The ending is justifiably legendary, but what really got to me were the moments of innocent joy - three friends gazing at a map, the sparkling new but very humble dreamhouse, the pleasure Bruno gets from playing his music and taking care of Eva. Much of the humor is terribly melancholy, and I mostly found those scenes endearing or sad rather than funny. Herzog knows life is a painful struggle but he isn't angry about it, just determined to tell a quiet sad story. Life is pain, the American dream is garbage, people are ruthlessly cruel, but there are songs to sing.

The mindless dancing chicken as a metaphor for life's repetitiveness and mankind's idiocy, sure. But a chicken doesn't…

Werner Herzog’s second greatest film is Stroszek. An uneducated little man in Germany raised without family is bullied so much in adulthood by locals that he moves to the Pacific Northwest of Wisconsin only to be bullied in another way, not by any individual but by the American system.

Bruno Stroszek has traveled to America with the elderly Mr. Scheitz and Eva the prostitute, and shares a fabulous beginning before it goes downhill. “Nobody kicks you here,” Eva rationalizes.

“No, not physically. Here they do it spiritually,” Stroszek retorts to her, inside their Fleetwood mobile home on wheels.

Relocation to America had been a gambit to makeover a life that was misbegotten in Berlin. The wide angle shots by Herzog…

Stroszek (1977) is a comedy drama directed by the great Werner Herzog in 1977. He wrote this film in four days, around his favorite actor, Bruno S, as Stroszek. Herzog is truly a prolific auteur that captures the characters at psychological extremes and I can bring The Wrath of God (1972) and Heart of Glass (1976) as my best examples to assert this. But Stroszek is his most realistic film, something less sublime, yet stylised in many respects.

It tells us the peculiar story of an alcoholic and a prostitute, who leave Berlin together in pursuit of a better future in Wisconsin. The way Herzog narrates is one of the oddest narrations ever told, as it’s almost impossible to anticipate…

So... your car is kaput. And your girlfriend is gone. And your house they have sold.

In the credits to Stroszek, Herzog thanks his pal, and great American documentarian, Les Blank (or "Blanc"), and borrows one image (the beer-swilling mechanic's pulling of his own tooth with a pair of pliers) directly from Blank's Steal it All. It's not just the dentistry, though: Blank's influence is felt in the casting of non-professional actors, and especially in Stroszek's discussion of landscape; of how landscapes shape the characters of those who dwell in them, and of the effect the lack of landscape might have on those unable to embed, whose grip-reflexes aren't as strong as the premature baby we meet in an early…

"We're in America now. I thought that in America everything would get better and that we would finally reach our goal. But no. Bruno is being chopped off as if he'd never existed." - Bruno Stroszek

This was one of the picks for the films this week for the Film Cult New Wave. If you want to see what I've ranked the films I've watched so far since joining, check out this list here.

Well, this was definitely my second Herzog film and it sure was something, I'll say that.

Is the "American Dream" really something someone can achieve? Unless you're born in America and into a rich family, the answer is no, not really. Especially when you can't speak…

"Nobody kicks you here."

"Not physically no. Here they do it spiritually."

Herzog explores the failed American dream. In Wisconsin of all places.

Starring the strange Bruno S., this is Herzog's least conventional films. It focuses on a street performer (Bruno S.), a prostitute, and their elderly neighbor as they grow tired of Berlin. They've heard of the booming American successes and they decide to take a crack at it. It's their understanding that they'll get rich quick and they will finally find some happiness. But the group is a bunch of misfits. They stumble along, getting more discouraged every step of the way.

It's the idea of the American dream that seems so enigmatic and unreachable. It's always been…

Stroszek is also the name of the leading character in Herzog's Lebenszeichen (1968). Herzog got the name Stroszek from one of his former classmates who once helped him cheat on a test and used his name as a tribute to him.
-IMDb Trivia Section

There is certainly a metaphor towards the ending that references both the animalistic nature of men, and a money-driven cycle of repetitiveness where people are willing to live the rest of their lives under a capitalist mentality and a fixed corporativist job to justify their existence as "successful". That is what drives the characters' wishes, erroneously, in Herzog's inventive and daring destruction of the "American" dream through three characters that, initially, might be considered as immediate…

Set in Berlin, this Werner Herzog film offers characteristics which are as tragic as they are comical as it revolves around a disquieting performance from Bruno Schleinstein as an alcoholic, and newly released from prison, street performer Bruno Stroszek. 

Stroszek is reunited promptly with former acquaintance Eva, a hapless prostitute, along with an elderly friend, and the narrative shapes its priorities around these personalities. Their various hardships and disagreements are foregrounded perpetually rather than any broader commentary on sociopolitical issues as the group become determined to evacuate Germany and to pursue a more satisfactory existence in Wisconsin. 

Schleinstein is intense throughout, and while there's an occasional prank that the trio engages in that is a little overfamiliar the performance of…