SCREENING THE CITY EDITED BY MARK SHIEL AND TONY FITZMAURICE"CUT OUT FROM LAST YEAR'S MOLDERING NEWSPAPERS": BRUNO SCHULZ AND THE BROTHERS QUAY ON THE STREET OF CROCODILES TYRUS MILLER FETISHISTIC URBANISM ‘And no face is Surrealist inthe sar Wale Beramin "Su degree asthe tue face of city, 1929) In 1986, the American-born animators Steven and Timothy Quay adapted the Polish writer Bruno Schule’ shor« story The Street of Crocadiles, originally pub- lished in 1933, inco a dialogue-less, animaced puppet film. But their film adap- tation did ace merely translate to another medium an essentially intact natrative structure from Schulz’s story: Rather, it subjected the Polish novelists text ro the cransformative force of time, working in several ways. In their adaptation of The Street of Crocadiles, che Quays animace Schulz's 1s if winding up cheit clockwork springs and setting them in motion. ut of the vireual realm of words, the puppets come to occupy a definite duration —twenty-one minutes—related to che materiality of the film and the calculated speed of its machinery. Yet the film also detours the text through « semiotic transposition and "projection" (from words co worlless pictures, fromTHE STREET OF CROCODILES space to space): a process that Marcel Duchamp called, in relation eo his Large Glass, “delay.” By serting Schule’s prose in literal motion and by highlighting the systems of relays through which the lierary cext gives rise «0 a new filmic arcwork, the Quays disclose physical end semiotic time as meaningfol dimen- sions of their incertextual artistic efforts. They als, finally, foreground the his- torical gap beeween their animsted flea and Schulz’ prose text through the device of a framing narrative. Litetally a “framing device’ —a seedy museum with a proto-cinematic viewing machine called “The Wooden Bsophagt provides the narrarive window onto Schulz’s story. Cinematic preservation and physical extitpation of the East European Jewish communities char formed che substance of Schulz’s lights of fancy thus appear, in che Quay Brothers’ highly aifecting film, a ewo facets of ehe same history thar transpired between Schula's sory in 1933 and che Quays! own work in 1986 that shares its name and narta- sive premise Beeween the ewo works, which inscribe a single fictive and fantastic "sere of ‘rocoailes” in the incongruent spaces of text and moving image, there occurs 4 Kind of double projeceion back and forth that allows the temporal gap thae this projection bridges to signify, ro "siga’ itself in the margins of Schul's areas tive—indeed, to replace the determinate words of the verbal text with vaguer implications of death, decay, and entropy thae must engulf language and erode meanings. The Quay Brothers add their work to Schulz’s across the partition of fifey yeats of history—ineluding the Nazis’ artempred extermination of the European Jews that claimed Schulz himself as one of its victims and the Soviet annexation of the pate of Poland in which Schulz was bora and died. Wich i¢ their film consticutes @ kind of “bachelor machine” of pwo partitioned elements, cach ocenpying a differene system of perspective and dimensionality. Through the looping delay of che Quays’ film, Schule’s The Street of Crodiler recurs at indefinice numberof times, rehearsing once more that very compulsion co repeat that Schul’s text itself illuserates, and capeuring its death drive within its mechanics to transmute it into lyrical “er of dying.” ‘Noteworthy in both Schule’ The Sirut of Crocodiles and the Quays’ The Stist of Crocndiles is an image of the city brought emphatically «0 light. The Quays reread Schule’ provincial dreamworld (based on his home town in southeastern Poland, Dtohobycz) through the lens of dadaist and Surrealist automatism,SCREENING THE CITY through the prism of modernism’s fascination wich the mechanical body and the figures of the puppet, the insect, and the automaton, In their translation off Schulz into animaced images, chey also suggest the reference of these jointed, ssutomatic figures, which populate che works of actists from Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp to Max Erast and Hans Bellmer, co che urban landscape of the wentieth-century metropolis. They reveal boea visible, perceptually appeehen sible aspects of these relations and che invisible social dimension drawing things, spaces, and bodies cogether into the vortex of commodity time, subject- ing each to a rapicl eycle of creation, cicculation, destruction, and re-creation in a new form, ‘Through che sightless eyes of their puppet figutes, for whose life and percep- tdon their camera and editing seand in, che Quays present a subjectively appre- hhended image of the city as mocern ruin. In his study of Sussealise art and liveracure, Compatsive Beauly, Hal Foster has suggested that modernise images of the aucomaton and the ruin can be understood against che background of capi- ‘alist modernization: these emblems .. . inerested che Suerealsts because they figured two uncanny ‘changes wrought upon bodies and objects in the high capitalist epach. On the one ‘hand, che mannequin evokes che remaking of ee body especially che female bad) as commodiey, just a the uromaton, is complement in che Serealisc image zeperoice, evokes the reconfiguring of che body (especially che male bod) as machine. On the ‘other hand, the romantic ruin evokes the displacing ofcalcual forms by chis regime ‘of machine production and commodity consumption —act only archaic feudal fours bat sso “ourmodes!" capitalise ones ‘These images, which constitute the two basic poles of the Quays’ The Stret of Crocdils, nus both register the forces of capitalise modernicy and implicily, by lingering on those objects and spaces that have been consigned to che sceapheap ‘of history, interrupt them. The Quays conceive of the spaces of outmoded con- sumables as ¢ labyrinth of delay, akin co the passage ftom image into language in Duchamp, The ourmoded serves them as language not separate from the com- ‘modity, from the circulation of money and goods, but one emerging from their Oblique, even perverse way of occupying the commodity eotically:THE STREET OF CROCODILES But if we tall of language, we needo't alk objectively of just English, or Polish, or Portuguese: but rather moreso ofthe language of things. Things ofthe senses which lude or resist classification, numbering, o caaloguing. A fiend af outs once heard the sound of voice counting out change in Polish and ssid it sounded like “rusting, taffea." This is a profoundly heauciful foornoee to any language, eo the innately ays tevious eexture ofthat language, and 50 you eppeoich its hem with more erembling than you dare imagine.” ‘The urban landscape that the Quays depict is charged with a disquieting combi- nation of scilloess and agitation, suggesting a restless erotic desite hidden behind the banal inexpressivencss of ies walls, windows, and doors (6). Under- scoring the implicie blurring of the boundary between subjective and objective features of chis represented space, I will call its basic mode “fetishistic urban- ism,” which I would characterize as having three major features. Firstly, it is ontologically indefinite: che spaces of this puppet-cty and the objects inhabit ing them confound oppositions of animated and dead, organic and inorganic, active and inert, real and imaginary, genuine and ersatz. Secondly, it is character. ized by a reversibility of properties berween the human body and inanimate ‘objects, with bodies becoming rigid and jointed, while objects take on flehly, pliable, and pulsaee qualities. Finally, i is an essentially entropic mode, deri nated by repetition and the dispersal of structuted form ina spreading dilapida- ‘ion and disorders This mode of urbanism is not ociginel co the film of the Surrealist animator, even though it has found ies mose faithful historian and archivise there, Rather, ic was indigenous to che modera European metropolis itself, resulting from the spacial dynamics of capitalise accumolation, che movements of value through the buile environment that marked the modernization of old European citics such as Paris in the successive implementations of Baron Haussmaaa’s plans. ‘The rapid development of zones of commerce, ia which gerrybuile fagades quickly crumbled inco strangely juxtaposed mixrures of newness and decrepi- tude, gave cise co a novel experience of temporal ambiguity embedded in the very spaces of everyclay life” The name for this experience was the “outmoded,” which writers as vatied as André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Walter Benjamin discovered hidden in the buile emains of the previous epoch. Benjamin, for example, catalogued spaces and things sarurated with this anachroviscico SCREENING THE CITY cempoeality of the once-and-no-langer n 5, the firse factory buildings, che earliest phot that have begun 0 be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five yeuts ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from chee.” Exemplifed by the new-old buildings of aging modern zones of the city, ancl equally by che commodified objec of 3s of domesticity once invested with the gleam of fashionubleness, chey ler, through che mere passage of time, came co carty the stigma of inauthenticity and destitution, Bur in cheir fall from newness, cheir qualities underwent a change of value In turn, the peculiae phenomenology of che outmoded spaces and objeces ofTHE STREET OF cRocoiLes these zones fcilcaced their interfacing with perverse forms of erotic desire fetishistic and masochistic, which displaced the erotic drive from a human object and extended it into the world of inenimate, pastial objects. In their freshaess and charm, before their decline into the grotesquetie of the out. date, such objects and places allowed the fetishism of the commodity to appear anything but perverse. Yielding oneself to the “sex appeal of the inorguni,” as Benjamin charactesized ehe commodity fetish of che fashionable object, became ' public mode of gratification rather chan something pursued in the shadows of the back eoom In their dectine, however, they becarue the material repositories of a desire fixated inthe past, set oa disavowing history, recapturing lest time, ‘and preserving iti artificial suspension for periodic reall. Yee chis paradoxical impulse, cis acempe co attest the ineluctable movement of the commodity on its circulatory course from fashionability to outmodediness, never really succeeds in recanimating a lost freshness. Instead, it produces a repetitive life-in-dearh and death-i The ultimate image one derives from Schuly’s and the Quays’ works is that of the city ws an intransitive and derisive machinery, in which the compulsive repe- tions of ftishistic sexuality and the entropic movement of matter ate comple- mentary and mutually reinforcing aspects of che dynamics of urban space Neither suggests enything cither of the convulsive beauty chae the Sutrealises thought o discover in such spaces of the outmoxled as the Passage de 'Opéa in Louis Aragon’s Payson de Pers othe flea marker in André Bretoa's Nadia, nov of the “revolutionary nihilism” Walter Benjamin detected in the Surrealist’ rela- tion to the impoverished zones of the modern city. NNo one before these visionaties and augurs perceived how desticution—not only social but architectonic, che poverty of interiors, enslaved aad enslaving objects ean be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism ... They bring the immense forces of “atmosphere” concealed in these things tothe poine of explosion ? Rather, for Schutz and the Quays, i isasifa mueual regression gripped both the ‘ity and its human material. The decay of the urban world sets free the frage mentary objects of the ftishis’s deste, while che feishist’s restless wandeting from object co objece drives forward the corruption, moral and material, of suchSCREENING THE CITY zones of urban disintegration. Rather chan dialectical, tending coward an in- censification and reversal of urban decay into revolutionary destruction, the dynamics of feishistic urbanism are diipasive—che entcopic spiral progresses from repetition co repetition, gradually spreading from point co point; yet this very expansion of its bounds eends to limi i¢, slow its spread, and contain its virulence. THE DIALECTICAL IMAGE People's weakness delivers their souls co us, makes chem nee, That loss of an elec tron ioniaes chem and readets.them suitable for chemical bonding. Withou fie they would stay locked inside themselves, not needing aayehing. Ie takes chet vices ‘0 give chem flavor and attraction, Bruno Schul to Tadeuse and Zofia Beeza, June 21 1934 This confroncation of madernity and provinciliey, childhood memory with rapid development and change, generates forms that are ac once enigmotically fantastic end fagile, subjece to appear and disappear without explanation of their epiphanic presence I is, perhaps, in similar exms chat one must describe Schulz’ own unique ceive asa writer dad artist, which is diffculs to expla in cypical literary and are historical ceems of influence and fiiavion, Schul’ life was one of quiet isolation, not only from international tendencies, but even with smote metropolitan Polish ones. Though he had some experience of larger cities such as Lwéwr and Vienna in his aborcedcraining 2s aa architect and painte, he lived most of his life in his hometown of Deobobyce, hardly « culearal center, working asa drawing instructor in che same gymnasium he had acended in his youth. His fist book Cinnamon Shop collected a sevies of vignettes originally conceived in his levers eo another writer, Debrorm Vogel; the timid Schulz only published it in 1933 upon the enthusiastic prompting of another fiend, Zofia Natkowska. Only after the strong reception of Cinnamon Shops did Schulz.come in contace with ocher key lterary-atcstic figuces of the interwar period in Poland, in particular the modernise writers Stanislaw Ignacy Witkie- vwicz and Wieold Gombrowica, for whose novel Terdydarke Schulz provided theTHE STREET OF cRocopiLes ately, Petheps. he singular phenomenon of Schulz muse besecn an unlikely product $rGeoeeal Eacopean historical and social conditions which littering uncannily sete distorting mitror of his sesibility. ence hie ago experience into fantastical works of at, Bruno Schl’ The Sia of Crit actually a single chapter from a book of interlinked stories from Schulz’: childhood ents Schulz had imaginatively “transformed ince some of the Arabian Nights. ° Schuli's Cin in, oF perhaps, ' id imagin- ‘ngs, especially evident in his pen-and-ink 4 fetish of a lose objece of love. As Zagajewski notes, “In trans cramped and dirty Dro- Rebycein which probably ony che half-wild gardens, orchards, cherry teees, Salowers, and moldering fences were really bsutful ance extraordinary,