Woyzeck

Based on a famous unfinished play by German playwright Georg Buchner, Woyzeck is the third of five collaborations between director Werner Herzog and crazed acting powerhouse Klaus Kinski. The play's fragmentary nature (due to being unfinished) lends itself quite well to Herzog's style as a director - his enigmatic emphasis on tone and feeling ensures that it comes across as a finished, self-contained film, helped in great spades by Kinski's disturbingly realistic performance.

Woyzeck (Kinski) is a military rifleman in a serene 19th century European town that sits on the shore of a small lake. He is mistreated by just about everyone - his superiors overwork him and bait his intellect, the academically-aspiring town doctor experiments on his diet by making him eat only peas for an entire year, and his wife is having an affair with the army's dashing drum major (she says to Woyzeck, "I'd rather have a knife in my body than your hand on me"). Woyzeck is a simple, poor man just trying to hang on, but when he is confronted with his cuckolded nature it begins to look like he won't be able to take it anymore, and the disembodied voices he hears in his head start to get louder.

At first I wasn't quite sure what to make of Woyzeck, a lot of it consists of characters philosophizing about the meaning of life, morality, God, fidelity, sanity, etc. It's not a very long film, Herzog keeps it relatively tight in terms of scope and length but also lets the plot and characters breathe via the wandering, reflective dialogue. It's not a boring film by any stretch of the imagination - a lot of the viewer's attention is attracted to the bizarre magnetism of Kinski's astounding performance. Woyzeck is a harried, preoccupied creature... so incapable of coping with the barrage of casual mistreatment he recieves that his stress renders him strangely absent. From the very outset he's fighting a losing battle with his sanity... an effect achieved by Kinski and Herzog thanks to an exhausting shooting schedule.

The film was shot in just 18 days, with minimal takes, and was also made immediately on the back of their previous film, Nosferatu, at Kinski's insistence. Ever the method actor, Kinski also asked for the rough treatment seen in the film's opening moments to be 100% real - allowing the other actor to kick and beat him for the sake of getting inside this abused character. There's a point in the film where the drunken drum major tries to fight Woyzeck in the alehouse (around the 51 minute mark) and for one brief moment it seems as if Kinski is literally trying to escape into the camera, suggesting a level of method acting that has become so pure that the real Kinski might disappear altogether. When Woyzeck cracks (and we know it's coming for the majority of the film), it's simply amazing. Herzog lets the restorative incidental music return after a long absence and shows Woyzeck's brutal actions in beautiful slow motion - a shocking and cathartically abrupt change of pace from the film's otherwise realistically languid tone, and one that allows for the horror and trauma on Kinski's face to be captured and stretched across time.

That's another great thing about this film - the wheezing, robust European folk music during the opening credits. It comes back again at certain points, and it swells the film in such unexpected ways. It's very memorable. Herzog keeps his camera fairly still and unobtrusive for much of the film, choosing instead to linger on prophetic and symbolic moments such as a trained monkey in a soldier's uniform, or Woyzeck vacantly clasping an abused cat to his chest. I imagine this film would reward a lot on repeat viewings, especially in regards to Kinski's performance - a lot of which can be summed up in a quote taken from Woyzeck himself, "Every man is an abyss - you get dizzy looking in".

DIRECTOR: Werner Herzog
WRITER/SOURCE: Based on a play by Georg Buchner, adapted by Werner Herzog.
KEY ACTORS: Klaus Kinski, Eva Mattes, Wolfgang Reichmann, Willy Semmelrogge, Josef Bierbichler, Paul Burian

RELATED TEXTS:
- Woyzeck has been adapted many times - as an opera, as plays, puppet shows, songs (Tom Waits), ballet, musicals, and various films. Werner Herzog's version is unarguably the most famous film adaptation - the other most prominent film version was made in 1994. An english-language student film was also made in 2009.
- Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog made four other films together - Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde. At least two or three of these also deal with a descent into madness.
- Herzog also made a documentary about his explosive relationship with Kinski during the making of these films, called My Best Friend.
- Herzog has also made several other films that deal with the line between madness and sanity, including Signs of Life and Stroszek.

AWARDS:
Eva Mattes won an acting award at Cannes for her work in the film. Herzog was nominated for Best Director at the same film festival.

The film won two other awards at minor European film awards festivals (best director for Herzog, and best actor for Kinski).