Signes de vie

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.

into a strange culture, in this case WW II German soldiers occupying a Greek island, three of them recuperating in an ancient fortress while a Nazi garrison is billeted in the town below. Herzog captures the exotic setting with brilliant photography, and at the same time the strangeness not only of culture clash but ultimately of the war itself. Intense Greek music on the soundtrack and the crystalline sunlight bring a sharp focus on the madness that comes to inhabit Stroszek's mind, the madness of seeing through what has been done in the name of the fatherland. Herzog's first major film is as much political meditation as it is psychological travelogue.

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.

Werner Herzog's debut feature tells the story of a wounded German paratrooper Stroszek (Peter Brogle) who is transported to the Greek island of Kos to recover physically and mentally. Already there are fellow soldiers Meinhard (Wolfgang Reichmann) and Becker (Wolfgang Von Ungern-Sterngberg), who are taking life easy in the sun with little to nothing to do. Stroszek sets them to work, but soon, as the work begins to dry up, he becomes more and more unstable in the isolation and loneliness.

Nobody really knows what goes through Herzog's head, but it is clear he is a film-making genius and has one of the finest eyes for visuals in cinema. Signs of Life explores themes that Herzog would later become engrossed and almost obsessed with - isolation, obsession and madness. While he would later employ Klaus Kinski as the face of wide-eyed insanity, here the tone is quiet, contemplative and often very funny. The opening half of the film concentrates mainly on the three soldiers trying to find things to do. Meinhard becomes frustrated with the presence of cockroaches in their apartment and builds a trap to catch them. The feeling of being trapped appears throughout the film, usually using animals - the soldiers are given a strange toy that seems to move on its own, until they open it and find out that it's full of trapped flies; and we are shown how a hen is hypnotised.

But the comedy is soon put aside as Stroszek begins his descent into madness, holding himself up in the 14th century fortress where the soldiers are stationed with a horde of ammunition. It's in the second half that Herzog shows us the images he can conjure. It's breathtaking what he achieves with a stolen 35mm camera and a micro-budget. Amongst other things, we see a seemingly endless field of windmills, and fireworks set off into the night sky. The grainy black-and-white imagery gives the whole thing a fresh beauty. This is far from the greatest debut in cinema, but a very clear indication of a director's raw skill, and of course, Herzog would go on to make many fine films.

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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.