Stroszek

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 8 of 10 / Overall: 91 of 100

‘Stroszek’ is inarguably the most emotionally shattering work Werner Herzog has ever put his name to. It has, infamously, become known as the film Joy Division singer Ian Curtis watched just before he hanged himself. An extreme reaction (although it should be noted that Curtis did himself no favours by listening to Iggy Pop’s Dostoyevsky-inspired slice of miserablism ‘The Idiot’ straight after watching it), but I guess there’s something in that evil soulless fucker of dancing chicken at the end that’s capable of destroying rationalism and convincing you that there is nothing left but the bleak emptiness of despair.

So what compelled Herzog to create this hour and three quarters of bleakness? Some run in with the American studio system that caused him to render that country’s cultural heritage as an act of artistic suicide? Some failure of his own creative vision from which he reeled in self-critical agony? Some personal tragedy so deep and heartbreaking that he was driven to paint ‘Stroszek’ in the harshest and darkest shades of black?

Er, no. He made it to say sorry to Bruno S. for not casting him in ‘Woyzeck’.

For those not in the know, Bruno S. was the idiot savant street musician whom Herzog cast in the title role in ‘The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’ (a film whose German title ‘Jeder Fur Sich und Gott gegen Alle’ – ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All’ – I much prefer). During production, Herzog told Bruno S. that he wanted to make a film of Georg Buchner’s unfinished play ‘Woyzeck’ and would cast him as the lead. Herzog shot ‘Woyzeck’ back to back with his loose but inspired Bram Stoker adaptation ‘Nosferatu – Der Phantom das Nacht’, using the same crew, and quickly realised that ‘Nosferatu’ star Klaus Kinski was better suited to play Woyzeck.

By way of apology, Herzog knocked out the script for ‘Stroszek’ (the similarity of the protagonist’s name to Woyzeck surely no coincidence) in a couple of weeks, and shooting the second half of the movie guerrilla style in America without a permit. But then again, this is Werner Herzog we’re talking about and small matters like getting permission to film have never stopped him. This is only one of many reasons I fucking bloody love the guy so much.

‘Stroszek’ casts Bruno S. as the eponymous man-child, turned loose after two and a half years in prison (the nature of his crimes is never disclosed, but alcohol is categorically blamed for his behaviour). His first act as a free man is to go into a pub and order a beer. Can’t knock him; I’d have done the same myself. It’s while he’s knocking back said beer, however, that he becomes reacquainted with his old girlfriend Eva (Eva Mattes), now turning tricks for a couple of thuggish pimps in some of the most horrible fashions ever to disgrace the 1970s.

Scraping out a meagre living singing in courtyards, Stroszek’s life takes a turn for the once when pimp-boy’s violent behaviour towards Eva quickly transfers itself to Stroszek. Then Stroszek’s elderly neighbour Herr Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz) offers a way out that seems to good to be true: a new life living and working in America with his nephew.

Too good to be true? You can say that again! Stroszek, Scheitz and Eva find themselves in Railway Flats, Wisconsin, a town so bleak and run down it makes Beirut look like the Riviera. Scheitz’s nephew, Clayton (Clayton Szalpinski), runs a dingy garage and is such a poster boy for personal hygiene and sophisticated demeanour that he removes a broken tooth with a pair of pliers and swills his bleeding gums with a can of beer. He has a face like the back end of a pick-up truck and sniggers about the possibility of shagging Eva. Yup, this guy is so déclassé that Cletus from ‘The Simpsons’ looks like Alistair Cooke in comparison.

Stroszek and Eva take out a loan to buy a mobile home, but soon fall behind with the payments. An unctuous type from the bank threatens repossession. Eva starts turning tricks again. Stroszek falls into despair. Things come to a bad end after Stroszek and Scheitz’s attempts at making easy money from a life of crime fail spectacularly. And, brother, do I ever mean spectacularly! If Bonnie and Clyde’s watchword was “we rob banks”, Stroszek and his OAP wingman demonstrate how not to do it by striking when the bank’s closed and robbing the barber’s shop next door for $32 instead. The concept of a getaway doesn’t seem to occur to them.

Granted, Herzog milks moments like these for absurdist humour (likewise a narratively redundant but bitingly funny scene about two feuding farmers and the no-man’s-land strip of dirt that separates their properties), but there’s no humour whatsoever in the denouement, which takes place at a deserted funfair. Stroszek rides a chairlift to nowhere and the dancing chicken keeps on dancing. Herzog has spoken of the idiocy of chickens. The chicken in ‘Stroszek’ goes beyond idiocy. Its meaningless gyrations go beyond a black joke at the expense of Stroszek himself; it stands as a metaphor for cultural emptiness; an epitaph for the clichéd myth of the American dream – something that probably never existed in the first place.

Werner Herzog's most maverick moments

In no particular order, and the only criteria being that I can't imagine these being attributable to any other film-maker, these are my ten favourite, most quinessential Herzog moments:

1) 'Aguirre, Wrath of God' - with the project doomed if its lead actor departed the jungle location, Herzog responded to Klaus Kinski threatening to pack up his things and board the next boat leaving for civilisation by assuring him that he had a rifle and nine bullets; eight of them would be in Kinski before he reached the first bend in the river, the ninth he would save for himself. Kinski decided to stay and finish shooting the film.

2) 'La Soufriere' - a Caribbean island's on the verge of destruction when a live volcano suddenly goes off the seismic scale. The islanders depart. The politicians and the police depart. The scientists measuring the volcano's activity depart. What does Herzog do? Round up a couple of cameramen and fly out there!

3) 'Fitzcarraldo' - shucking off the money men's suggestion that the film's centre-piece be achieved using a model boat in a greenhouse, Herzog has his cast and crew haul an honest-to-god steamship over a freakin' mountain!

4) 'Heart of Glass' - deciding that a dream-like atmosphere best suits this tale of a glass-works going out of business and causing the fiscal ruination of the town dependent on it, Herzog puts his cast under hypnosis.

5) 'Little Dieter Needs to Fly' - recreating Dieter Dengler's capture by the VC, Herzog eschews a simple "talking heads" account of the incident from Dengler himself, and spurns the docu-drama route of restaging key points of the narrative in a very polite, formal, more-tea-vicar BBC kind of way. Instead, he takes Dengler back to the jungle, handcuffs him, and has some big bastards shove him heavy-handedly through the foliage. Result: best documentary of the last two decades.

6) 'Even Dwarfs Started Small' - realising he would be putting his vertically-challenged cast through the ropes, he agreed that after the shoot was over he'd jump into a cactus field. The dwarfs did their scenes. The shoot concluded, Herzog threw himself happily into a field full of cactii.

7) 'The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser' - jettisoned any attempt at historical verisimilitude by casting mid-40s street musician Bruno S, as the 16-year-old Kaspar Hauser.

8) 'Woyzeck' - playing the hapless and much-put-upon soldier, Klaus Kinski decided that the opening sequence would benefit from the actor playing his drill sergeant giving him a real kicking. Herzog, making no attempt to dissuade either performer, filmed said kicking.

9) 'Stroszek' - ended this blackly comic tale of alienation and failure (yes, I know I just used "blackly comic", "alienation" and "failure" in the same sentence; trust me on this) with an interminable shot of a dancing chicken that so affronted DoP Thomas Mauch that Herzog had to explain the image thusly: "This is something very big. It looks unobstrusive when you see it with the naked eye in front of you, but don't you see that there is something big about it, something beyond what we are?" Mauch's response is unrecorded, but he filmed the chicken.

10) The Minnesota Declaration - declared war on Cinéma Vérité, describing at as "a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants".

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

The original German title of Werner Herzog's 'The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser' is


which translates as 'Every Man for Himself and God Against All'. I prefer this original title. It's apposite for a study in social hypocrisy and exploitation, even if it does make the film a harder sell!

'The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser' is based on historical events. In 1828, a young man was found on the streets of Nuremberg carrying a letter addressed to the captain of the city's cavalry regiment. The letter, unsigned, stated that Kaspar had been instructed in reading and writing and wanted to join the cavalry. It transpired he could write nothing beyond his name and his vocabulary was limited. What little he could explain indicated he'd spent his life chained up in a cellar. The council initially housed him in a gate tower under the care of a jailer; later, he took up residence with schoolteacher Friedrich Daumer. Public interest in Kaspar turned him into a celebrity-cum-sideshow freak. A much-debated conspiracy theory had him as the hereditary prince of Baden, swapped at birth with a dying baby so the Countess von Hochberg could ensure her son Leopold's ascension to the throne. (Historians have deemed this nonsensical.) Rumours continued to fly when Kaspar was the victim of an apparent attack with a razor in 1829. He died of a stab wound in 1833. His epitaph fuelled the legend: "Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time. His birth was unknown, his death mysterious."

Even the most cursory research on Kaspar Hauser (Wikipedia provides a good overview) reveals inconsistencies in his story of a lifetime's incarceration. Historical accounts show him as vain and quarrelsome. It has been suggested, plausibly, that the wounds he sustained from the "attacks" were self-inflicted. A film approaching the Kaspar Hauser story from the perspective that he was a fraud would be a fascinating project.

Herzog, however, considers the legend. And this makes 'The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser' doubly fascinating. Herzog, certainly in his documentaries, pursues what he calls "ecstatic truth". Which is not the same as factual truth. Before this article gets bogged down in semantics, I'll let Herr Herzog himself explain:

"There is a much more profound level of truth than that of everyday reality, for example in the dreams that Kaspar talks of, and it is my job to seek them out ... I am interested in the verifiable historical facts up to a point. But I much prefer to evoke history through atmosphere and the attitude of the characters rather than through anecdotes that may or may not be based on historical fact." (Herzog on Herzog, p. 113). That would be a moral minefield for most directors; for Herzog it's a mission statement.

The most controversial aspect of "ecstatic truth" in 'The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser' is the casting of Bruno S. Kaspar was thought to have been born in 1812, making him 16 when he turned up in Nuremburg. Bruno S. was 42, a self-taught musician whom Herzog had seen in a documentary about street performers in Berlin. I'm not sure what the right word is to describe Bruno S. without sounding patronising. Beaten so severely as a child that he temporarily lost the ability speak, his formative years spent in care homes, institutions and prisons, there remained about him, however, a curious sense of child-like innocence. This single piece of casting is Herzog's masterstroke: Kaspar, if his story is taken at face value, was a boy who had no childhood. Herzog has him played by, essentially, a man-child.

Herzog approaches the material not as the enigma of the English title - no speculation is given to Kaspar's identity or that of his guardian (an eerily shadowy figure in the early scenes) - but as a study of how society behaves towards Kaspar. The authorities question him (his non-response to stimuli is tested by feigned sword parries and a candle flame). The church tries to convert him (when it's established that he has no concept of God, the curt response is "he'll just have to have faith"). Children treat him almost as a plaything, encouraging him to recite nursery rhymes. Labourers mock him, deriving much hilarity from his fear of a chicken. The town council, concerned at how much he's costing them, happily exploit him. A visiting nobleman considers "adopting" him.

Only Daumer and his wife seem interested in Kaspar as a person. And even Daumer's academicism leads to an unfortunate invitation: a professor is summoned to test Kaspar's intellect. This he does by posing a logic question: there are two villages, one whose inhabitants speak only the truth, while the other lot tell only lies; meeting a person at a crossroads between villages, what is the one question that can determine which village they're from? It is of course, "Would you answer no if I asked you if you came from the liars' village?" (The answer forces the liar into a double negative that betrays him.) Kaspar posits a different question: "Are you a tree-frog?" The simplicity is brilliant: the liar perforce has to say that he is, therefore proving himself a liar. The professor rubbishes Kaspar: "Your question describes, it doesn't deduce", adding - in what for me is the film's key line - "In logic and mathematics we do not understand things. We reason and deduce."

Herzog's Kasper Hauser is a metaphor for honest, unpretentious simplicity in a world defined by social strictures and scientific enquiry (the closing scenes have a group of surgeons remove and probe Kaspar's brain while a clerk chortles over the potential importance of his report on the autopsy). The Kaspar Hauser of Herzog's film may be the legend, but there's not a trace of hagiography or 19th century conspiracy theory in sight; instead, by eschewing mere facts, Herzog posits some probing questions about the human condition.