‘Watch!’, says W. It’s the famous sequence of the chicken dancing in an amusement arcade booth, from Herzog’s film Stroszek. Bruno, the film’s protagonist, puts a few quarters in the slot and wanders off to shoot himself. The chicken dances, bobbing on its claws. The chicken dances, its comb wobbling, its wattle swinging, its black eyes manic…
Bruno and the others have come to America to escape the old world. They’ve come to escape the past! And what does Bruno find? The dancing chicken, W. says.
Herzog speaks of finding images adequate to the world, to the state of the world, W. says. - ‘The chicken is one of those images, don’t you see?’ I see.
Stroszek: didn’t Ian Curtis watch the film just before he killed himself? He saw the chicken, W. says. He really saw it, and it was too much for him. Perhaps it’ll be the same with us. Perhaps America will be too much for us.
…
The chicken is cosmic, that’s what we have to understand, W. says. It’s a bit like that statue I have in my flat. Who is it supposed to be again? Lord Shiva as Nataraja, I tell him. The dance of the cosmos, the cosmos as a dance, all that sort of thing.
‘What’s your cosmic dance like?’, W. asks. ‘It’s the funky chicken, isn’t it? Go on, fat boy. Dance’.
