When we planned to post our Screengrab tribute to movie comebacks we'd like to see, we weren't counting on being one-upped by The New York Times. Here it is, though: Michael Kimmelman's "Where Are They Know" piece on Bruno S., thirty years after Werner Herzog helped him carve out a place for himself in movie history with 1974's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (A.K.A. Every Man for Himself and God Against All) and the 1977 Stroszek. The cast-off son of a prostitute, Bruno (whose full last name, which it seems no one ever uses, is Schleinstein) grew up bouncing from one institution to another before finding himself on his own as an adult. He worked as a manual laborer while developing into what some would call an "outsider artist"; he paints and plays music and often speaks in cryptic word puzzles. He first came to Herzog's attention through his appearance in a 1970 documentary about street musicians. It's easy to understand why Herzog would seek him out and offer him the role of Kaspar Hauser, the nineteenth-century mystery man who, in Herzog's telling, would become a feral Christ figure for the counterculture era, a boy who, raised in isolation, would retain a purer connection to truth and nature than more socialized men. (Kaspar, who loves natural sounds, staggers out of a church in annoyance because the hymn singing sounds like screaming to him.) What couldn't have been anticipated would be how uncannily Bruno S. would embody Herzog's conceit and lift it to the level of poetry. It inspired Herzog to write Stroszek just for Bruno S.; a more uneven but often fascinating film, it would acquire a morbid cult reputation as the movie that Joy Division's Ian Curtis was watching on TV the night he hanged himself. Interestingly, the feature that Herzog made between his two films with Bruno was Heart of Glass, best remembered as the one where the director tried to capture some intangible atmosphere of muffled hysteria by having most of the cast members under hypnosis while they were on camera. To watch it back to back with Kaspar Hauser is to get a sense of how gimmicky Herzog could become in his sweaty desire to manufacture the kind of unearthly quality that Bruno S., and and his other favorite leading man, Klaus Kinski, seemed to pack in their lunch boxes on a daily basis.
The wrap of Stroszek essentially ended Bruno S.'s acting career. The celebrity that had surrounded him on the basis of both those movies and his own life story would eventually dry up, too: when Kimmelman met the now 76-year-old Bruno, he found that Bruno has a tendency to refer to himself in the third person, as "him", and that Bruno summed up much of his life with the words, "Everybody threw him away."
Read More...
