Stroszek

Werner Herzog made Stroszek in 1977, straight after Heart of Glass and while he was developing Nosferatu the Vampyre. The lead, Bruno S. (born Bruno Schleinstein), was a Berlin street musician with a complicated institutional history. Herzog had cast him three years earlier in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and wrote the script for Stroszek around Bruno's own life and personality, a tailor-made role he could inhabit without conventional acting technique.

It won the German Film Critics' Award and has turned up in BFI and Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films for decades. It also has a grim place in rock history: Ian Curtis of Joy Division watched Stroszek on the night of his suicide in May 1980, as his wife Deborah recorded and Tony Wilson confirmed, and the film has run through critical writing about Joy Division's music ever since.

The cast also includes Eva Mattes (a Fassbinder regular) and Clemens Scheitz. The American scenes were shot in Plainfield, Wisconsin (Ed Gein's home town) and in Cherokee, North Carolina, with Herzog working in his usual semi-documentary register, picking up scenes and supporting characters as they turned up on the road. Thomas Mauch, his regular cinematographer since Aguirre, shot it, and the score is partly by Chet Atkins. Herzog still counts Stroszek among his personal favourites of his own films.