Signs of Life

Herzog’s breakthrough film garnered a special jury award at the Berlinale and this appraisal at the New York Film Festival: “Deceptively beautiful landscapes and dangerous idylls on a Greek island during the German occupation provide the setting for Herzog’s mysterious parable, in which a modern Don Quixote, apathetic and inhibited, is at last stung into rebellion against society. . . . A strange, intense work . . . influenced by Borges and Kafka. The hypnotic probing of cruelty, indifference, and unspoken horrors becomes a metaphysical comment on man and his ideologies.”