Werner Herzog’s sixth fiction feature has a tone unique among his films. Split between Germany and America, the 1977 film was the first and perhaps only time in his career that he simply observed the contemporary world (the hot-house crime milieu of Bad Lieutenant doesn’t count), his signature “ecstatic truth” scaled back from visionary heights for something that almost approaches realism. But its strange conclusion is the kind of unforgettable filmmaking that could only come from Herzog, even though it seems like the simple stuff of childhood dreams—or nightmares.
The film opens and closes with prisons. Bruno Stroszek (Bruno S.) is released from jail for charges that are never explained. Prison officials warn Bruno not to drink, but his first stop after release is the neighborhood bar, where he runs into Eva (Eva Mattes), a prostitute in trouble with her pimps, including one-time boxer Norbert Grupe (aka Wilhelm von Homburg) as a particularly menacing pimp dressed in furs like a ’70s Attila the Hun.
Bruno offers to let Eva live with him, and though it is suggested that they have a sexual relationship, that’s not what Herzog is interested in. He is interested in the elderly neighbor (Clemens Scheitz), who carries a cage for Beo, a talking starling. As Bruno and Eve get further harassed by her pimps, she earns money the only way she knows how to get them a trip to America, where Scheitz’s nephew Clayton has an auto shop. Bruno, Eva and Scheitz take a ship to America, where upon arriving in New York, customs confiscate their bird. They buy a station wagon to drive to the fictional town of Railroad Flats, Wisconsin, where Bruno works in Clayton’s shop and Eva works as a waitress at a truck stop. They take advantage of buying on the installment plan to get a mobile home and a television, but America doesn’t deliver the riches promised, and if they left one country where they were harassed, they’ve gone to another where they don’t know the language. Only Eva speaks English, and she leaves Bruno knowing that their belongings will soon be repossessed. With Eva gone, the mobile home and television are taken away and auctioned off by the bank. Bruno and Scheitz resort to robbery, but when the bank is closed, they take $32 dollars from a barber shop and buy groceries across the street. The police pick up Scheitz but miss Bruno, who carries a frozen turkey and sets off for an American Indian-run amusement park, where he shoots himself on a ski lift.
Herzog wrote the script specifically for Bruno S. after he had promised the star of Kaspar Hauser a role in Woyzeck but then decided that Klaus Kinski should play that part. It took Herzog four days to write Stroszek, which he thinks is one of his finest films. It’s become my own favorite, for its rich visuals, absurd plot and brilliant soundtrack, unusual among the director’s films.
The dense, almost mystical scores of Popul Vuh, whose music had shaped his previous films, is here replaced by wildly different soundtrack approaches. In Berlin, the film’s music is diegetic, coming entirely from the film’s characters. This is tender, as in Bruno’s backyard performance with accordion and glockenspiel (it was the kind of thing Bruno did in real life), and bold, when one of the thugs who comes to rough him up plays a dissonant villainous piano theme (on a piano Bruno S. bought with the proceeds from Kaspar Hauser) as another pimp beats him.
America has a non-diegetic soundtrack, mostly provided by Sonny Terry and Chet Atkins, whose guitar serves as a gentle countrified version of Popul Vuh’s epic guitar figures. The film’s second half has moments that look like they could have come from the American renaissance of the ’70s, except they couldn’t: a shot of a frozen lake scored by Chet Atkins takes the normally forbidding Herzogian landscape and makes of it a cold idyll.
Three filmmakers are thanked in the credits: Lutz Eisholz, whose documentary about Bruno S. was where Herzog first encountered the actor, and two American filmmakers whose unmistakable influence help give the film its peculiar tone. Herzog had planned to meet Errol Morris in Plainfield, Wisconsin, the home of Ed Gein, for a project to dig up the grave of the infamous killer and body snatcher’s mother. Morris didn’t show up, but the German was so enchanted with Wisconsin that he returned to the area to film, changing the town’s name so it wouldn’t be so obvious he was borrowing Morris’ landscape, which Herzog noted “was a serious crime indeed.” The documentaries of Les Blank (who would go on to direct “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe”) made in rural America were a clear inspiration as well. When Clayton pulls out his own tooth with a pair of pliers, it’s a direct reference to Blank’s 1971 short film “Spend It All,” which featured a Cajun who extracted his own tooth on camera.
Herzog has said he didn’t intend to criticize America, but rather felt he was writing a kind of eulogy for the country and for shattered dreams. Bruno’s mussed up hair and rumpled wardrobe suggests Mecki, the hedgehog created as a children’s character by German toy company Steiff. Thus Bruno represents a kind of innocent Germany who needs to be reminded to zip his fly; although he’s released from prison, he’s still oppressed, and when he comes to the freedom and open spaces of America he winds up ending his life in another trap: a tourist trap.
It’s one of the quintessential sequences in all of Herzog’s work, but for some reason his crew reportedly refused to take part, so the director filmed the dancing chicken and other performing animals himself. The animals echo Bruno’s tragic life. Born to a prostitute and beaten as a child, the real Bruno S. was kept in institutions from the age of three till he was 26. As Stroszek reaches its end, Bruno is arrested in a kind of childhood that he never got to have, lost in a world where caged animals perform for money: a rabbit boards a fire truck, a duck plays drums, a chicken dances and another plays the piano. It’s wonderful and horrifying at the same time
Legend has it that Joy Division’s Ian Curtis was watching Stroszek the night he killed himself. It’s not a happy film, but its vision of a strange, lost America is exhilarating, so much so that even after the film fades to black, Sonny Terry is still whooping and hollering on the soundtrack.