None of what I've experienced so far has been exploitatively violent, sexual or foul-mouthed, but Herzog's work does show that you don't need any of those extreme elements to shock and depress an audience - you just need to show life in all its "naked" ugliness.
I did discuss Heart of Glass on my podcast, here: http://thewhittlingpost.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/podcast-whittling-post-digest-episode-05.html however I may go back and write a proper entry about that film and the documentary How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck in my next written blog entry. Whenever that will be. I really did love how beautiful Heart of Glass was, so I think that'll be the first Herzog film I revisit just for pure enjoyment of the visuals.
Right... onwards!
STROSZEK
Yeah, so this film is a real bummer. The Herzog films I've watched so far have all been haunting and dour, but never bleak. Stroszek, however, is real "Kill me now!" material. It is perhaps here that one should include the oft-noted piece of dark trivia that it was apparently this film that Joy Division's Ian Curtis was watching when he committed suicide.
Anyway, moving on...
I was unexpectedly glad to see Bruno S. return after his very unique and unusual performance in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. He is an odd fellow to watch, and apparently he's not really acting - this is Bruno S. and some of the stories his "character" tells onscreen are the actor's actual experiences.
So - spoiler alert - the key series of events or plot of Stroszek are: Bruno gets released from a psychiatric hospital, moves in with a prostitute by the name of "Eva", gets abused by local thugs, emigrates to America with Eva and a gender-ambiguous elderly neighbour by the name of "Scheitz", gets into debt, loses Eva, loses his home, goes on the road, turns to crime then kills himself.
It starts off downbeat and proceeds to get worse and worse.
Sigh.
Some things in Stroszek don't really make much sense or just aren't explained particularly well. I guess you could call them "plot holes", but I also don't think it helps that Herzog's documentary style works against the viewer's suspension of disbelief.
I'm just going to list the plot holes that stood out to me on my one and only viewing, rather than write a weighty commentary.
1) Why did the hospital Bruno was staying at spend so much time trying to help him get better only to give him an aggressive "dressing down" just as he was about to leave?
2) What are the local thugs actually up to? Were they into drugs or prostitution? This was never really made clear, as far as I could tell.
3) Bruno seemed to know Eva from before he was in hospital. What was his relationship with her back then?
4) Why didn't Bruno simply call the police when the local thugs started violently assaulting him and Eva on a regular basis?
5) Once in
6) What was wrong with Scheitz? Did he have dementia or did he have other mental health issues? He seemed fine before they got to
7) Why did Eva leave? The reasons why she and Bruno fell out aren't explained very well, and her leaving would almost certainly leave her in an even worse state of affairs than if she just stayed where she was. If she wasn't thinking clearly due to substance abuse then - again - that was not really shown.
8) How could the representative from the bank in good conscience or even legally goad Bruno into signing things when Bruno clearly could not speak English?
9) Where was Bruno going at the end of the film? Was he just aimlessly "on the road", or was he planning to "win" Eva back in
10) Apart from wanting to cause a distraction and to have Herzog feed us a heavy-handed visual metaphor about life going round in circles, why did Bruno leave his truck doing "doughnuts"? Why did it catch on fire?
So, there are some of the things that worked against my enjoyment of the film on a logical basis, but apart from that there were many things I did enjoy.
In particular, our three leads are wonderfully naturalistic, with Bruno perhaps unintentionally so. You will truly fall in love with Eva Mattes as the beautiful and warm-hearted Eva and smile every time Clemens Scheitz is onscreen as the increasingly paranoid mad-inventor Scheitz. Herzog's reliance on non-professional actors tends to work against him with some of the "actors" in the
McKain and the auctioneer both appeared in Herzog's How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck documentary, which I'm assuming was shot while they were making Stroszek... or maybe Stroszek was shot while they were making How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck. I'm sure the facts are listed somewhere, but I mainly want to give my first impressions here.
And that's it, really. The film doesn't carry on the visual beauty of Heart of Glass, unfortunately, so we're back to it being hard to discuss the cinematography or camera direction, so I think I'll end this discussion here.
Stroszek is a sad film, but that so many elements were left unexplained, especially why Bruno and Eva's dreams were so easily dashed, makes it hard to really believe. As an examination of the difficulties of getting oneself out of poverty, though, it's very sympathetic and probably relatable to many people watching out there.
And I can't stop the dancing chickens.
NEXT UP: HEART OF GLASS and HOW MUCH WOOD WOULD A WOODCHUCK CHUCK
