and gone, agonised by indecision and suspense.


Street of Crocodiles feels like a monument to childhood trauma – mine, yours, the directors – like we’re looking through the keyhole into a counselling session in which the filmmakers have been asked to play with toys with which to enact, exorcise or inflame some private psychic injury. I feel positively voyeuristic when watching the Quay’s animation, like I’m peering at their most private things, at the oblique treasures of two disturbed hoarders. To view Street of Crocodiles is to open a secretive door into a secretive cabinet laid out with secretive objects, all of which are substantively mundane, but in the status awarded them by dint of their fastidious presentation, I know them to be magical, dangerous, and of obsessive importance. I’m quite comfortable admitting I do not know why we are shown so often the strange meeting of two skeletal arms, which appear to create some kind of shock or tremor when they touch. What to make of the ice-cubes that unmelt, or the precise importance of the pocket watch filled so unpleasantly with a sphincter of raw meat? Often times, I feel as nonplussed and blinkless as the puppet character himself. There is a visual language here fraught with significance I haven’t been invited to share. This is not a criticism. It feels just as meaningful and true to experience things that cannot be understood. My gaze is frustrated. I look and I look, and like a visitor to a foreign country, I see many meaningful things the meaning of which I cannot know.


Acts of looking characterise Street of Crocodiles. Our own journey through these streets is pinned to the investigations of an unnamed stop-motion puppet, whose design is the answer to the never-asked question that wonders what would happen if the venerable gentlemen of horror, Peter Cushing, was spliced with some cautious long-legged insect. Reluctance, shame and curiosity all combine in the behaviours of this character, who is often shown hesitating on the threshold of some darker door or deeper ingress. Dressed as he is in a tail-coat, it’s like watching a mini-me Dorian Gray creeping his way into the opium dens and fleshpots of some Stygian London backstreet.


When I lived in Dalston, I was enchanted by Abney Park Cemetery that was just up the road in Stoke Newington. One of the ‘magnificent seven’ of London’s great cemeteries, Abney Park is lent further romance on account of it having once been abandoned to nature. I walked there one morning to take a series of moody black and white photographs, drawn to capturing on 1600 film the fright-wigs of desiccated ivy sported by some headstones, and drawn too to having my button pressed by all those watchful marble angels who may, or may not, have been moving out of the corner of my eye. It was an ordinary week day, the sun shining, the liveliness of Stoke Newington Highstreet a short distance away, but in this truly remarkable place, the atmosphere won out, and I moved through a timeless sequestered world of green gothic shadow. I didn’t know it then, but the cemetery was a popular cruising spot, and as I departed from the cemetery’s more formal pathways in search of moodier vignettes, I became aware of the keen, watchful presence of other men waiting silently on the edges of the cemetery’s more secluded spaces.

I recall this episode because, in their tingling mix of curiosity and caution, the thirsty men of this once-forgotten cemetery and the Street of Crocodiles’ Wildean protagonist feel one and the same. In the animation, the character’s ingress into the street of crocodiles begins with him loosening a knot in a near invisible line of thread. Then, in ways we never truly understand, this thread activates unseen apparatus that clear the way for the puppet to enter into a scenario he is both fascinated by and nervous of. He wants to go further, but he worries. He wants to explore, but at what risk?


When I think about those bold-bashful men in the ruined London cemetery, I also see them reaching out to pluck with their fingers at some otherwise unseen connection, as mysterious to some and shadowy as the mechanisms at work in the street of crocodiles.


Schulz’s street of crocodiles shares with Abney Park its double-coding. It is both what it is and also what it isn’t. Schulz lavishes description on the interior of a tailoring shop and its tailor, and we soon learn that this establishment and staff offer services of a very different stripe, though inside leg measurements are common to both. Schulz elides the precise nature of these backroom activities, but we can guess. The Brothers Quay are a little more forthcoming, as the same sequence in the tailor shop moves from dancing pins and coloured scarves to unsettling tableaux of a sexual nature. We watch as the shop’s retinue of fussing, broken dolls approximate an erect penis with orbs of meat and pins. An abandoned glove and sprout of pubic hair stands in for a vagina. We must assume these carnal alter-pieces are emblems for every shade of debauchery, but far from seeming rude, erotic, or illicit, I always find them poignant. Watching the dolls interact with these naughty artefacts, with their little hands and hollow heads, is like hearing children using terrible swear words the transgressiveness of which they don’t really understand, or like watching children shave with daddy’s razor or wearing mummy’s pearls. It makes for a peculiarly sad and queasy spectacle.


Desquamation, deriving from the latin word desquamare, meaning ‘to scrape the scales off a fish’, is the word describing the shedding of our skin. None of us like to think too long or too hard about what comprises the dust collecting on the surfaces of our homes, but to watch Street of Crocodiles is to fairly relish in the stuff. In what might be called ‘the poetics of desquamation’, Street of Crocodiles makes a fetish out of dander. Every scene is flocked with particles of one sort or another, glass frosted with non-specific granules, screws pushing their way out like mushrooms through thick coverings of mulch… But what is Street Of Crocodiles if not a world of cast-offs? Toys, light-bulbs, screws, the worming of snapped rubber bands, all things once useful, once vital, now fallen like flakes from the usage that previously gave them purpose.

Street of Crocodiles always gets me thinking about the coils of my own hair collecting unnoticed in corners of my house, an errant toe-nail clipping, or light powdering of my former-skin, these bits of me made abject and disturbing only on account of their new separateness. Watching Street of Crocodiles encourages me to feel sorry for my detritus. It hardly seems fair or reasonable to evince so much distaste for what are harmless fragments of myself.


Ultimately it’s this that affects me most when watching Street of Crocodiles: not, in fact, the unheimlich spectacle of that amber-eyed monkey with its spasm of cymbals; not the cruisy explorations of the ever-watchful puppet who seeks out the tailor shop with all its pornographic secrets, not even the film’s extraordinary elevation of grime. No, it’s the powerful melancholy of the piece. I’m less disturbed by scenes of sightless dollies fashioning testicles from steak and more so by the other little doll in the animation who only has a light bulb for a friend. It’s this same friendless little doll that seeks to gain the attention of the animation’s main character with little flashes of a hand-held mirror, and who sits in the dust with only a scurry of screws for company. At one point we see a creature comprised seemingly of light bulbs, as caged behind glass as the amber-eyed monkey, who seems trapped in some bleak Sisyphean task. The tailoring dolls, at first so fastidious and busy, wind down suddenly, their cogs showing, their limbs windmilling uselessly, slowly, slowing.

At the end of the animation, the puppet protagonist escapes the street of crocodiles, leaving all these lonely, broken and abandoned things behind, and it always feels like someone sneaking away from the aftermath of febrile house party, where every room is now filled with broken ornaments, fly-blown food, and the sediment of behaviours unsuited to daylight.