Woyzeck1979
Recognition
What makes this film worth watching?
2 members like this review
Watch this if you want to watch Kinski in prime kinetic form. A silent movie star, but with a voice. And the genius of this movie, is that it is literary. This would actually work as a silent movie, but we must watch and listen to this story of a poet to really move us. It is important to recognize the production of this was on the heals of their massive Nosferatu (Phantom der Nacht).
Is Kinski merely a puppet in Herzog's film vision? Is Herzog the phantom General? Or is Kinski pushing his body and emotions beyond the Director's expectations? Decide for yourself. Oh, and prepare for perfectly composed scenes and characters with minds of their own.
Starring
- Dieter Augustin - Marktschreier
- Josef Bierbichler - Drum Major
- Paul Burian - Andres
- Wolfgang Bächler - Jew
- Irm Hermann - Margret
- Klaus Kinski - Friedrich Johann Franz Woyzeck
- Eva Mattes - Marie
- Volker Prechtel - Handwerksbursche
- Wolfgang Reichmann - Captain
- Willy Semmelrogge - Doctor
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Member Reviews (5)
Watch this if you want to watch Kinski in prime kinetic form. A silent movie star, but with a voice. And the genius of this movie, is that it is literary. This would actually work as a silent movie, but we must watch and listen to this story of a poet to really move us. It is important to recognize the production of this was on the heals of their massive Nosferatu (Phantom der Nacht).
Is Kinski merely a puppet in Herzog's film vision? Is Herzog the phantom General? Or is Kinski pushing his body and emotions beyond the Director's expectations? Decide for yourself. Oh, and prepare for perfectly composed scenes and characters with minds of their own.
Paranoia,madness and murder, subjects covered with ease by Werner Herzog along with the more than able Klaus Kinski. How Kinski was able to hold Woyzek's persona and then build on it makes this expressionist play come to life and a one of a kind experience. A scathing study of human nature.
The tragedy of Franz and Marie is a painterly cinematographic work, having beautifully brush stroked visuals, lyrical dialogue and characters that are also caricatures and symbols. Woyzeck is fragile, vulnerable and ultimately debased. Kinski's expressiveness and embodiment of the struggle and suffering is incredible -- it was so difficult to have to take one's eyes off him to read the subtitles. Bravo Herzog and Kinski.
The film has been read as anti-capitalist critique, and this critique is certainly present: "If we ever got to heaven, they'd make us work the thunder," Woyzeck says to his Captain. As with the work of Dostoyevsky and Marx - among many other 19th century writers - we are struck by the alienation and subjective fragmentation endemic to a decaying social order, one soon to be sublated by a cold, pseudo-humanist rationality, and concerned only fetishistically with "die tugend, die tugend."
That said, there remains something obscene in the way Herzog aestheticizes Woyzeck's ultimate act of violence. (It seems significant in this regard that Scene 24 of Büchner's play, an autopsy, was omitted.) The lighting, colour palette and largely static cinematography are all impeccably beautiful throughout, but viewers should ask themselves: what is the political function of this beauty?
solid flick.