AT HOME WITH STROSZEK

By VBS Staff

While Klaus Kinski is still sopping up the film-student splooge 25 years after his death for that one picture where he’s choking out Werner Herzog, Herzog’s original unhinged actor-antagonist is tooling around Berlin, singing the same toothless street chanteys that paid his bills before Germany’s greatest director decided to make him one of the world’s most depressing stars. The proverbial son of a whore, Bruno S. spent his childhood being handed off between various orphanages and mental institutions before taking up the accordion and venturing out into the exciting career field of courtyard busking. Bear in mind, this was all happening in the middle of the Nazis’ height of power, when things like mental illness and being the illegitimate child of a prostitute weren’t widely considered bankable traits. By the time Herzog discovered him in the early 70s, Bruno had been tramping for nearly 30 years straight and just featured in a small local documentary called Bruno der Schwarze (“Bruno the Black”). Without bothering to check whether or not he could act, Herzog cast him as the titular abandoned mute of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and then specifically wrote him the lead role in Stroszek, the movie that put Cherokee, NC, and Ian Curtis’s suicide on the map.

In tomorrow’s episode of Practice Space Herr Bruno invites us over to his flat (which, provided you’ve seen the movie, you may recognize as the same place that gets invaded at the beginning of Stroszek ) to play us a couple of cheerful accordion ditties. Here’s a little gallery of some of Bruno’s painted work to tide you over until then. And if you’re one of those people who can stomach watching movies on a 10-inch screen with ichat bouncing up every three minutes, here’s the entirety of Kaspar Hauser.

B the dubs, we know this is about Bruno here, but if you’ve got a jones for a little mid-Monday Herzog break, check out this excerpt from his forthcoming Fitzcarraldo production diary in the current issue of Vice.

By VBS Staff 2 years ago

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