Contemporary Literary Criticism | The Brothers Quay - Peter Greenaway (review date Summer 1986)

Peter Greenaway (review date Summer 1986)

SOURCE: A review of Street of Crocodiles, in Sight and Sound, Vol. 55, No. 3, Summer, 1986, pp. 182-83.

[Greenaway is an English screenwriter and director whose film A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) was inspired in part by the Brothers Quay. In the following positive review of Street of Crocodiles, he discusses the aesthetic affinities between the quays and Bruno Schulz, the Polish short story writer upon whose work the film is based.]

The Quay Brothers' film Street of Crocodiles begins with a glob of spit. It falls from the mouth of an aged museum curator into the ambiguous mechanical parts of what used to be called a philosophical toy—one of those numerous, patented, primitive viewing-machines, precursors of the early cinema. This gift of human saliva, performing the same function as the finger of Michelangelo's God on Adam, animates a universe—a largely monochromatic...

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