Lebenszeichen

I first saw this film in 1969 in Bangalore (India) in a German film festival. The film was unheralded, being the first feature from an unknown director. However, the film made an everlasting impression on me, and I considered it among 2 or 3 of the best films I had seen till then. I kept track of Werner Herzog films ever since, and have been seeing them all I could lay my hands on. Even today, I'll put it as among the 10 best films I have ever seen, and it remains my favorite Herzog movie. The film is sheer poetry. It's a film about 3 characters'(2 soldiers and wife of one of them) boredom in an isolated Greek island, and how each one handles it. While one of the soldiers snaps up at the end, and tries to destroy everything in his impotent fury - managing only to kill a donkey ultimately - the second soldier keeps himself and first soldier's wife sane by just being raucously funny. I found the story, direction, camera-work and acting fascinating,and far from boring, as suggested by some reviews. I believe, Herzog has been influenced by India's Satyajit Ray in his style of presentation. He is one of the 3 most uncompromising film directors of the world in last 50 years, the other 2 being Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson, and his first feature is among his best.

Acknowledged as the film that inspired Stephen King's novel, The Shining, Signs of Life is a film which touches upon the rationality of insanity in a world gone mad. Set during the German occupation of Crete during World War II, the story centers around a German paratrooper (Stroszek played by Peter Brogle) who was injured during his first mission and sent to oversee an old fort in the uneventful city of Kos. Accompanied by his young Greek wife Nora (Athina Zacharopoulou), and two other German soldiers who do not fit well within the German military model (Wolfgang Reichmann as Meinhard and Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg as Becker), Stroszek is plagued by boredom and his own apparent uselessness. However, his young wife dutifully occupies her time learning German and taking care of domestic duties for the three men, Meinhard uses his engineering and creative skills to devise, among other things, a cockroach trap, and Becker studies Greek classical inscriptions and architecture, with which the fort is replete. Stroszek's only escape for the boredom of life at the fort is making Roman candles with Nora.

Typical for Herzog, Signs of Life portrays this boredom very effectively through content, pace and script, but without consigning its audience to the same fate. As with the equally excellent Heart of Glass, the passage of time seems at once extenuated and ambiguous in Signs of Life.

Stroszek becomes edgy, obsessive and unpredictable. Eventually he complains to his superiors that he has nothing to do and he is placed on a countryside patrol which is just as useless as sitting around at the fort. Surveying a beautiful countryside densely populated with a sea of windmills from a high vantage point, Stroszek finally snaps. He chases his wife and fellow soldiers out of the fort with a shotgun (though he clearly does not want to kill any of them) and begins an ominous stand-off with the occupation forces.

Herzog's frequent themes are mostly present in Signs of Life and are remarkably mature in this first major work of the master director. Stroszek is a familiar Herzog character - a man at war with society, reality and, ultimately, himself. Although it is fairly easy to write him off as a lunatic, Stroszek's part is written and acted well enough to permit a great deal of empathy. In later films dealing with similar characters and plots (i.e. Aguire: Wrath of God and Grizzly Man, etc) Herzog would take on less sympathetic crazies and examine them just as sensitively and even more powerfully. As in many of the great director's films, Herzog's anti-hero protagonist is as much a malignant product of social circumstance as a mirror of the insane implications of their own social context taken to extremes.

In Signs of Life, this is accomplished by an amazingly subtle treatment of the insanity of the German role in World War II and Stroszek's context as both a soldier and collateral casualty of that context. Subtle - because neither of these issues are examined at any point in the film, but rather - they permeate the entire film and provide the canvass for the story Herzog paints.

Herzog wrote and directed the film at the age of 25, with a paltry budget and a hand-held 35mm camera, setting sail on what has, so far, been one of the most interesting and productive career voyages in film. As usual, the sets are perfectly chosen and along with the cinematography, make the film a visual masterpiece. The script and acting are also exceptional, and though Signs of Life requires a good attention span, it does not fail to engage and entertain at many levels simultaneously.

Signs of Life is Werner Herzog's very first feature film and also one of his best. The script may have even inspired Stephen King's novel The Shining. In Signs of Life we have an injured soldier and his wife working as the caretakers of a military fortress on a Greek island. The soldier eventually goes mad with boredom and tries to kill his wife and everyone else.

Werner Herzog wrote the award winning script in 1964 and made the film in 1967 with only $20,000 at age twenty-five with a stolen 35mm movie camera. Herzog's script is amazing and all of the actors perform flawlessly. Signs of Life has great photography and a great use of Greek music and has Herzog's distinctive slow pace which may seem like torture to the average viewer who's been forced-fed a steady diet of fast food images.

A wounded German paratrooper named Stroszek (Peter Brogle) is sent to the quiet island of Kos with his wife Nora (Athina Zacharopoulou), a Greek nurse, and two other soldiers recovering from minor wounds.

The fortress which gives the film's main setting is a real 14th-century fortress built by the Knights Hospitaller. Herzog's grandfather, Rudolf Herzog, lived and worked for several years as an archaeologist at this site, and published translations of the ancient Greek engravings which appear in the film. The old Turkish man who appears in the film with a written translation was the last surviving worker from Rudolf Herzog's archaeological project.

I am not as crazy about Herzog as some people. Some of his movies I like, and I actually tend to prefer his documentaries. This film was alright and quite good for a first feature. I love the fact he took his father's work and translated it to a film. That is so cool to keep that connection. Somewhere I heard a rumor that this film influenced "The Shining". I don't see it... and I can't seem to be able to confirm it. How strange if true.

I guess it should come as no surprise that there are no more than 8 reviews on IMDb about this film. The comfortably habitual Hollywood formula, which in so many ways as found itself in far more than Hollywood pictures, makes it hard for people to appreciate works such as this. This movie premiers Herzog's love for pictures and his rare ability to search them in the most mundane environments-a picture of a statue's foot embedded in the wall, a car slowly crossing a dancing road over a hill disappearing and appearing, two grown man entertained by the mysterious motion of the ears of a small owl toy figure...the list goes on forever.

It tells the story of a soldier who, after being wounded, is sent to recover in a small and peaceful Greek island where he and 3 others are ordered to care for a fort. That reveals itself a boring job and as time passes, the mundane days start slowly removing the sanity from the soldier. The story of a soldier gone mad is hardly novelty, but in Lebenszeichen the soldier goes mad from boredom and the location seems to be the cause of that and that's why we are shown the quiet little island. And it seems Herzog wants us in quiet observance of this routine, just so that he can slap us awake by the impending insanity of the character. My favorite scene is when we observe a landscape of windmills, which is usually used to portray a sense of quietude and peace, and over the hill, on the background of the picture, in small size, we see the soldier losing his mind, waving around like a madmen as if he was being tortured. That duality seems to display the despair in a higher note.

This is not an easy movie to understand and interpret, because it hides more than it shows, it indicates more than it reveals, it searches as much as it offers. Its a beautiful movie and while its not as great as some of Herzog's best efforts, it is certainly worthwhile and memorable.

PS: another reviewer seems to offer the idea that the movie might have been influenced the Stephen King's "The Shinning", but the film predates that novel by 9 years.