Bruno Stroszek, a travelling musician and ballad singer, is released from prison. The director warns him not to touch alcohol again, as it was the reason for his crimes. Bruno gives him his "great Hungarian word of honour"; in other words, as soon as sets foot outside the door, he downs a bottle of beer in the pub round the corner to celebrate his return to the outside world.

However, he has decided to start a new life. An unfulfilled love story starts when he meets the prostitute Eva and takes her to his flat to protect her from her brutal pimp. When her pimp continues to maltreat her, the two decide to go to Mr. Scheitz's nephew in Wisconsin, USA, to start a new life there together with Bruno's neighbour, old Mr. Scheitz. For everyone can make money in America, as Eva optimistically tells them.

Their new life together starts in Plainfield, which really consists of no more than a couple of farmhouses, a petrol station and a drive-inn with car park for long-distance drivers at a crossroads between two highways. Bruno works in the nephew's car repairshop and before long they have a mobile home, the American symbol for the first step out of poverty, and a colour television.

The dream comes to an end not long after. They cannot repay the loan. Eva disappears with a truck driver. Bruno tries to drown his sorrows in alcohol and has to watch in despair how the caravan and all his possessions are auctioned.

The end starts with a small raid on a shop. With the stolen 22 dollars, Bruno buys himself a turkey and heads north. Bruno's life comes full circle: on a cold and wet November morning, he shoots himself on a misty hill in an Indian reservation, between Cherokees and a few tourists.

Herzog's first failed hero was called Stroszek and was a young army soldier on an island in the occupied Aegean Sea in LEBENSZEICHEN (1967). The biography of Bruno S. has been incorporated in the resurrected Stroszek of 1977. The story of Bruno S.'s life, which first became widely known through Lutz Eisholt's film BRUNO, DER SCHWARZE, ended in 1958 when he was "released into society as cured" and henceforth earned his living as a casual labourer and backyard singer in Berlin. When he is released, STROSZEK also begins to chase after a dream that many people before him thought was their last escape, the dream of America. "America remains a mysterious, strange country in STROSZEK both for Bruno, Mr. Scheitz and the viewer. Bruno and the old man head straight for disaster like the doomed Conquistadores in AGUIRRE, DER ZORN GOTTES, which has a great deal in common with this film, when they head from postcard America (the wordless conquest on the Empire State Building, the long car drives suggesting infinity, the red sunset at the end of the highways) into an inhospitable region with impenetrable natives and the corresponding customs and mores." (Hans C. Blumenberg)

"What kind of a country is this that takes Bruno's Beo from him?" he asks presentiently when his bird is not allowed to enter the country with him.

Herzog finally makes Bruno run in the same hopeless circles that feature in almost all his films: the car at the end draws the circle as a burning torch and the chicken in the dancing-chicken machine performs its own circular movement. However, the inescapability here is not the end of a great tragic epic, only that of a minor cheerfully melancholic ballad that is content with human proportions and trusts in the perspective of its two strange heroes from Berlin-Kreuzberg.

"STROSZEK's greatest quality lies in Herzog's love for his figures and their lack of middle-class normality. The American adventures of Bruno and Mr. Scheitz are both comic and frightening and Herzog accepts the beautiful madness of his heroes with unexpected wit; the failures are like all Herzog figures, but they have ceased to be enormous titans." (Hans C. Blumenberg)

The view of the landscape undergoes the same transformation; "it no longer corresponds with the heroes' inner world as in earlier Herzog films, but is now (like the flat, icy, deserted desert land in the USA) a naked view of reality. Landscape' has been excluded almost completely here in the form in which it dominated Herzog's past works. That is what makes STROSZEK an attempt to escape; it is Herzog who is trying to escape after trying to overpower the myth (including the myth of Nature) in HERZ AUS GLAS. He has returned to the people and not remained in the realm of fantasies and lemurs..." (Wolfram Schütte)

Herzog thus reconfirmed his commitment to the physically and mentally disabled and socially outcast existences which he had demonstrated so convincingly in IM LAND DES SCHWEIGENS UND DER DUNKELHEIT.

Production Country

Germany (DE)

Production Period

1976/1977

Production Year

1977

color

color

Aspect Ratio

1:1,66

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Drama, Comedy

Topic

Love, Film History, Migration / Flight / Exile, Precarity, Illness / Addiction / Physical impairment

Available Media

DCP, Blu-ray Disc, Digital Film

Original Version

German (de)

DCP

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (es), Lithuanian (lt), German (partly)

Note on the Format

DCP ist verschlüsselt

Blu-ray Disc

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (es), German (partly), Lithuanian (lt)

Digital Film

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Lithuanian (lt), Spanish (Latin America)