Stroszek
1977 Directed by Werner Herzog
Synopsis
Bruno Stroszek is released from prison and warned to stop drinking. He has few skills and fewer expectations: with a glockenspiel and an accordion, he ekes out a living as a street musician. He befriends Eva, a prostitute down on her luck and they join his neighbor, Scheitz, an elderly eccentric, when he leaves Germany to live in Wisconsin.
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24-hours after I watched Stroszek for the first time and I’m still not sure how to approach this review. Werner Herzog’s bleak and absurdist comedy demystifying the American Dream is widely considered one of his best films, yet whilst I can certainly admire it I’m not sure I share the near universal enthusiasm.
Stroszek is a film that plays loose with narrative structure as a recently incarcerated man, a prostitute and his elderly neighbour abandon their harsh Berlin existence for a new life in the almost equally bleak Wisconsin. Although the film has a story arc as our odd trio discover that the American Dream isn’t all it is cracked up to be, it is a film more concerned with…
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the chicken is dancing, dancing. he thinks that he will never die.
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Shit is bleak. And I hear this is the film that Ian Curtis watched before his suicide.
You can see from the start this won't end well. Bruno Stroszek constantly has his fly undone like he's already admitted defeat despite his best efforts to change his life. And when everything turns full circle you realise that nothing ever changes and we are the dancing chicken. What I love about this film though is its depressing nature doesn't arise from dramatic, worst case scenarios. It's just realistic history repeating itself, something we can all relate to and the fear we can't break the cycle.
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Wow. This is beyond words. Raw, bleak, but not that dark, yet devastating, but not dramatically. I don't even know what i'm saying.
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Bizarre "stranger in a strange land" drama by Werner Herzog. All the cast were real criminals, oddballs and drifters who Herzog had known, which only adds to the overall sense of insanity.
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If the cortex of Herzog - with his capricious metaphors and starved-for-images promises - could be boiled down to one really vital statement, it would probably be "the chicken won't stop dancing", maybe the most disposable bizarre thing uttered in Stroszek, a film where a great number of profound and nonsensical (depending on interpretation) things are said. The casual, autobiographical line readings of Bruno S. come out like great poetry being initiated in the presence of all the wrong people, which is, in a sense, what I think Herzog is saying here: It's not a matter of putting the wrong people together, it's a matter of recognizing that, since no one is compatible, really, actually being the wrong people is…
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Shit is bleak. And I hear this is the film that Ian Curtis watched before his suicide.
You can see from the start this won't end well. Bruno Stroszek constantly has his fly undone like he's already admitted defeat despite his best efforts to change his life. And when everything turns full circle you realise that nothing ever changes and we are the dancing chicken. What I love about this film though is its depressing nature doesn't arise from dramatic, worst case scenarios. It's just realistic history repeating itself, something we can all relate to and the fear we can't break the cycle.
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funny
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touching
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This and Kaspar Hauser now squaring off for Best Narrative Herzog Ever.
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24-hours after I watched Stroszek for the first time and I’m still not sure how to approach this review. Werner Herzog’s bleak and absurdist comedy demystifying the American Dream is widely considered one of his best films, yet whilst I can certainly admire it I’m not sure I share the near universal enthusiasm.
Stroszek is a film that plays loose with narrative structure as a recently incarcerated man, a prostitute and his elderly neighbour abandon their harsh Berlin existence for a new life in the almost equally bleak Wisconsin. Although the film has a story arc as our odd trio discover that the American Dream isn’t all it is cracked up to be, it is a film more concerned with…
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Hezog's huge "snap" ineed.
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“What kind of a country would confiscate my Minah Bird?”
For the first time we are in contemporary times, in a gritty German city with all the blight of modern times. But hey, isn’t that Kaspar Hauser locked up in that jail? Well, sort of - it’s Bruno Stroszek (Played by Bruno S.) and while his strange delivery of his lines seems like he is just picking up where he left off with Hauser, he does seem to be able to be at peace with his world. He’s an outcast - a street musician, a drunk - but he has his nitch and seems at ease.Bruno is being released from prison where he has spent time because of unknown…
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film nije za svakoga, iako volim ovakve filmove nije me baš oduševio
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All those feels, from the first to the last sequence... the piano playing chicken, a true masterpiece.