Themes in Street of Crocodiles

Alright, I'll admit it, Street of Crocodiles was crazy. The first time I watched it, I tried to keep an open mind, but was hopelessly lost within the first minute. I continuously tried unsuccessfully to find connections and themes in the film and figure out why the heck I was watching it. Finally, I just quit looking for answers and watched the film, hoping something would come to me. And then the ending happened. I hadn't felt anything throughout the film, but as soon as I just watched the film, I was almost overwhelmed with sadness, and I think that's the whole point of the film. Similar to Akira, Street of Crocodiles uses a story as a weak mask to their true intent, to invoke feeling into the audience. The film looks at how the Warsaw ghettos changed the humans that lived in them. We often like to think that we humans are very sophisticated and would never stoop to the primal instincts of animals. However, Street of Crocodiles show how that assumption is false. 

The dolls that live in the ghettos are literal shells of their former shelves. They have hollow heads filled with cotton, trying to replace what they lost with a cheap imitation, their clothes are in tatters, their workshop is a faint echo of the grandeur it used to be. The inhabitants also act in primal ways, giving into basic instinct of sex, greed, anger, and grief. The doll in the glass case is openly naked and exposed to her viewers, the seamstresses greedily collect screw for themselves at the cost of weakening the structure of their home, the dolls fight over the protagonist, and the little doll grieves over the dead body of the light bulb creature. The emotion here isn't hidden, directed, or filtered, its raw and exposed, overflowing the ghetto and infecting all its inhabitants. This raw emotion is one of the reasons why I found at first it didn't make sense. 

We are so used to being directed to an emotion in film, for the story to do all the work for us, and to have the film come to a satisfying, logical, mostly complete ending. Street of Crocodiles doesn't follow these rules. It makes you work to understand the story, and in the process, gain a better understanding of the events that conspired in the ghettos. At the very end of the film, the text states that they tried the best they could with the cheap imitations that they had. There is no way that a film is able to successfully convey the horrors of the Warsaw ghettos. Sure, there are countless War films on the topic and even worse, but they don't get the essence of it, the raw emotions of going through those events and experiencing that pain. Street of Crocodiles understood that and instead created a film centered around emotions instead of plot. The audience is forced to think of the events and having to be in that situation and how as an individual they would feel. And that is terrifying. 

By the way, I want to say that this is my opinion on the film. I'm not saying that anyone is wrong for not liking it and Im not saying that you have to like it. I still don't understand most of the movie (the meat? The creepy monkey? The dude at the beginning?) and I watched it three times. All I know is that when I watch it, I am hit with a sense of sadness and despair, that I am not better than anyone else in this world and I could easily revert to the sad lonely creatures depicted in this film. 

The dolls in the ghetto are shells of their former self. Their hollow heads and washed out, tattered clothing

The woman encased in glass. A symbol of sexual desire in the ghetto

Im not sure about the significance of the meat. Thoughts?