Herzog’s “Woyzeck” and Husserl’s

Natural and Phenomenological Attitudes

Many films can engage me, make me forget that I am the viewer and it is the viewed.  Very few films can so totally absorb me while also making me aware of my absorption without breaking the spell.  

I move from the natural attitude of being aware of the film as an art under study to the phenomenological attitude where the film engages me in a lived experience: giving itself to me as I take of it and taking from me as I give myself to it.  I develop an intentional consciousness of the film: a consciousness of the film where I am as aware of my consciousness of it as much as I am of it itself. 

The shifts are not just progressive; rather, they are infinitely fluid.  Watching, my attention relentlessly shifted back to the natural attitude with my frequent rhetorical protests of “what’s going on?”  Why is that wild-eyed man running?  Is he a solider?  But he was just shaving that man like a barber?  Why is that man so optimistic and so miserable at the same time?  But, this feeling of being lost in the story was also an important trigger. 

When the storyline again unfolded in a more linear fashion, I was purely reabsorbed in the unfolding.  One moment this absorption is natural, experienced like how Husserl writes: “I am conscious of a world endlessly spread out in space, endlessly becoming and having endlessly become in time.  I am conscious of it: that signifies, above all, that intuitively I find it immediately, that I experience it” (Ideas, §27).  The camera swings widely and smoothly, time has passed and the story is about to recommence.  Another moment I experience it as phenomenological: my stomach gasps and my spine tightens as the doctor looks angrily at the man with sunken cheeks, relax, I think, to him and me.   

This attitude is strengthened each time the disjuncture between dialogue and visual image is highlighted.  The divorce of linear expectations both further intrigues me in the unfolding as I also became aware of my alternating flashes of anger, boredom, humor, my focus on the dress, the large red nose, the thought that perhaps he is not an actor, but a random drunk man Herzog happened to spy at a local beer garden.  Then the camera realigns and someone says something to reengage the storyline developing in my memory. 

So what happened in the film?  A man, named Woyzeck and played by Kinski, was naturally inclined to an awareness of the inequity of society and had this awareness exploited by a doctor who permitted him only peas to eat, with the seeming desire to chart his descent to madness.  This man with haunted eyes had a son with a woman to some disgrace: either the boy was not baptized or the couple was not married.  The woman, ambiguously wife, lover, mother, and whore, became involved with another man.  The other man became involved in an altercation with the main man, seemingly unconnected to the woman and more so due to inebriation.  Woyzeck then finally understood what the ground and the sky had been trying to tell him (I did mention his descent to madness).  “Stab dead,” the ground and sky said; and that he did, on the shore of the river, he killed his ambiguous woman.  This act much delighted the local police, who had not seen “a real murder” in so very long.  And the credits rolled. 

The question now arises: was Woyzeck also experiencing the phenomenological attitude to such a degree of intensity that he could not break free?  What would happen to consciousness if one only experienced the world through Husserl’s radically insightful method?  The cityscape and skyline gave the crystal-blue eyed man messages of impending doom.  The ground swelled in volume only he could hear, the sky above as well.  In the phenomenological attitude one is best able to see the interconnected nature of living.  What if Woyzeck was able to hear his role as just another animal in the ecosystem driven to actions and thoughts by the blood in his veins, the instincts in his species.  Instead of relating to the human society, he was called to follow the dictates of the higher genus of life itself. 

Woyzeck could act but not reflect.  He ran instead of walking.  He shaved the captain’s face with a speed that made my own skin crawl.  He returned to her body, but not out of guilt and anguish.  He returned to her body to find the knife and throw it in the river. 

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