Author: Michelle

| Jeremy Meckler |

Stroszek screens at the Trylon from Friday, November 26 to Sunday, November 28. Scroll to the bottom of this page for tickets and more information.

Werner Herzog is one of those directors whose persona is sometimes more extravagant than his films. There’s the time he ate his shoe or jumped into a cactus patch; the time he pulled Joaquin Phoenix from a car wreck, or when he was shot by a sniper mid-interview and continued it anyway. Indeed, some of his films seem to get swept up in the Herzog myth, becoming more interesting as artifacts of a mad filmmaker than as films in their own right. Stroszek, Herzog’s meandering 1976 German-American road movie, has its fair share of legendary Herzog lore, but it also stands as an exceptional example of his unique cinematic vision. Balanced on the border between documentary and fiction Stroszek is perhaps the purest demonstration of Herzog’s experimental production approach, his devotion to stylized documentary as a way to access a deeper level of truth, and his consistent focus on characters at the margins of modern society. For my money, it’s also the most coherent articulation of the midwestern American spirit ever put on celluloid.

Stroszek is the result of a few creative and intellectual collaborations. The first is with Bruno S., the film’s star and direct inspiration. Bruno was a self-taught musician who played eighteenth-century ballads on accordion in Berlin streets and alleys. Herzog’s first encounter with Bruno was as the subject of a 1970 documentary and he was so immediately smitten that he sought out Bruno and cast him as the lead in his 1972 historical drama The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Bruno plays Kaspar Hauser, a (perhaps apocryphal) wild child teenager who wandered into Nuremberg in May 1828, repeating the phrase “I would like to be a rider, the way my father was” and bursting into tears when asked any question.[1] Through a series of interviews with the mayor, Hauser told a bizarre story: he had never seen another human being before and had spent his first sixteen years in isolation in a 3’ by 6’ cell in Bavaria where he would wake up to bread and water every morning. Hauser was the subject of inquiry and rumors, including that he was actually a prince, although his often contradictory stories also led many to believe he was a compulsive fabricator. He died at 21 from a stabbing in a park, either self-inflicted or by a stranger, and has remained an intriguing and mysterious figure ever since. Bruno, who had never acted before, was 42 when he played the teenaged Hauser, but he brought an innocence and sincerity to the role that somehow bridged their age gap, partially because his personal life bore uncanny resemblances to Hauser’s. Bruno spent age three through twenty-six in mental asylums and prisons after he was beaten so severely as a child that he lost the ability to speak. Per Herzog, “Bruno was very aware that the film was just as much about how society had destroyed him as it was about how society had killed Kaspar Hauser.”[2] Herzog even considered calling the film The Story of Bruno Hauser to highlight their resonances. The German title for the film, Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, literally Every Man for Himself and God Against All, sidesteps the dilemma by focusing on the guiding languor at the heart of both Bruno and Hauser.

After Kaspar Hauser, Herzog planned to work with Bruno again on Woyzeck, an adaptation of Georg Büchner’s unfinished stage play about the suffering of a working-class soldier in a nineteenth-century German town. But, as production took shape, Herzog changed his mind, finding his long-time muse/foil/fiend Klaus Kinski a better fit for the role. Bruno, whose life had been transformed by his stint as a movie star, was heartbroken. As a consolation, Herzog offered Bruno a role in a new movie that he made up on the spot. Herzog chose a title that sounded similar to Woyzeck, Stroszek, and dashed out the screenplay over the next four days, basing the concept even more directly on Bruno’s life than their previous collaboration.

Bruno Stroszek (Bruno S.), the film’s central figure, is a Berlin street musician released from prison who, contrary the advice of the prison Warden, wanders directly into a seedy Berlin bar and gets in trouble with some German drug dealers. Along with his elderly neighbor Herr Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz) and his friend Eva (Eva Mattes), a sex worker looking to escape the same gang, Stroszek flees to rural Wisconsin where the three are taken in by Scheitz’s nephew, an auto mechanic who gives Stroszek a job in his repair shop. They move into a double-wide mobile home and are swept up into an American midwestern culture that is just as callous as the Berlin underworld. Stroszek is a meek and accommodating weirdo with a depressive streak caught in a cruel, though often darkly funny, world. Like Bruno S., Bruno Stroszek seems somehow completely artless, able through his naïveté to reveal uncomfortable truths about the world around him. As Roger Ebert put it in his review of Stroszek, “he looks as if he has long been expecting the worst to happen…. [H]e projects a kind of sincerity that is almost disturbing, and you realize that there is no corner anywhere within Bruno for a lie to take hold.”[3] Stroszek represents the culmination of Herzog and Bruno S.’s partnership, and even more than Kaspar Hauser, it relies on Bruno’s disturbing sincerity to give the film its raw emotional impact.

But Stroszek is also the result of an earlier collaboration, evident only in the opening credits, where Herzog thanks Errol Morris. Errol Morris is an Oscar-winning documentary maker and the inventor of the confrontational camera setup he calls the Interrotron. In 1976, however, he was a disaffected graduate student in UC Berkeley’s philosophy program, yet to embark on his first film. When he met Herzog, Morris was already on the outs from academia which he called “a world of pedants” and was knee-deep into independent research on the phenomenon of American serial killers. One of Herzog’s and Morris’s first collaborations was to collectively interview notorious serial murderer Ed Kemper in the state prison in Vacaville, California. This shared fascination also led them to Plainfield, Wisconsin, the birthplace (and scene of the crime) for Ed Gein. Gein was the real-world basis for Psycho’s Norman Bates and The Silence of the Lamb’s Buffalo Bill. Herzog and Morris’s interest in Gein focused on a morbid psychoanalytic question, directly prompted by Hitchcock’s film: Ed Gein was a grave robber with a severe Oedipus complex, but no one could tell them whether he had ever dug up his own mother’s grave as Bates does in Psycho. Herzog and Morris decided to find the answer the old-fashioned way, by digging up her grave themselves. They picked a date and planned to meet in Plainfield with shovels in hand, but Morris chickened out and stayed in California. Herzog made it, but his car broke down and was towed to a small auto shop in Plainfield where he hit it off with an unassuming local mechanic.

A couple of years later, searching for a film topic after promising Bruno S. the script for Stroszek, Herzog remembered this rural Wisconsin town and decided that Bruno Stroszek’s wanderings would bring him to Plainfield, renamed “Railroad Flats” in the film. Stroszek works in the same auto shop where Herzog’s car was towed, and that real-world mechanic, Clayton Szalpinski, plays Herr Scheitz’s mechanic nephew. Herzog would later say that Plainfield had a particular kind of menace:

There was something very gloomy and evil about Plainfield, and even during filming two bodies were found only ten miles from where we were filming. I certainly felt it was one of those places that are focal points where every thread converges and is tied in a knot. You have these points in the United States — for example, Las Vegas, or the Stock Exchange on Wall Street, or San Quentin prison — where the dreams and nightmares all come together. And I count Plainfield, Wisconsin to be among them.[4]

So, from a morbid obsession with the most American psychosis, serial killing, and a collaboration with another filmmaker with an obsessive revelatory drive, Herzog stumbled into a film about an abused, disturbingly sincere German ex-con searching for a new life in a spooky site of power in the upper Midwest.

It is perhaps no surprise that Herzog and Morris would hit it off—both have shown long fascinations with the irrational margins of modern life, and both have a demonstrated knack for revealing uncomfortable and contradictory truths in a darkly comic mode. Morris’s films are often marked by long direct-to-camera monologues—interviews in which his subjects reveal something deep and earthshaking, often without knowing that they are doing it. As Morris put it in a 1989 New Yorker profile, “I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory.”[5] Herzog, in both his off-kilter, often poetic documentaries and his distanciating fiction films, is driven by a similar tendency toward finding a deeper truth beyond the limits of factual rationality. As he put it incisively in his 1999 Minnesota Declaration—delivered at the Walker Art Center—“There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”[6] Stroszek is itself the focal point of a variety of Herzog’s career-long interests—madness, absurdity, the incapacity of rationality, and a dark humor that sees something sublime and universal in ignorance and suffering. But the film’s specificity, its earnest connection to its setting and characters (most of whom are non-actors playing themselves) gives it a gentle, personal, and profound ability to distill the American Midwest down to its essence. This isn’t some snide, heartless sendup of flyover country, nor is it a romantic glorification of a lost American past. Instead Stroszek is a nuanced and loving portrayal of a spooky little town on the edge of the prairie. It’s one of Herzog’s strangest and most uncompromising films. (Ebert again: “Stroszek is not a comedy, but I don’t know how to describe it. Perhaps as a peculiarity.”[7]) But somehow, in its fusion of fiction and documentary, of improvised comedy and experimental amalgam, it finds its way to the soul of America, located somewhere between a professional auctioneer’s drawl and a dancing chicken.

NOTES

[1] Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason, Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser. (London: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 5.

[2] Werner Herzog and Paul Cronin, Herzog on Herzog. (New York: Faber and Faber, 2002), 119.

[3] Roger Ebert, “Stroszek Movie Review & Film Summary (1977): Roger Ebert,” movie review & film summary (1977) | Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun Times, July 7, 2002), https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-stroszek-1977.

[4] Herzog and Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 147.

[5] Mark Singer, “PREDILECTIONS,” The New Yorker, January 29, 1989, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/02/06/predilections

[6] Werner Herzog, “Werner Herzog Reads His Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema,” Werner Herzog Reads His Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema (Walker Art Center, April 30, 1999), https://walkerart.org/magazine/minnesota-declaration-truth-documentary-cinema-1999.

[7] Ebert, “Stroszek Movie Review & Film Summary (1977): Roger Ebert.”

Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon and Michelle Baroody

| Chris Polley |

Fitzcarraldo screens at the Trylon from Friday, November 19 to Sunday, November 21. Scroll to the bottom of this page for tickets and more information.

In Werner Herzog’s stirring 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, the director inserts himself carefully into the narrative as he contemplates the tragic and preventable death of grizzly-bear enthusiast and environmentalist Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell was mauled to death by the animals he was attempting to protect and film in 2003, all while letting his camcorder record (with the lens cap on) the audio of his demise. “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder,” Herzog narrates as he concludes his journey toward understanding Treadwell’s life and its end.

These words, forever imprinted in my mind, feel particularly apropos in the world of film news recently, with the tragic on-set death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins last month. While the camera wasn’t yet rolling when Hutchins was shot and killed by a prop gun handled by actor Alec Baldwin, the incident has already been replayed, picked apart, and documented by press outlets and amateur online commentators worldwide.

This parallel causes me to wonder if, while making Grizzly Man, and especially while writing and recording those chilling voiceovers, Herzog was thinking at all about the unfortunate events that occurred while filming Fitzcarraldo, his 1982 dramatization of the life and exploits of Carlos Fitzcarrald, a European rubber baron that brings a deranged vision to the jungle of Peru. The historical epic centers on this monster with a slight name-change—Bryan Sweeney Fitzgerald––played with manic precision by Klaus Kinski. Fitzgerald is an imperialist businessman looking to bring art to a people that never asked for it, and the film follows his trek into Peru and down the Amazon in an attempt to excavate and sell enough rubber to raise funds for constructing and opening an opera house in the South American jungle. The locals redub him “Fitzcarraldo” for easier pronunciation, not unlike how foreign names become Americanized for immigrants in this country, thus making the film’s title a nod to the idea of how someone’s identity can so easily become subsumed by their immediate surroundings.

Like Fitzgerald, Herzog seemed to lose control of his own attempt to bring Western art to an alien environment. The on-location production of Fitzcarraldo in Peru was beset with tragedy and injury, although it wasn’t considered newsworthy at the time (whether because of the remote filming location, lack of an American movie star at the center of it, a less whirlwind film production news cycle, or some combination of the three). Film editor Catherine Shoard looks back in her primer about on-set accidents for The Guardian, specifying that the 1981 shoot “resulted in numerous injuries and the deaths of several indigenous extras. One Peruvian logger was forced to amputate his own foot after being bitten by a venomous snake.”[1]

While this is hardly surprising considering all the clues both textual and subtextual in the finished product, it’s not something I explicitly knew about until researching the film in advance of writing this piece. In my previous watches and fumbling around on the internet as the credits rolled, I learned plenty of other things: how Jason Robards was originally the lead, that it took some coaxing for Herzog to secure longtime mercurial collaborator Kinski to be his replacement (who famously walked off mid-shoot during the filming of another of the duo’s iconic works, Aguirre, the Wrath of God), and even that the tension between Herzog, Kinski, and the locals led to a particularly pervasive story fed by the auteur’s mythical status that a local tribal chief offered to have Kinski murdered as a favor to the filmmaker. To learn this new information just days after the internet’s onslaught of reporting and editorializing on Hutchins’s accidental death was unsettling, to say the least.

What has become of this beloved work of art to me now? I started factoring in the imperialism of Fitzcarraldo’s narrative compared to what happened last month. My stomach turned. I knew Hutchins’s name, but nobody seemed to even care to write down the names of the people maimed and killed on Herzog’s set—probably because they were local indigenous people to Peru, essentially nameless to the Western world.

And for all the newfound clarity regarding on-set safety brought to the forefront in the wake of Hutchins’s death, criticism of Herzog’s epic upon its release in 1982 was not hard to find now that I was looking for it. In fact, Washington Post critic Gary Arnold seemed to particularly see through the grandeur that many (myself included for over a decade) could not, writing, “To remain intrigued with this movie you are obliged to go along with the pretense that Herzog’s continuing elaboration of a cherished personal myth––the impossible dreamer, the director attracted to primitive locales and dangerous circumstances in his quest for elusive, visionary images ––is a theme of surpassing interest.”[2]

Now, I admittedly do still value dissecting this theme so many years later, especially considering today’s landscape of an enduring ego-obsessed patriarchal hegemony. Ironically, the sheer audacity and singularity of Herzog’s understanding and conveyance of the human spirit as a filmmaker, artist, and thinker remains unparalleled. This story is still, nearly 40 years later, one that resonates, especially in a world that repeatedly wrestles with the concept of a white devil disguised as a white savior (even down to the white linen suit and shock of strangely styled hair). Yet, I still ask myself: is it worth it in the face of such catastrophe, such literal loss of life?

In an interview for the Directors Guild of America, Herzog himself said of the scope of the infamous central event of the film (a 340-ton ship pulled across a mountain using an elaborate system of pulleys and winches sans special effects/movie magic of any kind), “I had staged a huge mechanical event, which is out of proportion for a film, and then I just covered it the best I could.”[3] This is not just an admittance of how art, when in the hands of someone with an unrelenting vision, can become just as unwieldy as Fitzgerald’s plans for getting rubber out of an inaccessible part of the Peruvian jungle—it’s perhaps a confession that playing with cameras, actors, and king-size props is, yes, akin to the old theological warning about playing God.

NOTES

1. Catherine Shoard, “‘No one should be killed on set’: tragic history of fatalities during filming,” The Guardian, October 22, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/oct/22/on-set-fatalities-halyna-hutchins-alec-baldwin

2. Gary Arnold, “Visions of Vanity,” The Washington Post, November 9, 1982, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1982/11/09/visions-of-vanity/821978fa-3843-4fc1-9c2b-2da7de9cc0db

3. Jeffrey Resner, “Werner Herzog: Mountain Climbing,” DGA Quarterly, Fall 2007, https://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/0703-Fall-2007/Shot-To-Remember-Fitzcarraldo.aspx

Edited by Brad Stiffler and Michelle Baroody

| Matt Levine |

Nosferatu The Vampyre screens at the Trylon from Sunday, October 31 to Tuesday, November 2. Scroll to the bottom of this page for tickets and more information.

These written testimonies were discovered in the personal journal of Count Dracula in the city of Wismar, Germany, circa 1897.

June 12 –

I am the descendant of an old family.

When young, I was told that family lineage could transform one’s life into heaven or hell. Luckily, my family’s wealth and power was such that my immediate existence was heavenly. From our castle in the shadow of the Carpathians, I could roam the plateaus and forests. The sun would warm me, the rain drench me, the snow caress me; they were all my playthings.

My father called our castle a fortress, and he was proud of its dense stone armor. This is the mighty building in which I still live, habiting its frigid hallways at night. When I was a boy, years and years ago (centuries ago, it pains me to say), armies attacked with dreams of conquest. They slit throats and sliced through necks, all for the distant glimmer of power. At five, I watched the woman who raised me—not my mother, who was rarely present—run through with a large, curved blade as she shielded me from marauders who had stormed our walls. I felt love and grief, I know, but what I remember, eons later, is the sight of bright red blood flowing, warm tributaries creating a new topography on my bedroom’s granite floor. Not all was heavenly, I suppose, but even the barbaric moments are tinged with happiness in my recollection.

I am the only one left of my family. The others have died through murder, starvation, guillotine, suicide, plague, and—in a few lucky instances—the calm of old age. There were powerful dynasties formed from marriage between two clans, then more dynasties and more clans, domestic empires. But my whole family was lost, at some point, to the violence of time. We fell into disrepute; we raped, looted, and pillaged; we were overtaken by the peasants we terrorized, who, it turns out, could wield an axe themselves. We could find no more families to marry into, so we stayed within our own, cousins wedding one another, brothers and sisters having children, mother father aunt uncle. This I saw over centuries, till the last one died—a great-great-great-great… (who remembers the generation?) granddaughter taking her last breath. And in her final moment, as she looked past the ceiling and her eyes clouded over, I know now her last sigh was one of peace, not horror.

I am the last descendant of an old family. I was not the only one who was turned; there were both dead and undead on our rotting family tree. But now there is only the dead and me. How I long to join my kin, who once took solace in our family name, though now it can only elicit a momentary shudder, for it is the sound of doom.

June 17 –

Time is an abyss, profound as a thousand nights.

Centuries come and go. To be unable to grow old is terrible. After all this time, I know that there is nothing left to see, nothing left to think. There is a finite number of behaviors, actions, events in human existence. These things roil together, echoes of the past, variations on a theme—a theme which after so many years can only seem like plagiarism.

Once upon a time there were things that surprised me, delighted me. Even once I became the undead, the endlessness of time gave me a giddy thrill. Whatever is new and anticipated becomes a supreme love, once attained. But after its attainment, where else is there to go? The new is a laughable concept: nothing on Earth is new anymore. The anticipated is dashed from the beginning, with foreknowledge of its meaninglessness.

The meaning of endlessness is right there in the word, but stupidly we avoid its meaning. Endless love, endless time, endless joy—these things without end are nothing to savor. Only by knowing the end will come may we enjoy such transient pleasures.

Can you imagine enduring centuries, experiencing the same futility each day? The living cynic will say they can imagine it, not understanding what futility means. Nothing is futile about a human life, precisely because something must be done during the living interval of several decades.

To sink sharp teeth into pliant flesh, to feel a warm gush of blood on my tongue, to feel a body writhe as I take its life into mine—futile, futile. Repeated endlessly. Each soul I meet I know is an imminent victim, but there’s nothing bold in the conquest, no triumph in victory. I close my eyes as I drink their blood and wish I was anywhere, anyone else.

June 30 –

Listen. Listen. The children of the night make their music.

I was wrong, perhaps. I do take joy in some things—the animals. The wolves, the bats, the worms, the rats. Nocturnal creatures that howl, squirm, shriek, or flap their wings, because that’s all they know how to do. I am like them, living without deeper reason, surviving only because I have to do; the difference is, I am aware of my incompleteness.

There are many—the meek villagers, the untold thousands who will be claimed by my plague—who cannot place themselves in the soul of a hunter. They see me, they tremble, they know I must die, but they do not have the courage to plant the tip of a stake over my once-beating heart and drive it through my body. Even the ones who know what I am, they comfort themselves with superstition but don’t take the gruesome steps they know they must take. In this way, we are both incomplete: me in my perpetual shroud, them in their cowardice. Someday, a true soul will finally kill me, the first real human that’s existed in the centuries of my undead life.

July 2 –

I don’t attach importance to the sunshine anymore.

Or to glittering fountains, which youth is so fond of. I love the darkness and the shadows, where I can be alone with my thoughts. Sunshine, light, beauty, they’re all unfaithful to the true nature of the world I know.

This castle I call my own, the shadows which move of their own volition, the rays of the moon cutting through blackness—this is a truer illustration of the world, of living things, of nature’s mad workings.

But to be alone with my thoughts—as I am now, writing words which no one will ever read—is its own kind of torture. Here, too, there is nothing new. Every thought has already been conjured, by me or by someone else. I’ve remembered the infinite moments of my life, its four-hundred-some years, over and over again; my greatest fears and pleasures have been driven down into stale cliché. As if I’m reading an intimate biography of myself, written by a bland and detached author.

I attach importance to the sunshine only because it may kill me. What sweet salvation awaits. And yet, I cannot simply stand in an open window and wait for the dawn to relieve me of my torment. The beast in me insists on self-preservation; this ancient, brittle body won’t let me die.

Once, painters depicted God, the heavens, the apostles, all that is holy; then, the Romanticists turned their brushes to mountains and oceans and deserts, a different sublime. I know that all of this is absurd, that divinity is a comforting myth. And yet (maybe a new thought after all) there might be a God—wicked, cunning, tricking us to disobey our greatest desires. Why else would I want nothing more than the end, though my thirst keeps me going till I may suck down my next meal?

July 11 –

The absence of love is the most abject pain.

Did I ever love when I was living? Perhaps in the way that humans do. But that is nothing, a candle dancing in a typhoon.

When love becomes impossible, the need for it becomes dire. This is no news to anyone who’s loved painfully, desperately, something or someone who detests them, or even worse, doesn’t know they exist.

Sometimes my heart hurts so much, I beat it with my fists. I try to run. But you cannot run from this. It waits for you, like an object of desire that lures you to your downfall. I long for this desire, which will consume me until I feel the rising sunlight upon my face as it flakes into fire and ash.

Can someone love a corpse? No, of course not—whether living or undead, no heart beats within. There is an absence of love within me for this reason. I convince myself that I crave human touch, that I’m driven by ardor, but deep down I know it’s untrue; if a loving soul stood next to me and whispered kindness in my ear, I would bend down and drive my fangs into her carotid sheath.

The absence of love from me, from the world, from everyone—it sounds absurd, but it’s the only logical conclusion. In place of love, there is death—an army of rats, a parade of black coffins, the birth of a new era in which the monstrous is mistaken for the sublime.

Edited by Michelle Baroody