Stroszek

Director: Werner Herzog

1977 / 108min / DCP

Herzog’s longstanding fascination with cannibal killer Ed Gein drew him to shoot his devastating film of American dreams deferred in wild, wonderful Wisconsin, where a West Berlin street musician, Stroszek—played by Bruno S., the oft-institutionalized busker who’d previously appeared in Herzog’s 1974 The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser—arrives with ex-streetwalker Eva Mattes and an elderly acquaintance in tow. Hoping for a new life in the land of opportunity, Stroszek instead finds disillusionment, disappointment, and, at a roadside attraction outside Cherokee, North Carolina, a dancing chicken who seems to represent the very futility of existence. The last film viewed by Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis.