THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
the same time, the masses can go on looking at coffeetable art books, and take their own portraits: the owners of the Palmers being, of course, the very same sort of people who make the camera...
...It begins in the opening scene when some prison officials insist on using formal language while processing Stroszek for release, even though, as he objects, they know each other well...
...What Mr...
...And the philosophical, generalizing response which that doctor makes to the terribly urgent, particular problem Stroszek brings him is equally meaningless...
...To escape this persecution, they decide to join Stroszek's aged friend, Herr Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz), who is immigrating to America to live with a cousin in rural Wisconsin...
...After agreeing with a stern lecture the warden gives about his not drinking, Stroszek goes right to a beer hall on his release...
...In other words, you mustn't do anything to disturb the smooth workings of the art market...
...At times Stroszek's fate is, like the desert life portrayed in Fata Morgana, accompanied by a kind of solemn rhetoric...
...All the efforts to comprehend the incomprehensible leave us, in the end, with a pretty empty universe...
...Yet at the same time, Stroszek is only a document in the same peculiar sense that Fata Morgana is...
...But in general, the only thing you can do safely is make records at home for your own use...
...Soon after Stroszek's arrival, the parallel between the Germany he has left behind and the America to which he has come is implied by an incident he witnesses...
...in the studios where the records were made...
...Of course, if people want to do this, they should be expected to-pay for the labor of artists, engineers, etc...
...The more different ways of talking about human experience are introduced into the film, the less sense language makes to Stroszek...
...Like the overarching symbolism of Herzog's plots, any rhetorical wisdom those plots may contain is only an effort to surround a truth which exists, by its nature, in silence...
...So does the immigration to America become, in effect, the passage from infancy to senility--life's pilgrimage not to the promised land, but to ruination...
...He does this by seeing in Stroszek's immigration a continuity between European and American cultures...
...But Stroszek's experiences in Germany don't translate in such easy, hospitable ways...
...And in America Herr Scheitz, who looks almost like the infant, begins to have delusions that he is a great man, the discoverer of animal magnetism...
...A talking myna bird that was one of his few companions in Germany is confiscated by customs...
...I had never heard of a counterpart Le Jazz des Hommes, and I knew enough about segregation to know that separate was not equal...
...The only way Herzog can embrace life fully enough is to deal with it in a symbolic and anagogical way instead of a literal one...
...Like the cowboy imagery, the failure of language begins back in Germany itself...
...A REFLECTION ON JAZZ WOMEN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 MUSIC The announcement for an all-women's jazz concert billed as "Le Jazz des Femmes" gave me pause recently...
...But I don't believe Herzog intends us to take it seriously ~ny more than we did the voice-over narrative in Fata Morgana...
...Linwood, N.L 08221...
...Bad ~s the lines of communication are in Germany, however, their breakdown is of course worse when he gets to America...
...TH~ FAILURE OF LANGUAGE 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN O O ý84 In the last issue I was suggesting that Werner Herzog should be thought of as a kind of seer, perhaps even something of a mystic...
...In Stroszek Herzog again deals with a character who lives, increasingly, after he immigrates to America, in a land of silence and of darkness...
...Thus does rural Wisconsin become, like the institution in Even Dwarfs, the microcosm of a nation--an East and West Germany in miniature...
...This anticipates beautifully the duality of his experience in Europe and America and the double failure of language for him...
...But even private recording or reproduction is often illegal...
...When he, Eva and Herr Scheitz arrive in Wisconsin, Scheitz's cousin greets them with a sign reading "Willkommen" on one side and "Welcome" on the other...
...In Germany Stroszek earns money as a street singer, and at one point we hear a performance he gives where he narrates and interpolates each verse of his song before he sings it...
...and doubtless, if things got bad enough, we might have an army of snoopers round to check up on it...
...The result is films that are like parables...
...At first Herr Scheitz acts as interpreter for him, but after awhile even Scheitz himself reverts to speaking German to Americans, who only shrug and walk away...
...They behave only in accordance with the laws of Herzog's own imagination, which is an all-consuming, singular and very private one...
...Only then does the nonsense begin to make sense in his films...
...It's a horrific image of the attempt to encompass somehow a void which we cannot know in any other way...
...As in past films, so here, Herzog attempts almost physically to comprehend as much of human civilization as possible...
...They suggest everything while specifying little...
...In the end Stroszek stomps off in inarticulate rage as a cowboy-hatted trucker boasts in C-B argot over his radio about just having stolen Stroszek's girl Eva...
...By contrast, Herzog's newest film, Stroszek, seems the most naturalistic he has made...
...Who can blame him...
...That driverless truck going round and round is an image Herzog has employed before...
...Contact: Vocation Director, 2249 Shore Rd...
...The colony of dwarfs in Even Dwarfs Started Small or the African desert in Fata Morgana are microcosms of all creation...
...Those films are a peculiar combination of an impulse both to comprehend all of life and at the same time to respect its incomprehensibility...
...Headlining his review JAZZ DES FEMMES BELIES CLICHES, he complimented the woman saxophonist for her big tone, the trombonist for her assertive sound, the drummer for her aggressive MISSIONARIES OF THE SACRED HEARTS Apostolic, prayertul community seekinq eol- ~ leqe aqe men to join us in m~l~T~q Jesus" love visible as priests & brothers...
...One of the absurdities that is generated by all this is the contemporary copyright law...
...the same time, the masses can go on looking at coffeetable art books, and take their own portraits: the owners of the Palmers being, of course, the very same sort of people who make the camera films, and publish the books...
...In his film, both story and dialogue are similar gestures man attempt to get as close as possible to what can never be entered or known directly...
...When she attempts to live with him, the two thugs who have been acting as her pimps begin to terrorize them both...
...Two farmers engaged in a legal battle over a strip of land ride on their enormous diesel tractors armed with rifles and stare provokingly at each other across the disputed ground...
...It's the straightforward story of a petty criminal (Bruno S.) and his prostitute girlfriend Eva (Eva Mattes...
...Keating has done, in his little bit of the field, is show how absurd it is...
...A well-intentioned (New York Times) critic indirectly illuminated the source of my discomfort...
...Ultimately the myth Herzog would create here is a very pessimistic one...
...The immigration to America makes us especially aware of this since Stroszek speaks no English...
...At the same time, it makes it virtually impossible for anyone to borrow the original tapes the BBC holds...
...Even before Stroszek leaves Germany the parallel with America and the impossibility of escaping his problems there seems inevitable...
...But instead of devising a system to make this possible, perhaps on the lines of the arrangements we now have in Britain whereby authors get their due rakeoff from their books each time they are borrowed from public libraries, all our society does is maintain a facade of laws against reproductions while, with the other hand, encouraging people to break it by buying the apparatus to do it with...
...A few concessions are allowed, under strictly controlled conditions: for example, broadcasts for schools can be recorded and used in school during the term in which the broadcast was given---but not otherwise...
...As is suggested by the use of the actors' names for the characters they play--Bruno S. is the vagrant and ex-mental patient whom Herzog featured in The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (1975)~Herzog intends his film to seem, ambiguously, a document as well as a fable...
...In Germany Stroszek goes to a doctor who once treated him and now consoles him in his new troubles with a tour of the hospital nursery...
...The absurdity of this situation is obvious...
...Rather than the explanation of a particular situation, his films are revelations of the general...
...One of these is an auctioneer who has, ironically, just sold off with his own doubletalk the trailer in which Scheitz and Stroszek live...
...Holding up a tiny, wrinkled baby the doctor asks philosophically 30 September 1977:624 who can tell which such infant will be a great man...
...In almost all of Herzog's films to date, in fact, the characters behave, like figures of myth, by the laws of the imagination alone...
...What sense does it make to prevent people from legally making copies, on their own cassette recorders, of gramophone records, when the very corporations which make the records also make the recorders...
...Commonweal: 625...
...While Herzog was a teenager, as I mentioned last time, he took a hike all around the sealed frontier of Albania...
...What really binds together the episodes of Stroszek's life more than anything else is the failure of language...
...For example, every so often the BBC will remind people, through its house journal the Radio Times, that it is illegal to record most BBC broadcasts without permission...
...At one point, for instance, Stroszek tries to explain to Eva his feeling that America does to the spirit what Germany does to the physical and political man...
...The fascination she had for him was not so much her extraordinary ability to understand the world outside herself, but rather our inability to enter and understand the world inside her...
...At the end of this film, after he has lost his home, his Eva and his friend Scheitz, Stroszek leaves a truck he has stolen circling by itself in a parking lot and goes off to commit suicide...
...From his cellmate in the opening scenes to the pimps who terrorize him, half the people Stroszek knows in Germany wear Western hats and cowboy clothes like the Wisconsinites (indeed, like Stroszek himeslf, after he has been in America a time...
...At heart it is still predominantly an attempt to mystify and mythologize all life...
...Were we to take it seriously, such an insight into his own situation would at the least be out of character for poor Stroszek...
...It's an attempt once again to comprehend the incomprehensible...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...In Land of Silence and of Darkness (1972), in fact, Herzog made a documentary about a woman both blind and deaf...
Vol. 104 • September 1977 • No. 20
