In post war Germany delinquency was common. Families were destitute and crime was a ready outlet for the desperate. In newspapers, reports of underage criminality were sensitive to the perpetrators youth and, rather than print their full identity, they would give only their first name followed by an initial. This is how
Bruno S. was first introduced to his public. And it is apt, for Bruno was a cinematic delinquent. He stared in only two films (both for
Werner Herzog) and had no formal training in acting. Herzog called him:
The unknown soldier of German cinema.
Yet he was more than that. He was a radical and one of the most honest actors to ever grace our screens. Bruno came to our attention in a 1970 German documentary entitled
Bruno the Black - One Day A Hunter Blew His Horn. Here we met a humble fork lift trunk driver who devoted all of his free time to music and street performing. He dressed like a tramp: his brown hair wild, his face unshaven, his clothes dishevelled and creased. Alone he prowled the Berlin slums, carrying behind a cart full of bells, an accordion, a bugle and other musicians tools. He was completely self-taught and performed in back alleys, bellowing out troubadour music than originated in the Middle Ages. Sometimes people gave him their change sometimes not.
But Bruno seemed more than just an eccentric. He appeared to be genuinely separate from humanity. It was, as author
Jim Kipfel has suggested, as if:
a society which completely eludes him and his comprehension.
Bruno was one of Gods lonely men. Director Werner Herzog, watching
Bruno the Black at home, saw this immediately. At the time Herzog was one of the key players in New Wave German film. His debut picture
Even Dwarves Started Small would give him standing as an international filmmaker, but it was his 1972 masterpiece
Aguirre, The Wrath of God (starring long time collaborator and enemy
Klaus Kinski) that defined his reputation as a cinematic maverick. His films often focused on societys outsiders, as
Thomas Elaesser has stated:
Herzogs protagonists are always extreme. were marginal and outside, in relation to the centre which is the social world, the world of history, that of ordinary beings.
This was Bruno S. Herzog was preparing
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, the true story of the 19th Century foundling who spent the first 15 years of his life in captivity. He was kept in a cellar and isolated from everyone. He couldnt walk, talk or communicate in any way. Then one day, he was mysteriously set free and sent alone into society. Bruno had known this life too. He was born in 1932 to a prostitute mother; a woman who when he was only three years old beat him so badly that he lost the power of speech. Soon after she abandoned him to an orphanage and Bruno spent the next twenty-three years of his life in and out of institutions.
Everybody threw him away, he once said of himself.
Because of his separate, insular mind, the authorities thought him mentally unstable. From the age of nine he longed for the outside world and would repeatedly break out of his forced environment. Over the years he was arrested for petty crimes like vagrancy and breaking into cars (usually in search of somewhere to sleep). Herzog knew that no trained actor could inhabit the part of Kaspar in the same way as this man from the street a man whose childlike eyes showed endless needing, pain and hope. The producers fought him, but Herzog stood firm. Bruno was Kaspar. Kaspar was Bruno.
So, at the age of 41, Bruno the Abused; Bruno the Orphan; Bruno the Vagrant; Bruno the Musician; Bruno the Black; was about to become Bruno the Actor. To begin with he was uneasy in his new environment surrounded by hip young filmmakers who viewed him as an intruder into their community. He feared Herzog would steal his money and at night would sleep on the floor next to the nearest exit in case he needed to run. But he was also dedicated to the extreme. He slept in his costume and struggled to learn High German, a dialect which this Berliner had never spoken. For deep down the connection with Kasper was there:
He knew the character had to do with his own catastrophes, said Herzog.
Onscreen we first meet Kasper chained to cellar floor playing with a toy horse. When he is lifted up by his captor his body slumps like a puppet held on strings and when he is beaten he expresses no outward sign of pain or outrage just simple acceptance. This is his life. When he is set free Bruno plays the character as a blank canvas a human being stripped of every thought and feeling. He stares obliquely into space, his physical being disconnected from the world around him. In town he is taken in by the authorities where he is first treated as a scientific specimen, then as a freak (he is forced to join a sideshow to earn his keep). Brunos struggle with the language, added to Kaspars own struggle to learn fundamental words. Battling with the dialogue, Bruno enunciates every sentence in a broken, staccato rhythm - emphasising each word with his hand waving; his thumb pressing against his forefingers. Knowledge of Brunos hardships add a deep resonance to events onscreen, but, even without this information, his performance is still profound. In an early scene, Kaspar is cared for by Jail Keepers family. The mother, tending to Kaspar like one of her own, invites him to hold her newborn baby. Kaspar takes the baby from the womans arms and steadily begins to weep.
Mother, he says. I am so far away from everything.
There is a fundamental truth here; a truth to Brunos acting sure, but more importantly to the feeling it invokes in the watcher. We have all at some point been where Bruno/Kaspar is standing. He is speaking for all of us who at some point have been adrift or lost or so totally alone. Kaspars tragedy (and indeed Brunos) is that he remained there. Following the films release Bruno went back to his day job and used his fee to buy a grand piano. But Herzog wasnt finished with him yet. In the process of adapting
George Büchers play
Woyzeck to the big screen (the story of an abused soldier struggling with his own psychological breakdown) Herzog began to picture Bruno in the lead role. But as production drew nearer, he decided Kinskis intensity would be more appropriate. Bruno was devastated. So, shamed with guilt, Herzog promised the street musician that he would find him something else and, four days later, returned with the script for
Stroszek. The film tells of Bruno Stroszek, a street musician who we first meet being released from prison. In a nearby pub, he meets prostitute Eva (
Eva Mattes) and takes her in when shes abandoned by her sadistic pimps. But when the men decide they want her back, the couple, along with their elderly neighbour, flee to America. But here they find the American Dream to be empty wish fulfilment.
The country is bleak and unforgiving. Work is hard and money is everything. Bruno of course, has none. He is further isolated by his inability to speak English. He neither understands, nor is understood. Finally Bruno is left alone, with no hope for the future.
It is the portrait of the real human suffering faced by a man who finds that he simply doesnt belong anywhere, explained author Jim Knipfel.
While the crux of the narrative is purely fictional, the world that surrounds it is filled with autobiographic details from Brunos own life. Both actor and character are men broken by state institutionalization.
Years in a home have knocked out his ability to defend himself, explains his doctor friend.
Stroszek is a street musician (seen in a wonderful vignette where he bellows out ancient songs in a back alley courtyard) and Brunos own mannerism and modes of speech were adapted into the screenplay; such as his continual reference to himself in the third person. The film was shot in Brunos Berlin and his real home doubled as Stroszeks. Here we see a house filled with clutter, papers and various instruments (no set decoration was needed) and are introduced to the grand piano bought with money from
Kaspar Hauser.
This one is my best friend, he says to Eva showing her the piano. A black one.
For Bruno (character and actor), his valued possessions were always referred to as if they were living, as trait at first amusing, but which later evokes a bitter sadness.
Bruno couldnt relate to human beings, Herzog once said. So he put all of his love into objects.
The boundaries of real and false are so muddied in
Stroszek that one could argue that Bruno S. isnt required to act at all. This maybe so, but the raw honesty on display here transcends the limitations of more mannered thespians. Bruno spills himself out onto the screen, leaving nothing behind for himself.
In one scene (improvised by Bruno) he relates the story of his time in an institution during Nazi occupation (a time when the Nazi felt it perfectly legitimate to experiment on mentally disabled children. They were referred to as, ausschusskinder the discarded children). He tells how if the boys wet the bed, the teachers would make them stand in the yard and hold the sheet up until it dried:
And the teacher would be standing behind him with a stick. And if the guys arms got tired so he dropped his sheet he got a thrashing immediately.
The story was true and Bruno is reliving it on camera. He allows us to share his suffering. For Bruno these experiences could never be escaped and the world around (with the exception of his music) offered no solace. He concludes by stating:
Now they do it the gentle way and thats much worse than it seems. The prison doors are open.
The prison doors are open. Perhaps it was the suffering Bruno brought to his two onscreen performances that saw him retire from the movies altogether. He is a gentle soul and if anyone deserved to be free of pain then surely it is him. So he went back to his day job once again, and to performing music on the streets of Berlin. At the age of 77 Bruno can still be seen there. Yet his films also remain, and are a dark yet beautiful glimpse into a fractured soul. He was a none-actor who found truth through the lens of the camera. To paraphrase historian
Lotte Eisner, Bruno did not act. He is scarcely an actor. He simply exists.
POST SCRIPT: While looking for images to include in this article, I stumbled upon news that after 33 years Bruno S. has returned to acting. The film is
Phantomanie (2009) and is directed by
Miron Zownir. In 2003 Zownir directed a second documentary on Bruno entitled
Estrangement is Death. In
Phantomanie: He plays a mixture of a moronic bum and an all knowing philosopher, a character that mediates between dreams and reality, says Zownir. He does the same for himself in real life.
I honestly dont know what to say. Imagine if
Robert DeNiro had only made
Mean Streets &
Taxi Driver, then after 30 returned to film as a loyal devotee of Cult Cinema this how excited/terrified I am. Bruno S. is back