hey, nosferatu

after reading an article about a new version of the play ‘woyzeck’ featuring music by nick cave, I decided that maybe it was time to watch the 1976 herzog film, based on the georg büchner play left unfinished at the time of his death in 1837(which itself was loosely based on a true story).

klaus kinski is a difficult actor to watch, both because his off-screen persona was so incredible, and because once you’ve seen ‘nosferatu’, it’s difficult to see him as anything else. but he is well suited to the role of franz woyzeck, a poor, ignorant, downtrodden, much-maligned soldier who seems to have no other choice but to lose his mind. we first see an exhausted woyzeck being brutalized by a military superior. he is then subjected to some routine insults by the captain (looking remarkably like a bloated klaus maria brandauer) whose beard he is shaving. “woyzeck,” he says, ”you always have a hunted look in your eye”, and then proceeds to link his immorality(he has fathered an illegitimate child) and stupidity with the fact that he is poor. a visit to the town doctor fares no better in that he is merely performing bizarre experiments on the poor soldier, whom he has kept on a diet of peas for an entire year. on top of all this, the mother of wozeck’s child can barely disguise her disgust with him, and is actively pursuing a bigger, stronger, saner soldier with a much nicer uniform. woyzeck has one friend, andres, who constantly sings and is honestly not an awful lot of help. it’s apparent quite early that woyzeck’s sanity is in danger, as he runs around in the forest trying to figure out what the voices no one else can hear are saying.

woyzeck is weird, wizened, and pathetic. You can’t really like him, but he’s certainly deserving of pity. with the exception of andres, the entire town treats him as little more than a circus animal. in fact, the circus animals in an early scene are probably treated a little better. his fate seems sealed in a remarkable scene that has him running through a field of what appears to be gray tulips, finally putting his ear to the ground to hear the voice that are saying to him “stab dead”. the climactic, slow-motion murder scene ends with woyzeck, knife in his hand and tears in his eyes, maybe grasping the importance of what he has done, but maybe not.

it’s not what you’d call an enjoyable film, exactly, but it does make me feel like watching a lot of other non-enjoyable kinski films.