Woyzeck

I'm on a bit of a Herzog roll at the moment, and watched Woyzeck twice. This was a very different experience from Fitzcarraldo; less accessible and decipherable. Some background reading between the 2 viewings was essential as I have to confess I was somewhat mystified the first time I saw it. It stars Klaus Kinski, and was made immediately after Nosferatu, with some of the same cast and crew.
I wasn't aware that Woyzeck is a famous German play, based on a true story. Herzog assumes some prior knowledge of the story, and spells nothing out for his audience; Vincent Canby's wonderfully perceptive review in the New York Times notes that 'every Herzog film is a record of the director's questions and speculations about his subject'. He goes on to say that 'though the narrative is as straightforward as a fairy tale', it has become 'even more mysterious by the time we reach the end than it is at the beginning'. In another remarkably acute observation, Kinski 'with his deeply lined face that is simultaneously youthful and ancient, looks like death given a reprieve'. He is possessed by demons, and Kinski's physicality makes this visible, as in the scene when, shaving his commanding pofficer, he has to be told to slow down.
The scene in which Woyzeck murders Marie, the local women who bore him a child, one suspects, out of boredom, is painful and hard to watch, not because of violence - there is none visible, but through Kinski's agonising enactment, and Herzog's slow-motion direction.
It's a visually beautiful film - Herzog manages to make the beautiful landscape seem both tranquil and threatening, and the long, long takes are almost static at times. It's hypnotic, and strange, but unmissable.