BRUNO=CHICKEN

Over the past week we watched the film STROSZEK twice. Once with commentary, and once without.  The first viewing was with commentary playing, and though I felt overwhelmed at times trying to listen to what the director Werner Herzog had to say while simultaneously reading the subtitles of the film, I thought it was very interesting to learn the behind-the-scenes relationships between the director and the actors.  

The end of the film (Which we did not see in our first viewing) is left rather ambiguous, with a distraught Bruno running from the law into an empty carnival.  Inside, he puts some coins into a machine that signals different animals to perform for him.  While there could be many interpretations as to what exactly the significance of the chickens and rabbit was, I assumed it was a representation of the three main characters in the film. The fire truck that the rabbit jumped onto had its siren blaring, much like the police car that took Scheitz away just minutes beforehand. The fire truck also foreshadows the next scene. I thought that the dancing chicken was a representation of Eva.  The policeman in the following scene says over his police scanner that he can't stop the dancing chicken. This is similar to the behavior of Eva, who couldn't stop prostituting herself even after moving to America.  The piano-playing chicken seemed to symbolize Bruno, both because it's playing the piano, and because it was the only animal out of the three that really looked like it was behind bars--the other two were in glass cages.  Since Bruno spent much of his life in and out of institutions, and in fact begins the film in prison, this seems like a fitting comparison.

I'm not entirely sure how much of this I can apply to my own project, since I don't have as much artistic freedom to develop an inner landscape like Herzog has, and like some of the other students in the class may be trying to do, but maybe there is room to try.

Over the past week I have finally sent out some interview clips to be translated from Cebuano by a schoolteacher from Green Bay.  Now we just need to find someone who speaks Tagalog too...