It was the first time I realized that Werner Herzog was in "The Mystery of Casparhauser". It was also the first time I knew about the "New German Cinema Movement". I watched this movie with great expectations for ratings and wonderful short reviews. After nearly 2 hours of immersive viewing, Casper’s slightly funny body movements and self-contained way of speaking left me with a different perspective. Shadow experience. Through the tragedy of Casper, the most fundamental and flawless image of a simple person who was born abandoned and far away from the morals and order of human society, satirizes the reshaping and manipulation of us by the so-called civilization in modern society, I feel Herzog's brilliant talent.
At that time, I was obsessed with the new German film movement. There is nothing more exciting than looking at the cultural movement of the 1960s through film. Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders are all my favorite directors. The German film industry, which has stagnated after the war, has experienced a glorious period with a new look under their individual creations. As a movie fan, I admire their self-expression and admire their achievements for the history of film. The most special label of "The Wanderings of Shi Chuxi" should be "The movie Ian Curtis watched before committing suicide". Ian Curtis's untimely death, it is inevitable that people think of the ending of this movie. When they are connected, we should be able to outline its outline.
The birth process of "The Wanderings of Shi Chuxi" is quite interesting. At that time, the male number one of another Herzog movie "Wojceko" had already agreed to let Bruno S (Bruno Schleinstein) play it, and the shooting time had already been set, just two minutes away. At the end of the month, Herzog decided to let Kinsky play. So he called Bruno and tried to clarify the situation. After a brief exchange, Herzog realized that the movie was of great significance to him. Driven by guilt, Herzog promised him to make another film, called Stroszek, and promised to give him the written script in five days. Of course, he still kept his promise, completed the script on time, and contributed to the movie. In Herzog’s own words, “To this day, I still think that is one of the best scripts I have ever written, and the films I made are among my best works.” Camus once said, Great works are often born in restaurants or cafes on the corners of streets. I think that great works are often born from an unexpected promise.
Bruno is a non-professional actor and a street performer who often sings on the streets of Berlin. Herzog first saw him in his student work, a disciplinary film "Bruno Negro" dedicated to people on the margins of society, and took him to "The Mystery of Casparhauser." Bruno in the film is the same as himself in reality. It can be said that "The Wanderings of Shi Chuxi" is tailor-made for him. The absence of family and parents in his early life, the unbearable childhood memories, and the torn and suppressed street life all made Bruno in the lens look very close to the real image of a marginal person. As a person who has not received any performance education, his iconic third-person speech, sometimes hesitant, sometimes determined facial expressions, and circumflexed tone give him a highly stylized form of personal performance.
The prostitute Ava played by Eva Mattes, as a figure who subjectively pushed them to pursue the American dream, her social status and marginal status have long foretold her final tragic ending. In order to avoid the oppression of the pimp, she chose to come to the United States. When she first arrived in the United States, she was very energetic, dreaming of embracing the world, abandoning the past, and believing that she could have simple happiness. But that simple happiness is accompanied by a high price, and the accumulated debt has made her deeply tired. In the end, she chose to escape the heavy debt and left Bruno and this land, which was quite unfamiliar. On the contrary, Bruno chose to face it. He was tired of the world's rich preaching, endless sadism and invisible abuse. He told Ava about his childhood in the Nazi reformation house. He found that nothing had changed. He fled the reformation house but came to a larger reformation house. Countless instructors still followed him with sticks. He has understood that there is no place for him in the world.
Herzog is a humanist full of wisdom. He sympathizes heavily with individuals who are alienated by capitalism and sink into the abyss of suffering and cannot struggle. In the film, he explained the absurd pain with a playful attitude. The smallest ship in the world, the dancing chicken, the car turning in circles and the useless tester in the cell, these absurd images may carry his own important vehicle against nothingness, full of fear, desolation and loneliness. At the beginning of the scene in the prison cell, I was more impressed by the scene. The lens was shot through a transparent kettle hung in front of the cell window. Under the refraction of light and soft and melancholic background music, dreamlike images appeared in the water, snow sweepers, passers-by, and trucks. They are distorted, distorted, and blurred in front of the camera, gradually losing their outline, and becoming "objects" that can be generalized. Following the pull-back shot, when Bruno appeared in the frame, "How lonely is he?" came to my mind.
This work was born accidentally, without pretentious and feminine form, without instilling frivolous and unreal fantasies, it asks all the truth about dreams with pure and simple content, and summarizes a tragic ending. The life of a marginal person. It debunks the gorgeous and exaggerated preaching about dreams, life, and love in the propaganda, revealing those bloody truths and impresses me. Bruno exists by our side, passers-by passing by, strangers on the subway, or takeaways in front of your door. Like Bruno, they may have given everything for their ideals, left their hometown, fantasizing about worldly success, desperately joining the society, and finally tasted the taste of failure, with nothing and nothing to do. Finally, on a sunny afternoon, with loneliness and regret on my back, I ended my life in silence in the fate of homelessness. Many years later, I think I will definitely remember the dancing chicken and the cable car that says "Is this really me?" in the film.
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