Werner Herzog | Woyzeck / 1979

force of nature

by Douglas Messerli

 

Werner Herzog (screenwriter and director) Woyzeck / 1979

 

Although Georg Büchner’s 1836 play Woyzeck (not published until 1879) has been performed numerous times since its 1911 premiere, there is still no one consistent version of the play, although one might well argue that Werner Herzog’s film of 1979 is as coherent as any. For Herzog, Woyzeck, although clearly almost mentally challenged, is also a deeply confused philosopher, trying to comprehend his demeaned position in a universe while also being sensitive to the frightening natural signs and omens only he is able to hear and interpret, which also suggests an element of schizophrenia in his personality.

     This Woyzeck, like the character often presented on stage, is maltreated by the surrounding society, tortured by his military superiors for his slightly deranged appearance (who else but Klaus Kinski could look out at the world with such a totally mad stare?), is scolded by the local captain for his constantly hurried activities and his inability—as the commandant has perfected—to congratulate himself as a “good” man, and has been experimented upon by the local doctor, a perverted quack determined to theorize his paid patient into madness, in part by insisting that he live on a diet of only peas! Yet Kinski’s Woyzeck somehow seems to good-naturedly put up with all of this. Rather than suffering primarily from the societal and political inequities of his life, Kinski’s Woyzeck seems more terrorized by the metaphysical rumblings that come from within.

     As a man of nature, Woyzeck, in Herzog’s telling, is forced to stand up for himself in a world that is utterly self-controlled—revealed in the film’s beautiful images of the small town in which the events take place—and, equally, thoroughly boring. Woyzeck’s problems, and our fascination with him, emanate from the fact that he cannot control anything; not only is he hardly able to pay for food and rent, but has no control of his temperament and body. Racing through the streets like a mad hatter, peeing in public against the town’s edifices, hurrying through the activities he is forced to undertake (including a terrifyingly speedy application of a knife to throat and face as he shaves the captain), diving in and out of his own home to report is whereabouts to his wife and young son, Woyzeck is unrestrained, a born romantic locked into a petty bourgeoisie community of 17th century propriety and reason. We know from the beginning that it is only a matter of time before these two forces come crashing in upon one another.

    The only ones who seem to calm Woyzeck, and clearly the only things of which this nearly hallow being is proud, is his beautiful wife (Eva Mattes) and his son. The only time he does rush about, his eyes nearly popping from his head, is on a weekend stroll and entertainment in the town square, with his babe in arms and beautiful wife striding quietly beside him.

    We already know that she is an unredeemed whore, but Woyzeck seems either not to care or oblivious to the fact. Rather, he is proud of his little family whom he does his best to support. Marie, it is clear, is also a creature of nature, but in her case, it fits all to well within the structures of this hypocritical community. Marie is smitten with the most pompous of the local folk, the Drum Major (Josef Bierbichler), and overdressed, high-strutting ass of a man, who is only too ready to take over the most beautiful woman in town; stealing her from her husband out from under his gentle gaze of adoration, the dazzling monster might almost be described as raping her, if it were not for the fact that she somewhat passively accepts his actions.

    It is only days later, when both the doctor and captain come together in discussion and, encountering Woyzeck along the way, teasing him about his wife’s improprieties, does he apparently realize that he has been cuckolded. Rushing home, Woyzeck attempts to find some evidence of his wife’s infidelity, as if cheating and lying must be visible to the eye. He cannot comprehend that his vision of the world is the unnatural one, that the real world does not reveal what it truly is but hides it, covers its truths over just as have the captain and doctor attempted to qualm and theorize their way out of their horrible actions. The captain insists that he has become a military man to prove that he is good. The doctor sees the entire world as representing proof of whatever quack theory enters his mind.

     But the foolish Woyzeck, more of a real man of science than either of these men, must see evidence, which soon after he discovers by watching his wife vigorously dancing in the arms of the Drum Major in a local wine hall.

     The madness that Woyzeck has feared all along descends upon him, and, just as Marie cannot resist her nature, so Woyzeck cannot resist his madness, buying a knife from the local butcher in order to kill the only being he loves. The murder, although totally brutal, is presented by Herzog in restrained operatic conventions: we see only the blood, which, like Macbeth’s wife, Woyzeck cannot wash away from his body, drowning in the lake as he attempts to do so.

     Since this version of Woyzeck is tortured les by mankind that by his very nature, there is no need to suggest a trail, which, in any event, is a scene that Büchner never completed and, perhaps, never even intended in his original manuscript. In Herzog’s vision, this desolate little community would never have been able to judge a man from another time and place. Rather, let them take their perverted joy in the event, the most exciting thing that they might ever have experienced.

 

Los Angeles, October 4, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2015).