User Reviews

At the climax of this somewhat tragic tale, Bruno, a German immigrant whose quest for happiness in America has failed, goes on an amateur, what-the-hell crime spree, turns on all the exhibits in a barren mid-winter Indian tourist trap, and climbs aboard a cable car for a final trip to the mountain top, carrying a shotgun and a frozen turkey. One of the exhibits he activates is a piano-playing chicken who hammers out an impeccable version of Schubert's Scherzo in B Minor. Another is a dancing chicken. The chicken walks out into a glass case, plucks a piece of string, and begins scratching atop a slowly revolving round table the size of an old record player. The Tribal Police arrive and examine the scene of the crime, which includes a burning truck and a recently robbed grocery store. One of the cops is on the squad car's radio. "We got a single passenger on the lift and an electrician's on his way out. Somebody turned on the electricity and we can't stop the dancing chicken." The director, Werner Herzog, lingers on that chicken, scratching away over and over on a revolving platter, his head completely empty of thought. What are we to make of all this? Except that we are all dancing chickens manipulated by some deranged outer force.

If it isn't that, then I'm lost.

A good case could be made that this movie is utterly pointless. Bruno, a shabby caricature of a man, is released from an institution and returns to his apartment in Berlin, where he has two friends. One is an elderly eccentric and the other an abused whore. The pixy-like old man carries on about how easy it is to get rich and live happily in America. The whore saves up her money and the three of them travel to a truck stop in Wisconsin. They buy a mobile home and a television set and things look bright for a while, until they fall behind in their mortgage payments.

Sick of it all and desperate, the hooker takes off in one of the trucks for Canada. The old man goes bonkers and believes it's all a conspiracy, so he and the not-too-bright Bruno hold up a barber shop, run across the street, and begin buying groceries. The old man is arrested for armed robbery, Bruno steals a truck, takes off on his own, and finally runs out of money and gas at the Indian tourist trap.

My old German grandpappy had a saying: "Ein Mann hat das Bodel und ein Mann hat das Gelt." Some people have money and others wind up with the bag. Bruno and his friends -- and even his enemies -- are losers from beginning to end. It's a long, slow story of social suicide. All three end up worse than they began, as bad as that was.

And when I say "long", I mean "long." Herzog -- here as elsewhere -- has a tendency to hold on stylized shots for a long long long time. The camera is placed behind and above Bruno as a huge truck pulls his forfeited mobile home away. The camera remains static as the mobile home sluggishly departs to the right. The camera stays in the same place and so does Bruno, who is now staring at the empty space that his mobile home had occupied. He continues to stare as the seconds tick by and a scratchy old record plays a tune called "Silver Bells." If you're patient, and if you're sensitive to mood and character and composition, you'll get much more out of this movie than if you're expecting some plot-driven dynamo.

I'd like to compare this to Robert Altman's exercises in improvisation but I can't. One senses an intentionality behind Herzog's stuff that's absent from Altman's movies. What I mean is, Herzog seems to have something in mind behind the apparent non sequiturs and stylized shots. Herzog has a goal, whereas many of Altman's movies seemed designed for nothing more than seeing what happened next. In a sense, Altman stays with the dancing chicken because that's all there is, while Herzog believes that there is somebody turning the machine on and off.

"A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free." – Nikos Kazantzakis

"Amerika ist wunderbar!" - Rammstein

Many of the films which comprise "New German Cinema", a period in German cinema which lasted from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s, explored and attempted to come to terms with the cultural colonisation foisted upon Western Germany by America in the aftermath of WW2.

Wim Wenders, Margarethe Trotta, Rainer Fassbiner and Werner Herzog were the big names in this movement, with films like "The American Friend", "Kings of the Road", "Storszek" and "Fear Eats the Soul". But while Herzog's "Storszek" may have been thematically typical of the movement, it's a bit of an anomaly in Herzog's own filmography, whose films, at least at the time, tended to be set in the past and were often structured as allegories or medieval fables.

"Storszek" opens with a mentally unstable musician, Bruno Stroszek, being released from prison. This character is modelled on the life of Bruno Schleinstein, the actor who actually plays Stroszek in the film. Typical of Herzog's work, "Storszek" thus effortlessly blends fiction and documentary, Bruno, who always seems uncomfortable in front of Herzog's camera, "acting as himself" in a fictional story based loosely on his own life.

Like most of Herzog's films, the tale is told via several symbolic episodes. First act: a wet and oppressive Germany populated by violent pimps and prostitutes. Symbols like a shrinking boat and a bird which is confiscated are then dished out, after which Bruno "rescues" a prostitute and travels to America in the hope of making a better life for himself.

Vast and seemingly unrestrictive, America is initially portrayed as a place of possibility and freedom. Gradually, though, Herzog begins to populate this world with his usual assortment of freaks and grotesque characters. More symbols and symbolic subplots are then revealed: the story of a local murderer and body snatcher, the fact that Bruno's new hometown was the hometown of Ed Gein, warring farmers who fight over a thin strip of land, obsessions with metal detectors, a crazy old man's insistence that people are magnetic and that the dead emit magnetic fields, dangerous walks on frozen ponds, salty pretzels, mobile homes, a ski lift etc etc.

End result: by the film's final act, "Storszek's" faux-documentarian edge completely gives way to a kind of overt surrealism. And so Herzog has Bruno lose his home, lose his girlfriend (who returns to prostitution and leaves him for an obese trucker), and mount an incompetent robbery, all for 32 dollars and a Thanksgiving turkey. Chased by the police, Bruno then flees to a depressingly tacky town whose chief income is a large amusement park operated by Native Indians and awash with machines, neon signs, glitzy diversions, kitschy plastic facades and an assortment of fun-house fakery.

Seeking escape, Bruno hops on board a ski lift. He thinks it'll take him up into the mountains, to some heavenly getaway, but of course the ski lift is stuck in a loop and can take him nowhere except right back where he started from. Realizing that the American dream is the German reality, Bruno shoots himself, committing suicide off screen.

The film's final shot is of a solitary chicken, trapped in a fun-house, dancing (automatically, seemingly without thought) in a cage and making a fool of itself for bird-seed. This, of course, is Bruno's own trap: the Myth of Sisyphus in poultry form, life reduced to a circus act too grotesque to contemplate. Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis would hang himself in his kitchen moments after witnessing this very sequence.

Herzog's cinema is a cinema of madmen (Timothy Treadwell in "Grizzly Man", Klaus Kinski's numerous starring roles, the various mystics and deranged prophets peppered throughout Herzog's filmography etc). What's great is that you're never quite sure how nuts these guys are and how sympathetic Herzog wants you to be toward them. But while it's easy to dismiss Bruno as an endearingly simple man-child with a couple screws loose in the head (he is), Herzog's ultimate point is three fold. Yes, the amusement park may violently spit madmen out of its machinery, mad men like Bruno who either reject the illusion or are too damaged to cope. But those "chickens" whom the machinery doesn't reject are far more insane. "Normalcy" is irrational, and in Herzog's filmography it is often the mad who see this clearest. Or as Harlan Smith once said: "Fantastic insight into the true nature of Reality is isomorphic to insanity."

8.5/10 – Fittingly, this film was made the same year as Lynch's "Eraserhead". Lynch would use a similar filmic language or meta-story decades later with "The Straight Story". The film is too ambivalent to be taken as a jab at America and late capitalism. Herzog is primarily an existentialist, and whatever fingers he points at the US he points at Germany as well.

Worth two viewings.

The richness of "Stroszek" strengthens with multiple viewings. Haunting cinematography by Thomas Mauch has a bitter-sweet humor faithful to mid-century American experience. Underscored by sentimental American popular tunes many from Chet Akins presage "Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes" enhanced by pensive editing by Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus.

The late Bruno Schleinstein plays a protagonist. If you do not know his story,watch the film and then read about him. In the film, he also plays (his) piano, accordion, glockenspiel, and hand bells. This is music by Bruno S. himself. Even though the movies tells a story set in America, it is a film about Bruno S. and, in an important way, a film for him.

Eva Mattes, famous for her work in four masterworks by Rainer Maria Fassbinder, brings a dry, sardonic sense to what might have been a maudlin role. Many who play in the film are amateurs the crew met on location. The second cameraman Edward Lachman often improvised English language dialogue in the moment. Literally, Mr. Herzog used the people he and the crew met at the moment. Sometimes, especially in the sections shot in Germany, those playing the role were known ahead of the shooting. The scenes early in the movie with a brutal pimp are played by a brutal pimp. The premature baby is with an actual doctor who works with premature babies.

Editor Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus took part in the shooting. Improvisation plays a major part in the tonality of "Stroszek". With Bruno S. and others, improvisation plays a vital and central role though Bruno knows what he is to do.

This is a terrific film that I relate to Michael Ritchie's "Smile", another masterwork that explores similar themes. Yet, Herzog's view of American life is not bitter like that of Mr. Ritchie. It is brutal—but not meanly so. I think that the meanness has more to do with the story than with Mr. Herzog's opinion of the United States. He admits to having deep affection for the heartland of American and to the people who live there.

For one who loves the immense formal beauty of European Modern French, Swedish, and Italian films, watching German movies is sometimes hard in some ways. Many films from the wave of German movies of which Herzog's work is part and example have a hard look. Some of them are hard to watch. The humour is hard even if it softens bitterness. This is not an optimistic film but that is not the mood that Herzog finds about America. It is simply the mood of the story.

Do not listen to the commentary on the DVD until you first watch this film without it. Then do listen to the commentary. From the commentary, you learn precisely how the movie blurs lines between documentary and fictional film narrative.

In the end, we realize the "Brave New World" image of conditioned life in America—in the trained rabbit and poultry, a duck and especially a chicken, at Cherokee,North Carolina. Sonny Terry, blowing his fierce blues harmonica, beats the frantic and pointless pace at which we live. Funny and tragic but not mean, these images infect your memory.

Being a huge fan of Joy Division I found out that this was the last film watched by Ian Curtis before he killed himself. I then found out that Werner Herzog was his favourite director and knew I simply had to see it. I didn't quite know what to expect upon popping it into my DVD player as I had never seen a Herzog film before. I begins with Bruno S., apparently playing himself being released from prison with his accordion and bugle. He is warned to stay away from alcohol as beer is the reason he ended up in prison. The first thing he does is go into a pub called "Beer Heaven". There he meets Eva and offers her a place to live, however Eva's pimp and his mate beat Eva and intimidate Bruno. Eva sells herself to men to raise money so herself and Bruno can go and join Bruno's elderly neighbour in America. Like many people in films before they believe America will be the place of their dreams where Bruno can rise to fame with his musical talent and they can earn money. Things seem good at first with Bruno and Eva settling in. However the bank comes looking for repayments to their loan and Eva begins selling herself to men yet again, finally leaving Bruno. In a hilarious scene Bruno and Mr. Scheitz go to rob a bank only to find it is closed, so they rob the tiny shop next door only stealing $32. They then go across the road to spend the money and Mr. Scheitz is arrested. Finally Bruno drives off and kills himself upon a ski-lift. It is a tragic film that really captures the hopelessness of dreams and shows the characters trapped in a world that doesn't measure up to their dreams, much like the dancing and instrument playing animals at the end. Herzog has an eye for simply constructed shots and images that convey raw emotion. One point sees Bruno visiting a premature baby ward. The babies are so helpless and fragile, yet still beautiful. The doctors demonstration of the strength of their reflex grip echoes that of Bruno and his dreams. Herzog is also highly skilled at holding a shot, forcing the viewer to experience the emotion. At the end we see Bruno in a diner, and the camera simply stays on his face, Bruno barely flinches but it is though we can feel what he feels. The film is also interesting in its pace, as it never rushes but feels though each moment just flies by, but also the overall film seems longer than it actually is. The film is very rare as it feels complete. BEing told from Bruno's perspective once a major character leaves him they feature no more. Some films have me thinking "What happened to..." not here though, as I was completely wrapped up in Bruno's journey. The unprofessional cast are more convincing in their subtlety and inexperience than the majority of A list ensemble casts and they really add a human touch to the film. A brilliant film that really makes you feel and connect with it. And since the film is about a musician it only makes sense that the music is well used and very, very good.

From director Werner Herzog (Nosferatu the Vampyre, Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man), I confess that I do not remember much of this German film at all, not even watching all of it, but I know I did see it because it is in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. Basically Berlin street performer Bruno Stroszek (Bruno S.) has been warned to stop drinking after being released from prison, but he immediately goes to a bar, where he meets prostitute Eva (Eva Mattes), who he comforts as she is down on her luck, and later he ends up beaten up by the pimps. Bruno and Eva decide to escape any more harassment from these people by escaping from Germany by moving to Wisconsin, America, and live with his American nephew Clayton (Clayton Szalpinski), so they start their journey, stopping off to do sight seeing in New York City. There Bruno gets a job with his nephew as a mechanic, and Eva works in a truck stop as a waitress, and the couple buy a trailer, but they trouble with the bills, so to stop the bank repossessing their home she is forced back into prostitution, but it isn't enough. After Eva leaves him, he starts a little bit of drinking again, and is forced to put the trailer up for auction, and after believing there is some kind of "conspiracy", he and his original elderly neighbour Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz) steal some money from a barbershop. The police catch and arrest Scheitz, but Bruno gets away, heading back to the garage, taking loads of beer and heading for the highway into the mountains, but forced to stop in a small town when the truck breaks down. Bruno sets the truck on fire, and the final time you see him is getting on a ski lift with a frozen turkey, then the police arrive, you hear a shot, and the last moments see a chicken playing the piano and a rabbit riding a toy fire truck, I don't know why, LOL. I did pay attention to the moments that mattered, were most interesting and would make it a "must see", such as a scene of the lead actor playing his accordion, and the strange ending, but I don't think it would have made much difference to me if I had paid more attention, it seemed a confusing story anyway, but what I did see and catch onto made an alright satirical drama. Worth watching, at least once, in my opinion!

Stroszek

analysis by Philip Brubaker

Werner Herzog's Stroszek (1977) is a film both in German and English. The three main characters flee Germany for the promise of opportunity in America. In Berlin, they find themselves victims of vicious brutes, who prostitute Ewa, Stroszek's friend. Stroszek himself is just released from a mental institution. The two outcasts hook up with an eccentric old man and decided to move to Wisconsin, where the old man's nephew lives. Stroszek has been called Herzog's most accessible film, a distinction due to it's time-worn fish-out-of-water premise. But the archetypal humor of the situation turns black as Ewa begins to revert to her promiscuous ways, and the group's double wide gets impounded and auctioned off by the bank. Stroszek's life is falling apart, so what does he do? He attempts to rob a bank.

The failure of the American Dream is the story of every criminal in the United States. By turning to crime, the criminal hopes to regain the hope of being rich, by any means necessary. The American Dream failed Stroszek, and this idea is represented by many striking images.

The most overt symbol in the film are the two farmers who mow their grass toting shotguns. The tractor-riding farmers are both watching over a strip of land in between their properties, making sure neither one is attempting to mow it, and therefore claim it as their own. The scene is played for laughs, but it is a pointed reference to Stroszek's hometown of Berlin, with it's harsh division by the Berlin Wall.

The Native American character is the ultimate symbol of America. He is both a foreigner and a native. A stranger to the white man's culture, a culture of European immigrants. When Stroszek makes his farewell ride to the Indian Reservation town of Cherokee, he drives right into the heart of the American dilemma. Here he is surrounded by the last vestiges of American Indian culture, now warped and perverted into a tourist attraction, an example of American grotesquerie at it's lowest low. An old-timey holler is heard on the soundtrack and our hero ditches his car and climbs onto a chair lift ride with his shotgun. As the camera tilts up to his slow ascent up a tall mountain, a shot rings out. Did Stroszek take his own life? Appropriately, Herzog leaves this ambiguous. His rise upward on the chair lift is symbolic of the ascent to Heaven, Shangri-La, Eldorado and every dreamed mythical place that foreigners imagine America to be. He is going home.

What an unclassifiable hybrid/whatever movie Stroszek is. I'd wager it's the kind of picture that Gonzo the Great (yes, the Muppet) would probably make if he were from Germany and looking to make a tragic-comic look on one man's journey in the rural side of America (after all, the last sequence would make perfect sense, wouldn't it). In truth, it's Werner Herzog at his most focused and un-hinged, a work of wild, original art where the tone ranges from harsh reality, documentary realism (or so we might think), to drama stripped of its 'melo', and a brand of satire that goes beyond the usual realm and is satirical only in the sense that you know something is being made fun of. In fact, I'd say the last twenty-five, thirty minutes of this picture are the funniest, and even in these minutes there's a sense of sorrow to what has happened with Bruno Stroszek (Bruno S., sort of as himself, I suppose, the line between fiction and fact is so blurry that it's the only way Herzog can get things done) and how his girlfriend (Eva Mattes) leaves him, and his best friend and neighbor gets arrested after armed robbery of a, uh, store in a basement next to a bank, I guess.

But whatever weirdness and sort of everyday mundane qualities that go hand in hand with the film Stroszek are given a greater context. I actually had a little more interest in what was going on after having just seen Chaplin's Modern Times, and seeing how there could be a comparison made to the two. Of course, Herzog could never be one to induce the silly physical comedy that makes up the bulk of Chaplin's films, but there is a similarity that struck me, and helped make me really care about what was going on with these characters- Herzog, for all his showing the ultimate follies, loves Stroszek, or at least does not try and show him off as being a complete waste of life. And if it does almost come off that way (Stroszek is, after all, a perpetual drunk who got released only recently from the mental hospital, and can never get steady work aside from being a mechanic once in the US), it's off-set by how much he even cares about the much more flawed Eva, too. He sees them in a context of society and civilization as well as just stand-alone outcasts (outcasts being another Chaplin comparison) not to mention the other side characters, both wretchedly cruel and mean like the Germans who bully Stroszek and beat up on Eva, or the wacky co-workers and very formal mortgage/loan people. So, in a way, Herzog takes on the other side of what we might usually find in a Chaplin effort, which includes cynicism (at least skepticism), despair, and replacing morality with a truly twisted sense of humor. Not that the form of documentary, more than anything, peeks its head into the work.

There isn't much story to report, aside from the bulk of what I've already mentioned- Stroszek, Eva and their elderly neighbor escape from the harsh and cruel state of being they're at in Berlin (a brief but interesting commentary on Germany too), only to find in the small-town Wisconsin life not much more in line of prosperity. Soon, Stroszek is on his own when he loses his trailer-home, Eva leaves him after a drunken ramble he goes on, and of course the aforementioned botched robbery. He heads off randomly to another small town, tells his story to a random guy, and then as his truck goes up in flames, he gets caught on a ski-lift after passing by a dancing chicken. All the while Bruno S. plays this guy with no punches pulled, and is as intuitive a non-professional actor as any given others in the old neo-realist days. Eva, too, wasn't that much of an actress yet when she took on this role. And a lot of the time (David Lynch mentioned this in an interview as he started watching the film in the middle) it's like watching a documentary of these people, showing in all the ordinary working-class ways how they get stuck and any chance of the "American dream" gets squashed. One's never really sure who's an actor or not, but it makes no difference really. A lot of it is some of the most harrowing cinema that I've seen in a while- the tone is of a bitterness at the system, any system, and of a sorrow that is everlooming, that is, perhaps, until the ending.

Remarkable then is really how much I laughed during the film. Even in the earlier scenes, when it was dreary, the sort of behavior in parts, and especially notes of the dialog, rang of the complete randomness that is all abound in Herzog's work. But one only needs to look at Stroszek to see the Herzog sense of humor working full-tilt amid the social commentary and despair. The two funniest sequences- not withstanding the armed robbery- are the auction scene (that guy, wow, just wow is all I could say after that), and the dancing chicken. A big chunk of the dancing chicken scene's bizarre appeal is the music, with a true absurdity to the harmonica playing and wailing vocals. Many over the years have wondered the significance of the dancing chicken, most particularly as the ending to the picture. While Herzog himself claims it to be a metaphor for something he can't place, a friend mentioned that it could be capitalism, or the chicken as a representation of Bruno Stroszek, or of an American in general. I wouldn't want to jump to any conclusions just yet, and I'm glad that way- all I know is that it's one of the funniest three minutes of film to ever come out of Europe. It's Herzog's ultimate, tragic-comic tale about a man in the lower depths of himself and his society. A+

In Berlin, the alcoholic street musician Bruno Stroszek (Bruno S.) is released from prison and while returning home, he invites the prostitute Eva (Eva Mattes) to move to his apartment and leave her two abusive pimps. His paranoid friend and neighbor Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz) has taken care of his apartment and his piano while he was imprisoned. On the next day, Stroszek plays accordion and glockenspiel on the streets to raise some money and when he arrives home, he finds Eva beaten and the two pimps humiliate him. The harassment continues and without any option, Stroszek, Eva and Scheitz decide to begin a new life in Wisconsin, where a relative of Scheitz lives. The trio of friends travels to the United States of America expecting to make money and accomplish the American Dream. Bruno works in a auto mechanic and Eva as a waitress in a diner, and they buy a prefabricated house despite the concern of Bruno with the installments. When the bank threatens to take the house due to delay in the payments of the loan, Eva enters in the prostitution again with truck drivers to raise the necessary money. Sooner Stroszek discovers in a tragic way the sad reality of the American Dream.

"Stroszec" is a powerful and realistic movie about losers and the American Dream. The screenplay is original and unpredictable like life is, with magnificent lines and Werner Herzog uses also amateurish cast leaded by Bruno Schleinstein from "The Enigma of Kaspar Hause", who is the unwanted son of a prostitute that spent a great part of his life in mental institutions due to the severe abuse and beaten; therefore, the actor has some problems indeed and the beginning of the film is very similar to his real life. The conclusion is open to interpretation and I believe that Stroszek shot himself. I do not understand the meaning of the dancing chicken; with regard to the frozen turkey, I am not sure whether it is a symbolism indicating that Stroszec wanted to return to his origins in Turkey since he is Turkish-German, or if it is Thanksgiving in USA at that moment and he ends alone without friends just with the turkey. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Stroszec"

Kurt Vonnegut once said the problem with the hippie generation is that they expect love and happiness but "I would settle for a little common human decency."

This movie is Herzog being "decent." He promised Bruno (his challenged actor) another movie, but when Bruno couldn't learn the part of Woyzeck he realized his old friend Klaus Kinski had to take the role -- and did so brilliantly. But he had made a promise so he kept his word and wrote this movie on the spot, and even got the great Eva Mathes (who won the Golden Lion in Venice for her role as Marie, Woyzeck's tragic love) to pitch in and play an abused hooker. All the rest of the cast were amateur "characters."

It has the basic Herzog themes of struggle against all odds and regardless of outcome even in the most hopeless cases. And just that spirit of struggle is worth applauding. This one just doesn't go into the usual richly layered labyrinths of dreamscapes that Herzog, being the romanticist he is, tends to use as story within the story as allegories for the whole story -- the romantics' arabesque. Strozeck is more blunt, straight forward and hits the viewers over the head with a lot of grotesque black humor.

This movie has great hilarious black humor scenes and a great punchline when the hero compares the bank repossession agent's pen with the beatings by the Nazi's in the Concentration Camp -- unfavorably.

It's great fun to watch and wallow in if you're in a dark or twisted mood, but I wouldn't base drastic decisions about the rest of my life, especially its remaining duration on what is arguably Herzog's most crude slapstick and that includes the one with the rebellious Spanish dwarfs.

But it really isn't fair to compare this or any other Herzog film to his big dramatic successes like Aguirre, Kasper Hauser, Fitzcaraldo, Nosferatu or Woyzeck. While they share some common themes (see above) every one of his movies and documentaries are their own work and can range from remakes of 19th century realist play, 1920s silent movie, 18th century romanticism or the joys of mountain climbing or ski jumping.

As its own work, Stroszek is fun to watch and a good laugh watching one of the 20th century's legendary independent filmmakers present a very different mood.

Bruno Stroszek (Bruno S.) is a backyard-singer in Berlin and just released from prison for minor crimes committed under influence of alcohol. Nevertheless, his first walk leads him back to his regular inn. There, he meets the prostitute Eva (an absolutely gorgeous Eva Mattes). She wants to get away from her pimp, and Bruno invites her to stay in his apartment that his old neighbor, Herr Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz) has kept for him, as well as the Brave Beo (played by himself), who is also happy to see Bruno again. But it takes only a short time and Eva's pimp (played by the unforgettable Prince Wilhelm von Homburg), assisted by another "souteneur" (Burkhard Driest) finds her. They devastate Bruno's apartment and beat both Eva and Bruno up. Meanwhile, the post has brought Herrn Scheitz an invitation to live with his cousin in Railroad Flats, Wisconsin. Eva gets the money through prostitution. The first bad experience for this trio happens at the customs: "What a land is this, where a beo is confiscated?" Bruno comments. Arrived in Winsconsin, they buy a mobile home. Bruno finds work as a mechanic, Eva as a server, and the old Herr Scheitz is occupied with his researches in mesmerism. However, soon after, they cannot pay anymore their rates for the house and the furnishing. More and more frequently, a bank clerk visits them. For Bruno, the European, there is an exorbitant difference in the "nice" American behavior of the clerk on the one side and his merciless demand for money on the other side. Bruno says: "In the children's home where I grew up, they used to torment us children physically, but here, in America, they torment us psychologically, and this is much, much worse". Finally, the bank takes the home away, Eva elopes with two truckers, and Bruno and Herr Scheitz are left without house and money. They plan to rob the bank that has taken their home away. However, when they arrive at the bank, it is closed, and so they decide to rob a hairdresser's salon instead. With the little money robbed, they go and buy food – just in the grocery-store on the other side of the street. While Bruno looks for a turkey, the police arrive and arrest Herr Scheitz. Bruno hides in the store, until they are gone, and, now left totally alone with himself, he drives through the snow on the interstate in direction of North Carolina and ends up in the Cherokee Indian Reservation. What happens then, I do not tell here, although this comment contains the basic lines of the story and thus necessarily many spoilers. I don't think that any other movie has such a truly original, yet both tragic and surreal end in the best sense of these words. I do not think much of Werner Herzog's work, except his Kinski-movies – on reasons that are not to be discussed here -, but I still consider this movie one of the best of the approximately 5'000 movies I have seen up to now. As a matter of fact, the "Stroszek" figures even in my personal "Top-10-Movies-List".

I've always enjoyed Herzog's humanism and here he doesn't pull any punches. When a trio of misfits tires of Germany and has their sights set on a fresh start in Wisconsin, you know it isn't going to work out. The prostitute tries to be a waitress, the fool tries to be a mechanic, and the old man...well, let's just say he has some wires crossed. No matter how much you think things will work out, you need realistic goals in the first place; all they did was carry their baggage with them to a new country. There is a lesson behind the dancing chicken, who doesn't even know why he does it or that it's supposed to be entertaining because he's acting on pure instinct, trapped in his little world behind glass where he performs some trick in exchange for food. I want to think that at the end, Bruno finally accepted his limitations as a human being. Like Bruno, most of us are just average.

In recent years Stroszek has become infamous for being the last film Ian Curtis of post-punk pioneer's Joy Division saw before hanging himself. The image of the dancing chicken has become synonymous with the final hours of Curtis' life. It's, therefore, a movie associated with real life sadness. The content of Stroszek makes for pretty depressing viewing itself it has to be said. Although, admittedly, the downbeat story is interspersed with moments of humour throughout, meaning that its impact isn't entirely doom-laden. It centres on a mental patient from Berlin who is released into the community. He and his prostitute girlfriend are victimised by low-fife pimps, so it is with some relief when their elderly neighbour organises for the three of them to move to the U.S.A. to start a new life. But despite a promising start, life soon degenerates to even worse levels in their new home in rural Wisconsin and their American Dream soon turns into a nightmare.

This film was directed by Werner Herzog and, as is usually the case, this ensures that it's a fascinating look at unusual people living on the fringes of society. Its star is Bruno S. who is most famous for his portrayal of the title character in Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. In Stroszek he again plays the title character but in this one he is playing a character very close to himself, a street musician with a history of mental problems. We even get to hear an example of his music, which is very strange indeed. He is a very unique performer and it never really ever appears that he is acting at all; his unaffected style is just as perfect for his character here as it was in Kaspar Hauser. Eva Mattes, who also worked with Herzog in Woyzeck, plays his girlfriend and Clemens Scheitz rounds things off as his elderly neighbour; both of these actors are also very good.

The story is about how the American Dream is a false hope for most. The three protagonists move from a gloomy Berlin but end up in the desolate town of Railroad Flats, a joyless decrepit place with poor impoverished people. Incidentally, the town's real name is Plainfield and it is most notorious as the hometown of the serial killer Ed Gein the inspiration for Psycho. Herzog in fact first went there to work on a documentary on Gein but ended up being inspired by the desolation of the place to make this film instead. The characters in Stroszek not only live in this place but, to make matters even more depressing, end up living in a prefabricated trailer which they ultimately lose due to being unable to keep up the loan payments. The disadvantageous nature of the place in general, coupled with the language barrier conspires to work against Stroszek, not helped by his strange natural bearing. It ultimately leads to his tragic downfall. The ending is pretty bleak it almost goes without saying. Although, we get there in ways that provide some absurd comedy moments, such as the armed robbery that Stroszek and his elderly friend attempt. They try to rob the bank but find it closed, so they rob a small shop next door instead and come away with only thirty dollars, only to then go and spend it across the road on groceries and unsurprisingly get arrested in the process. Similarly, when the dark ending comes, the mood is lifted somewhat by the bizarre scenes of the performing animals in the little arcade – we have a rabbit fireman, a piano playing chicken and the aforementioned dancing chicken. It's a pretty weird and funny way to end proceedings. It emphasises the point of the film though - the absurdity of life. But another underlying message is the way in which humans carry on despite the seemingly insurmountable odds. This point is reiterated by a quietly, unique scene where a physician friend shows Stroszek a prematurely born baby that grips on to his hands so tightly it can be lifted into the air - the survival instinct is inbuilt. These are some of the many things of interest in this unusual movie.

Stroszek is a somewhat timid German-Hungarian prone to drink too much who, together with a few friends, decides to start his life over in the U.S., in a small Wisconsin town.

Things by and large don't go well for him. Even so, he doesn't have a couple of thugs making his life miserable, as was the case back in Berlin. And the difficulties he encounters are in large part his own making. He moves to America almost on a whim, doesn't bother to learn or try to speak English, and makes some other mistakes, which I won't mention, insofar as they would be spoilers.

Yes, America can be rather hard on immigrants. But so can most any other place, I expect. Most of the things that befall Stroszek were avoidable; indeed, one is left with the feeling that instead of moving to America, he should have moved to another neighborhood of Berlin.

7/10