Werner Herzog, Stroszek (1977)
In isolation, this scene, the very final one in a very long movie, works simply as a clever music video. But when seen at the end of Stroszek's desperate journey with his prostitute girlfriend and his elderly Mesmerist neighbor from Berlin to Wisconsin, and ultimately up a ski lift on an Indian reservation with a shotgun, the ending works as a sort of microcosmic summary of everything that has gone before. Stroszek isn't even a trained animal (as the rabbit and the duck are, minimally): like a dancing chicken, he is made to do his tricks by external force.
Bruno S., the actor who plays Stroszek, is a mentally impaired survivor of severe child abuse in Nazi mental institutions. Until as recently as 2008, he continued to play his accordion in Berlin restaurants at no charge, performing standards from the era of the Three-Penny Opera. I am no great fan of Herzog's manipulations, of his hardline Schopenhauerianism, his awkward machismo (see Little Dieter Needs to Fly), or his memorialization of idiots (see Timothy Treadwell), but watching Bruno S. one wonders why directors ever bother with professional actors. The world is full of people (just as it is full of donkeys), and yet to make movies one has to go to great lengths to simulate people. Why?
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