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The films that emerged in the early- to mid-1970s represented the highest point reached by American filmmaking since the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1940s and 1950s.
One morning in 1828, a young boy appeared seemingly out of thin air. He was found wandering a public square in what is now Nuremberg, Germany. The boy was 16-years-old and was dressed in tattered clothing.
Werner Herzog's films do not depend on "acting" in the conventional sense. He is most content when he finds an actor who embodies the essence of a character, and he studies that essence with a fascinated intensity. Consider the case of Bruno S., a street performer and forklift operator whose last name was long concealed. He is the center of two Herzog films "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" (1974) and "Stroszek" (1977). The son of a prostitute, he was locked for 23 years in mental institutions, even though Herzog believes he was never insane.