B&W NR (mature themes, violence, language), 96 min., VHS $19.98, DVD $29.98, German with English subtitles Available now Cast: Helmut Doring, Gerd Gickel, Paul Glauer, Erna Gschwendtner Director: Werner Herzog ANCHOR BAY Story Line: In a world where...

A family purchases a pair of milking goats, whose breed is known as Nigerian Dwarves, as an alternative to milking cows. After experiencing some initial problems with the goats, the family finds that the goats are good milk producers and decide to breed them...

Werner Herzog should be thought of as a kind of seer, perhaps even something of a mystic. Only then does the nonsense begin to make sense in his films. Those films are a peculiar combination of an impulse both to comprehend all of life and at the same time to respect its incomprehensibility. The result is films that are like parables. The only way Herzog can embrace life fully enough is to deal with it in a symbolic and anagogical way instead of a literal one. Rather than the explanation of a particular sit...

Where [Herzog's] later films have located the history of man in a terrain and on a time scale all their own (the terminal ward of Even Dwarfs Started Small, the desert myths of Fata Morgana), Lebenszeichen … extracts a similar meditation from a specific historical situation and a not unfamiliar plot format. Wounded in Crete during the Second World War, good soldier Stroszek is removed from the fighting and left to heal in the sultry, dulling climate of a non-combat zone. In the 'time ou...