Signs of Life (1968) User Reviews

Beautiful; Herzog's first feature film

[gsic_batou · 8/10 · 3 July 2010]

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.

Herzog's impressive debut about isolation and madness

[tomgillespie2002 · 7/10 · 26 February 2012]

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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Herzog's Dialogue with Humanity Began Here

[mstomaso · 8/10 · 26 March 2009]

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.

Introducing Herzog

[gavin6942 · 7/10 · 21 April 2016]

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.

An admirable first effort, but perhaps not an essential one

[I_Ailurophile · 6/10 · 15 November 2022]

I greatly admire Werner Herzog. While I have a long way to go in catching up on his films, all those I've seen to date - whether fiction or documentary - I've absolutely loved. It stands to reason, however, that not all a filmmaker's pictures will be equal, or equally appealing to a viewer. Despite myself, 'Signs of life' is the first of the man's features I've watched that just doesn't make a major impression with me. The filming locations are lovely, and I appreciate Thomas Mauch's cinematography. I regret to say that I don't particularly get anything else out of this; I altogether struggled to even stay awake while watching.

In terms of both content and film-making I recognize the underpinnings of the style, the command of the medium, that Herzog would develop and indeed perfect in very short order hereafter. Yet in this instance there is no meaningful plot or character development until the last third of the runtime. At that point 'Signs of life' is more actively engaging, more strongly holding of one's attention. Even then the story is a little light, though, and all that would have been necessary for the picture at large to have stood out more would have been for the progression of Stroszek's condition to have been earnestly drawn out over more of the preceding length. As it is, the shift comes across as too sudden in the narrative, and therefore less than natural, believable, or convincing.

I do like this film, and think it's worth watching, especially for Herzog fans. This is a showcase of where he was so early in his career, much as 'Dark Star' is for John Carpenter, 'Stereo' is for David Cronenberg, and so on. In much the same fashion, though, 'Signs of life' also lacks the finesse, and fullness of vision, that would let it truly shine, and by that token it's not necessarily so essential a viewing experience as are many if not most of those to follow. This is, still, a fine way to spend ninety minutes - only, much less than wholly perfect or captivating.

immersion

[jimi99 · 9 June 2003]

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.

Herzog's Speeds: Slow, Slower, Slowest

[lucifergary · 6/10 · 6 February 2000]

I admire this film very much - however, I don't much like it. Herzog attempts to cause the audience to relate to the boredom suffered by three pathetic german troops stranded on the Greek island of Kos during WWII. Herzog succeeds too well. I was able to relate far too well to the main character slipping into madness from boredom. A beautiful, but utterly boring film. What more is there to say?

gritty, meandering, a beautiful and harrowing start to a career

[Quinoa1984 · 10/10 · 14 December 2007]

Werner Herzog's first film is a view into the mindset of the soldier who goes over the brink, but unlike many films that might explore the concept, or even Herzog's own later, arguably greater, Woyzeck, Signs of Life is about a man engulfed by the location. The setting is interesting right away; a stone fortress that men who have been wounded or just put on leave are guarding on a remote Greek island during WW2 (of course, we're never told this, which is appropriate, one can take a guess as to the significance of Herzog's POV as part of the New German cinema), and aside from the cockroaches and painting doors, there's not much to do. The mundane becomes engulfing, even as there's little things to do on the island. It's always bubbling under the surface, and as the days pass and things start to grow more aimless, Stroszek (Peter Brogle, with the kind of eyes and demeanor Kubrick would've loved to film) distances himself, sets of fireworks in his hands, and snaps one day out on patrol.

If anyone knows Herzog, the tale of a man going "berserk", as one officer says in this film of the main character, this shouldn't be seen out of the ordinary. Herzog has always tried to explore not so much of the precise 'whys' of the snap, or the break under pressure, or society's role or those around in personal quarters. Of course it's suggested a lot of the time, but in the case of Signs of Life we see much of the insanity in very long shots, with Stroszek going mad in the last twenty minutes on top of the fortress, wavering around, surrounded still by the immense landscape - an "inner" landscape, mayhap, as Herzog describes so often of his perspective on landscapes - of the fortress set against the background of the sea and mountains. But if one were seeing this as the first feature of some 26 year old Bavarian who only made a few shorts (one of which was similar somewhat to Signs of Life), this would seem like the most unclassifiable "genre" film ever made.

It's a movie about soldiers who don't fight, and with images like cut aways to peasants running and rummaging in the streets, a bird, a bunch of statues, stone tablets. And then when Stroszek does snap, we don't hear any audio, just the intense plucking of the guitar by the Greek composer, as Herzog pans over a whole field of windmills. And where else would one ever see something like when the bald soldier is setting up the trap for the roaches? Or the segway with the guy who thinks that he's a King? The first half of the movie is unsettling because it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere, and yet I kept on wanting to stay with Herzog (not even because I knew where it was going); there's something underneath all of the ho-hum "non" drama that goes on, little bits of behavior in the lackadaisical, that when finally things pick up dramatically it starts slowly, then builds, goes to a peak, and then...

Well, you'll just have to see for yourself. All I know is that you're likely not to see another film like Signs of Life- much less a debut from a major European film artist- where the climax entails fireworks going off while practical martial law is placed over the island. Herzog doesn't follow any rules, and it can get frustrating here and there. But it's also exhilarating, and I would probably count it in my top 10 favorites of the director.

Not a bad early effort from Werner Herzog

[Jeremy_Urquhart · 6/10 · 29 September 2023]

Last Friday, I had to power through three Expendables movies to write about them for work. Now, this Friday, I find myself needing to watch three Werner Herzog films; partly for work, but they're all titles I would've liked to watch eventually in any event. If I have the energy to get through all, it should prove to be a very different triple feature than last week.

Signs of Life was first up, and it also happens to be the first feature film Herzog ever directed. It's not bad - kind of a lesser effort by his standards, but he was only 26 when it came out, and it's pretty good considering its age and the stage the director was at in his career. It's about three soldiers going crazy on an island, mainly from isolation. That's about it.

Tonally and genre-wise it's entirely different from The Lighthouse, but it has a similar aspect ratio, basic premise, and is also shot in black-and-white. It might make for a good half of a double feature, for anyone specifically after "men going crazy after spending too long together" movies.

Signs of Life is pure cinema

[buscemi-11 · 10/10 · 24 August 1999]

Signs of Life is one of the purest cinematic experiences in the history of film. For those unused to slow moving, simple stories the movie will probably seem painfully dull. The first time I saw it I was nearly driven crazy by the pace. It was my first Herzog movie and I was unused to movies that operated outside the Hollywood formula. But that feeling of going crazy is exactly what Herzog is trying to bring you to understand. He gets inside the boredom of his principal characters so that you viscerally understand what they are going through. When one of them finally snaps -- you understand. The visual poetry of this film will live with me forever. Herzog more than any director alive understands that a picture is worth a thousand words.

My favorite Herzog

[manjits · 10/10 · 22 November 2007]

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.

Herzog comes to life

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 4 July 2016]

"Lebenszeichen" or "Signs of Life" is a West German 90-minute movie from the 1968, so this one will have its 50th anniversary soon. It was the first full feature film (after some short films) by writer and director Werner Herzog and he was in his mid-20s at this point. Of course, the awards reception was huge for such a young filmmaker and even if I did not like it that much, I am glad Herzog made it if it helped propel his career in any way. I am a great fan of Werner Herzog. This one here is in black-and-white and deals with a character names Stroszek. You certainly have heard of this one if you care about Herzog as he made another film later and that one was starring Bruno S., an actor who is mostly known for his work with Herzog today while late Swiss actor Peter Brogle, who plays the main role in here, is pretty much forgotten by now. And I am not too angry about it. He was not bad, but he also did not elevate the material particularly. In general, this film was way too bleak and sterile for my liking. I never really cared for the story, the characters or their fates. It's fine I guess as back then Herzog was still looking for his style and approach to filmmaking and it needs practice to get perfect. "Lebenszeichen" is a way Herzog acquired said practice and I am not mad at all that this was made, even if I give it a thumbs-down.

Werner Herzog's First Feature Film: A Masterpiece

[Bloodfordracula · 10/10 · 29 July 2003]

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.

Where real life needs forceful expression to live!

[RJBurke1942 · 9/10 · 28 August 2019]

Having seen and appreciated all of Werner Herzog's fictional works prior to seeing this, I looked forward to finally seeing his first, full commercial feature.

This is a short story about a trio of men, and one woman, who are brought together on the Greek island of Kos, near Turkey, during the Second World War. One of the men is wounded soldier Stroszek (Brogle), a recent arrival at Kos. Shortly after he has recovered, he's allowed to marry a local Greek woman Nora (Zacharoppoulou), and both settle down to living in a small house within a 14th century bastion, part of which has a Greek ammunition depot. With them are two other soldiers; and all three men are assigned to guard the depot which contains tons of explosives and ammunition, the latter however being unsuitable for German weapons.

We see all the above, with quick cuts and voice-over narration by Herzog, in the few minutes after the grand opening scene, accompanied by the theme music (from Stavros Xarhakos) permeating most of the story. It's hot on this island of Kos, even German guards faint in the heat. The sun is blinding; the heat palpably visible on sweaty faces. Nothing much even moves.

Now Stroszek, we learn, is a misfit, a romantic, and an adventurer. Guarding the depot is a joke: there is only one entrance to the whole fort and that stays locked all the time. Balding Meinhard (Reichmann) busies himself with practical matters: building a cockroach trap, fishing, pondering the nature of oil, and other trivialities. Younger Becker (Ungern-Sternberg) is more academic, translating ancient texts carved into and around the whole fortress. All of them begin repainting doors etc., even though that's quite unnecessary. And all of them begin making fireworks from materials found in the depot. Various locals (a wandering gypsy king, a virtuoso piano player, children playing) provide Stroszk with some distraction and interest; still, he just mopes about with Nora, the boredom and inactivity becoming more oppressive for him. In desperation one day, he asks the Captain (Stumpf) if he can go out on patrol across the island.

So, with Meinhard accompanying, the two set out, eventually reaching a spot in the mountains where they come upon a seemingly unending panoply of quickly spinning windmills, the sight of which causes Stroszek to snap: wildly, he shows his quixotic side by shooting at them until Meinhard stops him. Shortly after, while having a meal together, Stroszek finds out that Meinhard reported the shooting incident to the Captain.

Stroszek goes berserk, smashing table, chairs and chasing the two men and Nora around the fortress with his rifle, shooting towards them but not actually hurting anybody. While they exit the castle, he then runs about the battlements screaming at everybody and the world in general, threatening to shoot anybody who tries to enter and also threatening to blow up the explosives depot. Because Stroszek has a plan....

So also the Captain, who orders three assault teams of army veterans to scale the walls and subdue the deranged man. As the teams begin their operation, so does Stroszek start his. While the sun sets, and with his white flag proudly fluttering at top of pole, he begins a grandly, magnificently ineffective effort, the like of which we'll never see again.

This movie, like others (Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Fata Morgana et al) from Herzog, is simply unforgettable. Heightened by the hauntingly elegiac theme that infuses the sound track, this is for me, one of the saddest movies I've seen. (As an aside, while savoring that music, I realized that, in Lynch's Wild at Heart, one of its instrumentals - Wicked Game - bears an uncanny similarity to the theme here.)

The only fault - if it is - with this production is the speed and jerkiness of the many and frequent cuts throughout the film. But, hey, only a small handheld camera was used throughout....

Give this nine out of ten, for sure. Recommended for all.

August 26, 2019

Chopin's evil ditties...

[punishmentpark · 8/10 · 25 October 2015]

German soldiers on a little Greek island during WWII. One of them was wounded in battle and he and two of his fellow soldiers get to spend the remainder of the war to reside in an isolated place near a small village on the island Kos. At first, things seem okay, but pretty soon boredom sets in, and the recuperating soldier Stroszek becomes more and more aloof to the others, among whom is also a Greek woman with whom he has a relationship of some kind. Still, things might still turn out okay.

But then: the scene in which Stroszek meets a piano player who plays and tells about the tragic composer and piano player Chopin, which does not come until late into the film, is really ominous, and when Stroszek - by means of distraction - is sent on a harmless patrol with Meinhard (or Becker, I get their names confused) a Don Quixote like nightmare sets in his final downward spiral.

Werner Herzog fills his (black and white) film with countless beautiful images of Kos, takes his time with the unraveling of a soldier's mind and keeps things in a rather sober and at times humorous mood. A really interesting and captivating little debut film is the result.

A good 8 out of 10.

Typical First Movie Attempt

[mcjensen-05924 · 2/10 · 24 January 2024]

This one felt strained, like every scene was just aching for something more. If there was ever more uninteresting people in a movie I cannot recall which movie it was. All these exceptionally bland characters do is complain, and when they're not complaining spout the most inane garbage you've ever seen. At least there's a gorgeous woman to give the viewer's eyes something pleasant to settle upon occasionally. I am not kidding. The men, without exception, are total idiots. Here's an example of the stupidity of the feeble attempts to give them something interesting to do. The bald idiot makes a trap for roaches and is delighted to catch a few. Um, he could have walked around and stepped on all he wanted in a fraction of the time. See? Dumb, and it took several minutes to get this across. It would be almost a decade before Herzog hit his strike with gems such as Stroszek and The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser. I'm not sure why so much praise gets heaped upon this guy's films, when less than half are remotely worthy of attention.

Fine Art: non-hysterical look at our hysterical and consuming obligations

[tedsteinberg · 10/10 · 7 March 2009]

This film is smart enough not to let you know where the moment of tension, if any, or departure, will appear. The lead flips out when he does and for no better reason than he just flips out which makes his reactions to his situation all the better to appreciate. Herzog's other characters including the leads commandant deal with the situation in a perfectly sane manner, again surprising the viewer with their lack of all the hysterical clichés associated in movies by Kraut mannerisms. The photography in itself is like Henri Cartier Bresson was coaching Herzog. Visually, and as a screen play, you have the best combination like when Eugene O'Neil said that a play wright's job is to put people in a room and get them to talk to each other. This movie is fine sherry, it is not a champagne cocktail. The film glistens from it's lack of "get it's?"

Great visually and brilliant musically, and the land of a thousand windmills

[jamesprichard-86652 · 10/10 · 11 April 2020]

Werner's first and best , yet not part of any compilation /collection/box set of his work . I have unsuccessfully tried to find a CD of the soundtrack ,but luckily found DVD -for a lot of dollars. I saw Dwarves,Fata, Land of Silence, Aguirre, Kaspar , Heart of Glass , ,Stroszek, Wozzeck , Nosferatu , Fitzcarraldo many times , and believe Woodcarver Steiner was best of short films ,also thanks to Florian Fricke/PopolVuh, pioneer of beautiful modern electronic music. Herzog and Kinskey at Telluride 1979, or was it 1980 a nice distant memory. What a legacy ! Werner is very much beloved .