Customer Reviews

Woyzeck [VHS]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

We have to thank Anchor Bay for bringing into the DVD standard a certain number of german director Werner Herzog movies. Werner Herzog is, in my opinion, one of the best film directors of Movie History and his films must be shown again and again if we want that a new generation of directors rises from the ashes of the kilometers of rotten anonymous pellicle produced in industrial quantity nowadays.

WOYZECK was filmed in 1978 in Czeschoslovaquia, just after the completion of NOSFERATU. Georg Büchner's play is well-known to european literature students who have to read it at least once during their academic career. At first, I didn't understand why WOYZECK had attracted a lyrical director like Werner Herzog. Georg Büchner's minimalist dialogs and action don't leave much place for the visionary travellings of the director of AGUIRRE and KASPAR HAUSER.

But, as soon as Klaus Kinski appears as the soldier Woyzeck, I knew that something would happen on the screen, Klaus Kinski IS Woyzeck in the same way that he WAS Aguirre, the mad conquistador. When Woyzeck feels that there is " a second nature " hidden behind what we see, the genius of Werner Herzog explodes once again : what is important is not what we see but what we feel while being hypnotized by the hallucinated Klaus-Woyzeck-Kinski.

Of course, I shall recommend WOYZECK to those of you who are already familiar with Werner Herzog's world through AGUIRRE, KASPAR HAUSER or HEART OF GLASS. I also recommend it to the students who are fighting with the dryness of Georg Büchner's play or to those who still believe that Klaus Kinski was only a B-movie actor who starred in horror movies and spaghetti westerns of the 60's and the 70's.

Superb copy with a trailer and incomplete filmographies of Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski.

A DVD zone movie lovers only.

Klaus Kinski gives the finest performance of his career in this fine adaptation of the play, later used by Alban Berg for his opera Wozzeck, completed in 1924. The story has always had a power and truth all of its own; indeed it is based on an actual incident. Highly recommended!

It's been said that this was Herzog's easiest film, and that certainly shows. Whereas the best of Herzog's films are born out of his blood and spit, this film feels blasphemously effortless. I didn't expect the jungle perils of Aguirre: The Wrath of God, nor the 30,000 rats unleashed in Nosferatu, but I did expect art. Instead, Herzog simply points the camera and shoots.

Perhaps, only five days after shooting the exhaustingly stylized and expressive Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, it was tempting to take a leap toward the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, presenting Woyzeck's oppresive reality in sanitized colors with a near total absence of expressive lighting, scoring, and camera work. But I believe Herzog confused artistic interpretation with sheer laziness. Indeed, even at the film's climax, when Woyzeck has broken free of his societal restraints and rediscovered a portion of his natural side, Herzog is too late and still too restrained to make me care. We are outside of Woyzeck, unable to experience the leap that he himself has made.

Rather unfortunately, Klaus Kinsky pours his heart into this role, bringing the character to life with a genuine authenticity that dwarfs the greatness he accomplished with Aguirre and Nosferatu, but his efforts are wasted. Herzog simply holds a camera up to Kinsky's face. It seems obvious that Kinsky sacrificed a great part of himself to achieve this performance, but we are only able to watch; not to experience along with him. Herzog utterly fails to take us along on Woyzeck's emotional journey.

I don't think that other viewers are wrong to recommend this film solely based on Kinsky's command performance. However, I'm angered that the film fails to support Kinsky and make his amazing efforts worthwhile. It is certainly true of both Herzog and Kinsky that their greatness comes only as the result of high personal sacrifice. In Woyzeck, Kinsky came to the table with blood to spare, but Herzog was clearly in need of a vacation.

The adjectives "creepy" and "mordant" are usually not used in praise of something, but those are the terms I use to praise Werner Herzog's mesmerizing film "Woyzeck." Herzog regular Klaus Kinski stars in the title role and his first appearance, in the opening credits, is worth the price of the video. A hair-raising tune is played by a string group as the soldier Woyzeck is drilled and brutalized by a shadowy figure in jackboots. He spends the film being degraded by his cynical superior officer and experimented on by a sadistic doctor. His sexy wife (Eva Mates, winner of the best actress award at Cannes) is sleeping with a drum-major. Woyzeck succumbs to the voices in his head and in one of the most horrific murder scenes ever filmed, takes action. The story has been around for 175 years and obviously speaks deeply to Germans, who have had plenty of historical experience with sadism and domination (the doctor is eerily prescient of Nazi atrocities.) This film is not as totally satisfying as "Aguirre" or "Nosferatu" but has moments of twisted genius all its own. Herzog is a unique director who makes demented, entertaining epics that can go way over the top (the closest American equivalent is Francis Ford Coppola in his "Apocalypse Now" phase.) Oddly moving, even darkly funny, this must be one of the favorite movies of Mike Myers' "Dieter" character from "Saturday Night Live". Watch it on Halloween, if you are in the right mood.

Many fans of Aguirre seem to have trouble with this film, which has only 27 edits. One need not have a stalwart attention span to endure this film, only an interest in insanity, a recurring theme of Herzog's work. The performances are really brought to the fore in this film, making it's theater origins all the more apparent, particularly with the solilioquies that several of the characters give when they are alone. But just as cinema was borne of theater, there are some quintessentially cinematic scenes that more than make up for any staginess elsewhere. I rank Herzog up there with Kubrick and Scorsese as directors who understand better than anyone else the power of music combined with psychically compatible images. The opening sequence is a prime example. While this is not one of his very best films, it is one of his most difficult and well-acted. B+

Woyzeck marks the fourth collaboration between director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski and is Herzog's adaptation of George Büchner's unfinished play. I'm not familiar with the play, but I am familiar with Kinski and Herzog and recently re-visited Aguirre, the Wrath of God, which is now one of my favorite films. Woyzeck is a much different film from that one, with a performance that is similar yet couldn't be more different. I'll get to that later on.

The film begins "in a small town on a wide, still pond" where Franz Woyzeck (Kinski), a soldier, is stationed with his mistress Marie (Eva Mattes) and his illegitimate child. Woyzeck only seems to be happy when around Marie and his child, and who can blame him? The only other people in his life are his Captain, who tells Woyzeck he's a "good man" but one "without morals," simply because Woyzeck is poor. The other is a doctor who uses Woyzeck for various (and increasingly ridiculous) medical experiments. Woyzeck's sanity is slowly crumbling and when his captain hints that Marie may have had an affair, the film builds to a startling climax.

Woyzeck is a change of pace for both Herzog and Kinski. The movie does have some stylistic touches that only Herzog could have been responsible for and there's some beautiful cinematography right from the opening scene, but the visual extravagance that characterizes much of Herzog's directorial work is nowhere to be found here. As for Kinski, his performance here should change any previous perception you may have had of Klaus Kinski, the actor.

Kinski was apparently suffering from exhaustion when production on Woyzeck began and is said to have exploited his exhaustion for the role. Early in the film, he actually seems much more gentle and warm than I was accustomed to seeing and when Herzog takes a moment to linger on his face, there's no trace of that ferocity that was present throughout his portrayal of Aguirre. With that said, it's incredible how different the characters Aguirre and Woyzeck are and how great of an actor Kinski could be. As Aguirre, he brought out the animalistic nature that lurks within every human being. As Woyzeck, he's tapping into that slow descent into madness that any sane man can go through once he's hit his breaking point.

There's a pivotal scene in the film that plays in slow-motion with the score drowning out everything else on the soundtrack. In the hands of a lesser director, this scene could have been completely ridiculous but Herzog knows how to achieve maximum effect. In this scene, Kinski must work only with facial expression and physical mannerisms (in slow-motion, no less) and, in doing so, solidifies his Woyzeck as one of the most startling, intensely emotional performances committed to celluloid. Kinski turns in such an emotional performance, yet plays Woyzeck as an introvert...Without ego or bravado, Kinski must illustrate this man slowly unraveling inside and he does it so convincingly that Herzog's style and Kinski's performance make this pivotal scene one of the most memorable and haunting in the film. To call Kinski `electrifying' in this film is to undermine the power of electricity.

I look forward to one day seeing Woyzeck again as I'm sure my appreciation for it will only deepen. Its brief length (a quick 77 minutes) and lack of singular narrative focus make Woyzeck a slightly uneven, imperfect film. Stylistically, it does so many things correctly it's hard to not call this film a "masterpiece," especially with few movie endings able to rival the nightmarish, creeping final shot of this film. With that said, the film is a triumph for Kinski and Herzog, as well for taking Kinski to these dark depths as an actor. While I didn't love Woyzeck, it's a film that will haunt my memory and stay with me longer than many films I do love have.

GRADE: B+

Although dismissed by some critics as too slow or too "stagey," Herzog's adaptation of Buechner's "Woyzeck" is, I believe, one of his finest films. Herzog follows Buechner's unfinished script fairly closely, cutting a few of the lines, jumping up Woyzeck's age by ten years, and closing much more ambiguously than Buechner's original ending. His long shots, particularly of Woyzeck's face right after he murders Marie, are penetrating. The film is nearly scoreless except for a couple of dance scenes, the murder, and the final scene (which closes, unfortunately, with Vivaldi's "Daybreak"--perhaps the only leaden moment in the entire film).

Kinski in the title role is unforgettable. The mad passion that we associate with Kinski's acting is present, but intermingled this time around with a touching passivity. Woyzeck is a man in the process of erosion, a man who becomes increasingly fragile until he falls off the sanity cliff. Kinski expresses this decline with incredible skill, particularly with his facial expressions and hand wringing. Both could've come across as burlesque in a less skilled actor. But Kinski pulls them off.

Buechner has often been compared to Beckett, but I'm not sure the comparison is an apt one. Beckett's work explores the absurd, meaningless void into which humans are necessarily born. "Woyzeck" may have a touch of the absurd in it, but it deals much more directly with what happens to a man who's relentlessly treated as an object, a tool, a thing. Woyzeck is mocked by his military superiors, experimented on by the local quack, used by Marie. Treated as subhuman, he first becomes numb and fatalistic (at one point he tells the Captain that he suspects his lot--the lot of people without money or social status--will remain the same in heaven as on earth), then crazed and finally destructive. Buechner presents us, in other words, with a gripping account of the moral and psychological erosion of a man abused by society. Through the genius of Herzog and Kinski, the erosion is presented in as gripping a way as we're likely to see on film.

While many Herzog/Kinski fans may have difficulty with the pace of this film, I find this to be one of Kinski's most gripping performances. From the opening sequences of the film one can see that Kinski has totally transformed himself into the hapless Woyzeck. As the film goes on, it is clear that Kinski is performing at a level that is both transcendental and peerless.

Herzog's decision to limit the editing and shoot longer scenes really forces the actors to search deep inside themselves to give performances that are rarely brought to the screen these days. This has also given the characters an added dimension that would otherwise be lost with dubious cutting. You would be hard pressed to find an actor like Tom Cruise to have the discipline to give a convincing performance in this climate.

Some of Herzog's shots, like the marching band slowing approaching the camera on the town cobblestone streets, are so visually compelling that they would make great oil paintings (but maybe that's just me). The town itself has a flesh colour to it, illustrating an almost human quality. There is also a certain brightness of the sets that enhance the performances of the scenes and bring out subtle details and nuances.

Scenes of Woyzeck breaking down in the middle of a wheat field, being humiliated in the tavern by his rival, and confiding in his only friend in the bunkhouse are emotionally highly charged (which is an understatement) performances by Kinski. The most incredible scene, however, is when Woyzeck murders Marie in a long slow-motion sequence. It is truly something that has to be seen to be believed. The soundtrack during this sequence is spot-on perfect and adds a trancendent quality to the scene. I've watched this scene over and over again and couldn't help but be in total awe. Any student of film should study this scene in great detail, because there has never been a performance more dramatic or inspiring in the history of film. This is possibly THE greatest highlight and example of genius created between the union of Herzog & Kinski in both their careers (this is not an overstatement).

To sum it up, Woyzeck is a highly under-rated classic with performances that are unparalleled in film. Klaus Kinski deserves so much more than a mere footnote in the history of film, because he is truly one of a kind. I'm glad that Herzog had both the stamina and intelligence to be able to harness the madness and harvest the genius.

Surprisingly straight version of Buchner's play by Herzog. Only two really interesting scenes in the film. One is the death scene in which Kinski and Eva Mattes play it to the hilt, and the other involves one of Herzog's trademark monkey scenes. It's not bad, just that after viewing Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, you'll be expecting more.

I just saw this on video and it's one of Werner Herzog's more mediocre films along with "Heart of Glass" and "Fata Morgana/Lessons in Darkness" (DVD). I thought Kinski did a decent job although he's been better, especially in other of Herzog's films. I know that he did this right after "Nosferatu the Vampire" so maybe he was a bit tired but really he gave it his all. Anyways, I just want to know that even though Werner Herzog has given excellent audio commentaries on most of his films released by Anchor Bay Entertainment, he neglected to give one for this film. I would've liked to have heard his comments for "Woyzeck" since his audio commentaries are one of the best reasons to invest in DVD's. They always have intriguing insights into his films and I always find what he has to say fascinating. Why he neglected to contribute a commentary track for this, his only narrative DVD release without one as far as I know, is something I'm wondering. Oh well. I think this film is worth seeing anyways as are all of Herzog's releases. A merdiocre Werner Herzog film is far better than most film director's best films.