Word: herzog
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...Werner Herzog serves as a textbook example of this Teutonic "New Wave." His work demands a special kind of viewer, a sensibility that can accommodate the warped and the damned souls of this world. His 1972 film Aguirre: The Wrath of God suggested Herzog's affinity for dwelling on the sordid side of things; watching a demented Spanish conquistador in search of his El Dorado foam at the mouth for the better part of 90 minutes, one could sense a sublimated sadism at work in the movie...
...whereas Aguirre could be dismissed as the flawed effort of a young filmmaker who had seen one too many Bergman films for his own good, no such allowances can be or should be made for Stroszek. Five years of reflection and presumed growth have taken Herzog a painfully short distance, and this exercise in depression and squalor has mired Herr Werner still deeper in the quicksand of the art film syndrome. Stroszek is an aimless film about aimless people, society's losers who spend their lives groping for a promised dream that goes unfulfilled. Set in the slums of Berlin...
...rest of the film, Herzog does not make much more effort than this to help the audience understand the plot. From time to time a voice reads from the fictional diary of a monk who accompanied the fortune-hunters, but for the most part we are forced to rely on sparse dialogue and a relentlessly searching camera for our information...
...conquistadors' story is also presented without judgment. Herzog, the enfant terrible of the German film industry, is widely-known for his existentialist treatment of his subjects, and Aguirre is no different. Herzog's view of the Spaniards' abuse of the Indians they found in Latin America is offered through juxtaposition of images--four chained Indians struggle under the burden of a gaily-decorated sedan chair while its occupant looks on impassively; the monk impassively kills two Indians who fail to understand his efforts to proseletize. But the filmmaker's views are rarely more articulated than this, as if he accepts...
...Aguirre is little more than an extraordinarily beautiful enactment of an historical event. Herzog tells us little that we didn't already know, though he shows in magnificent detail the physical odds against which the conquistadors struggled in their desperate search for gold. If Kinski were a different kind of actor, Aguirre's steadily increasing megalomania might have provided a dynamic for the film, but he fails to project the reasons for his ruthless brutality. (The problem may be that the actors speak in German, and subtitles hardly aid in character development, but is more likely that Kinski...