Stroszek

Werner Herzog's Stroszek was made in 1977 in the immediate aftermath of Heart of Glass and during the same period that Herzog was developing Nosferatu the Vampyre. The lead, Bruno S. — born Bruno Schleinstein — was a Berlin street musician with a complex institutional history; Herzog had cast him three years earlier in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and the script for Stroszek was written specifically around Bruno's own life and personality, with a tailor-made role he could inhabit without conventional acting technique.

The film won the German Film Critics' Award and has remained a fixture of BFI and Sight & Sound polls of greatest films across decades. It is also indelibly associated with one of the most discussed pieces of post-mortem rock-music biography: Ian Curtis of Joy Division watched Stroszek on the night of his suicide in May 1980, a fact recorded by his wife Deborah and confirmed by Tony Wilson; the film has appeared in extensive subsequent critical writing about Joy Division's music as a result.

The cast also includes Eva Mattes — a Fassbinder regular — and Clemens Scheitz. The American sequences were shot in Plainfield, Wisconsin (the home town of Ed Gein) and Cherokee, North Carolina, with Herzog working in his customary semi-documentary register, picking up scenes and supporting characters as they presented themselves on the road. The cinematography is by Thomas Mauch, Herzog's regular collaborator from Aguirre; the score is partly by Chet Atkins. Herzog has continued to refer to Stroszek as one of his personal favourites among his own films.