'We've got a truck on fire. We have a man on the ski-lift; we're unable to find the switch to turn the lift off. We can't stop the dancing chicken. Send us an electrician, we'll be standing by,' says a perplexed policeman - just arrived at the scene - into his radio in request of further assistance, and so ends Stroszek in a weirdly anarchic and unpredictable ending perfectly apt for all which had preceded it.

To read of the life of Bruno S. - the actor playing the protagonist in this 1977 Werner Herzog directed film - is to read of a life born into an extremely antagonistic world. As an unwanted child he was subjected to frequent beatings and on one occasion was beaten so severely that he became temporarily mute. So peculiar was his character considered to be that much of his formative life, from childhood to young adulthood, was spent in psychiatric hospitals; and yet, according to Herzog - who befriended Bruno S. having first cast him in the 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser - he was not a man suffering the affects of a psychological disorder but was rather a man of unique, if unconventional, character shaped by a society unfailingly indifferent towards him.

It is of little wonder then that a film described by Herzog as a monument to the actor whom he once called 'the unknown soldier of German cinema' is one of the oddest, yet strangely poignant, films I have seen, a film that is at times bleakly humorous and yet never without a latent feeling of sadness; a film which, though purely fictional in terms of narrative, has much that is based on the true life of the lead actor; a film which is, at its heart, a portrait of the real human suffering faced by a man hopelessly adrift in a world beyond comprehension; a man who has long been expecting his dreams to falter and, when they ultimately do, can only watch on in silent disbelief.

Stroszek, for me personally, is among the best and most moving of Herzog's work.