At the climax of this somewhat tragic tale, Bruno, a German immigrant whose quest for happiness in America has failed, goes on an amateur, what-the-hell crime spree, turns on all the exhibits in a barren mid-winter Indian tourist trap, and climbs aboard a cable car for a final trip to the mountain top, carrying a shotgun and a frozen turkey. One of the exhibits he activates is a piano-playing chicken who hammers out an impeccable version of Schubert's Scherzo in B Minor. Another is a dancing chicken. The chicken walks out into a glass case, plucks a piece of string, and begins scratching atop a slowly revolving round table the size of an old record player. The Tribal Police arrive and examine the scene of the crime, which includes a burning truck and a recently robbed grocery store. One of the cops is on the squad car's radio. "We got a single passenger on the lift and an electrician's on his way out. Somebody turned on the electricity and we can't stop the dancing chicken." The director, Werner Herzog, lingers on that chicken, scratching away over and over on a revolving platter, his head completely empty of thought. What are we to make of all this? Except that we are all dancing chickens manipulated by some deranged outer force.
If it isn't that, then I'm lost.
A good case could be made that this movie is utterly pointless. Bruno, a shabby caricature of a man, is released from an institution and returns to his apartment in Berlin, where he has two friends. One is an elderly eccentric and the other an abused whore. The pixy-like old man carries on about how easy it is to get rich and live happily in America. The whore saves up her money and the three of them travel to a truck stop in Wisconsin. They buy a mobile home and a television set and things look bright for a while, until they fall behind in their mortgage payments.
Sick of it all and desperate, the hooker takes off in one of the trucks for Canada. The old man goes bonkers and believes it's all a conspiracy, so he and the not-too-bright Bruno hold up a barber shop, run across the street, and begin buying groceries. The old man is arrested for armed robbery, Bruno steals a truck, takes off on his own, and finally runs out of money and gas at the Indian tourist trap.
My old German grandpappy had a saying: "Ein Mann hat das Bodel und ein Mann hat das Gelt." Some people have money and others wind up with the bag. Bruno and his friends -- and even his enemies -- are losers from beginning to end. It's a long, slow story of social suicide. All three end up worse than they began, as bad as that was.
And when I say "long", I mean "long." Herzog -- here as elsewhere -- has a tendency to hold on stylized shots for a long long long time. The camera is placed behind and above Bruno as a huge truck pulls his forfeited mobile home away. The camera remains static as the mobile home sluggishly departs to the right. The camera stays in the same place and so does Bruno, who is now staring at the empty space that his mobile home had occupied. He continues to stare as the seconds tick by and a scratchy old record plays a tune called "Silver Bells." If you're patient, and if you're sensitive to mood and character and composition, you'll get much more out of this movie than if you're expecting some plot-driven dynamo.
I'd like to compare this to Robert Altman's exercises in improvisation but I can't. One senses an intentionality behind Herzog's stuff that's absent from Altman's movies. What I mean is, Herzog seems to have something in mind behind the apparent non sequiturs and stylized shots. Herzog has a goal, whereas many of Altman's movies seemed designed for nothing more than seeing what happened next. In a sense, Altman stays with the dancing chicken because that's all there is, while Herzog believes that there is somebody turning the machine on and off.
If it isn't that, then I'm lost.
A good case could be made that this movie is utterly pointless. Bruno, a shabby caricature of a man, is released from an institution and returns to his apartment in Berlin, where he has two friends. One is an elderly eccentric and the other an abused whore. The pixy-like old man carries on about how easy it is to get rich and live happily in America. The whore saves up her money and the three of them travel to a truck stop in Wisconsin. They buy a mobile home and a television set and things look bright for a while, until they fall behind in their mortgage payments.
Sick of it all and desperate, the hooker takes off in one of the trucks for Canada. The old man goes bonkers and believes it's all a conspiracy, so he and the not-too-bright Bruno hold up a barber shop, run across the street, and begin buying groceries. The old man is arrested for armed robbery, Bruno steals a truck, takes off on his own, and finally runs out of money and gas at the Indian tourist trap.
My old German grandpappy had a saying: "Ein Mann hat das Bodel und ein Mann hat das Gelt." Some people have money and others wind up with the bag. Bruno and his friends -- and even his enemies -- are losers from beginning to end. It's a long, slow story of social suicide. All three end up worse than they began, as bad as that was.
And when I say "long", I mean "long." Herzog -- here as elsewhere -- has a tendency to hold on stylized shots for a long long long time. The camera is placed behind and above Bruno as a huge truck pulls his forfeited mobile home away. The camera remains static as the mobile home sluggishly departs to the right. The camera stays in the same place and so does Bruno, who is now staring at the empty space that his mobile home had occupied. He continues to stare as the seconds tick by and a scratchy old record plays a tune called "Silver Bells." If you're patient, and if you're sensitive to mood and character and composition, you'll get much more out of this movie than if you're expecting some plot-driven dynamo.
I'd like to compare this to Robert Altman's exercises in improvisation but I can't. One senses an intentionality behind Herzog's stuff that's absent from Altman's movies. What I mean is, Herzog seems to have something in mind behind the apparent non sequiturs and stylized shots. Herzog has a goal, whereas many of Altman's movies seemed designed for nothing more than seeing what happened next. In a sense, Altman stays with the dancing chicken because that's all there is, while Herzog believes that there is somebody turning the machine on and off.