Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Stroszek
1977 · Werner Herzog · Stroszek on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Bruno play his glockenspiel and accordion on the street. (performance)
Herzog doesn't direct Bruno S. in any conventional sense; he places him in situations from his own life and films the authentic response.
Payoff: His face carries a history the camera couldn't have invented, and the film knows it. In the reading: fabulation / legending. Deleuze calls this fabulation: a person caught in the act of legending himself, with no clean line between documentary and fiction.
Watch how cramped and dim the Berlin interiors are. (light)
Mauch shoots institutional walls and bar interiors close and dark, full of the textures of poverty rather than any compositional grandeur.
Payoff: The claustrophobia sets a baseline of misery the Wisconsin scenes will answer with a different, flatter kind.
Watch how flat and open the Wisconsin frames become. (setting)
Strip malls, parking lots, and mobile-home developments sit dead center in the frame without irony or beautification.
Payoff: The openness is its own kind of despair, just shaped differently than Berlin's.
Listen for Chet Atkins' cheerful guitar over road scenes. (sound)
The music's bright, precise optimism runs alongside images of dislocation and failure, never quite matching what you're actually looking at.
Payoff: The mismatch is the film's real subject: the official story of opportunity against what actually happens to people.
Watch the trailer park get treated like a character. (staging)
New appliances bought on credit, modular homes with no community around them: the space itself carries the film's argument about broken promises.
Payoff: The setting does the film's social critique without a single line of dialogue stating it.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch Bruno's eyes in the scenes where nothing can be done.