Clemens scheitz biography of michael

Herzog tells it this way: He and Errol Morris, sometime in the mid-70s, decided to meet in Plainfield, Wisconsin, and rendezvous at the Plainfield Cemetery under the cloak of night, where they would dig up Ed Gein’s mother once and for all, to settle what was apparently unsettled business: whether Gein had or not already dug her up himself.

(Which is what Robert Bloch, in the story for Psycho, hinted.) Morris shrugged it off and never went; Herzog, of course, showed up in Plainfield on the appointed date, figurative shovel in hand. Uninterested in performing his Geinian task alone (“I was kind of scared, because people open fire easily in this town”), Herzog loitered, tasted the plain, totemic American-ness of Plainfield, and decided to make a movie.

Stroszek (1976), showing in Metrograph’s Whole Lotta Herzog series, is Herzog’s Amerika, just one of his 70s masterpieces, and possibly the greatest film a Euro