Beginning and ending with a map of arterially-patterned city streets, the Brothers Quay’s Street of Crocodiles, from 1986, initially presents the viewer with monochrome footage and live action. A lone male enters a deserted, ambiguous space, filmed across rows of empty metal chairs to a small proscenium-framed stage. Looking into the eye piece of an apparently disused mechanical contraption, the viewer is presented with a highly realised, self-contained world of hybridised machinery, coloured in a drab palette of greys and rust browns, populated by marionettes and customised dolls, and with the air of factory workshop as antiquated, abandoned museum. The cutting of a knotted string appears to set in motion a chain of non-linear events, with images and episodes conforming to the unfathomable logic of a dream. Metal scissors hang in mid-air, and lie across a glass roof, as barely glimpsed feet scuttle past. In a movement vocabulary of rolling and spinning, spiral-grooved, rusted screws emerge of their own volition from the woodwork. A single lighted window in an otherwise darkened cityscape; fob-watch workings as vivd red meat; an impassive, cymbal-striking toy monkey; the limbless, smooth moulded torsos of dress-making dummies; paper patterns pinned against raw liver; the involuntary circling arms of wheel-mounted plastic dolls. The retying of string signals a re-enactment of the work’s opening sequence, this time with marionette as lone exploring figure.