The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) – Review by Pauline Kael

Metaphysical Tarzan

by Pauline Kael

The Werner Herzog film that showed at the New York Film Festival under the title Every Man for Himself and God Against All opens this week as The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser. Herzog prefaces the images with a quotation from Georg Büchner’s short story “Lenz”: “Can’t you hear that terrible screaming that men call silence?” Yes, I’ve heard/not heard that sound. It’s the scream of one hand clapping. I heard/didn’t hear it last at Antonioni’s The Passenger. It’s the sound of garbled, pop-abstract enigmas.

The story of Kaspar Hauser, who appeared in a German town in the 1820s, is a factually based variant of the lost-or-abandoned-child, Mowgli-Tarzan myth; Kaspar wasn’t raised among wolves, bears, or apes but, rather, in isolation. In Werner Herzog’s nightmare version, Kaspar is a grunting lump of a man, chained in a dungeonlike cellar from infancy. Covered with sores and welts, unable to stand, he is fed by a black-caped man who beats him with a truncheon. One day, the man carries him to a town square and, saying “Wait for me,” leaves him there—a catatonic statue, with a letter in his hand. The puzzled townspeople stare at him blankly, then do their best to help him. He is a grown man who has just been born; they consider him mentally defective, but they train him in human habits and try to educate him. As he begins to learn, however, he balks at what he is taught, and becomes obstinate, trying to retain his new, mesmerized pleasure in nature. Before the issues are resolved, he is struck down by the caped figure, who returns, first to maim him, then to murder him. The film is a double fable—intermingling the deadening effects of bourgeois society and the cruelty of the universe.

Werner Herzog has achieved a visionary, overcast style. The higgledy-piggledy pink and blue roofs of the town of Dinkelsbühl, where The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser was shot, suggest the world of a German primitive painter, or of an awkward, self-taught puppeteer who has gone a little haywire. The gentle farmlands have something ominous hovering in the atmosphere, and even normal domestic scenes are airless and oppressive. The estrangement is poignant. Herzog’s images look off-balance, crooked, as if the cameraman were wincing; there are distances, large vistas, but the perspectives aren’t inviting. The universe is enclosed in an invisible hand. Caught in that grip, nobody seems warm-blooded; everyone is alone, immobilized, slightly stiff. Herzog holds shots for a second or two longer than one is used to, so that a character is left with a reaction on his face when what he’s reacting to is gone. You’re aware of every shot, because each one suggests a visual or emotional displacement. Even the children, who are Kaspar’s first teachers, are unnaturally lackluster. You’re looking at a drained, dissociated world—a godforsaken world. The hand that holds it belongs to that black figure with the truncheon.

In Hollywood’s versions of the Tarzan story, the point was always that the noble savage was superior to civilized man, and Tarzan was played by a handsome, athletic superman. Bruno S., who plays Kaspar, is not a professional actor; he was once believed to be a mental defective himself, and he was the subject of a documentary, Bruno der Schwarze, by Lutz Eisholz, in which he talked of his youth as an orphan in reform schools and homes for the retarded. Kaspar, here, is smudgy and top-heavy; he looks physically stunted by his chained-down years. But Werner Herzog is far more of a romantic than Edgar Rice Burroughs ever dared to be. Kaspar seems conceived sculpturally—man being formed out of clay. Rooting in the muck in his dungeon, he shows no fear of his guardian, and he doesn’t suffer any visible pain when he’s beaten: he doesn’t cower, he doesn’t cry out. It’s not until he walks upright and has experienced the freedom of mingling with flowers and birds that he learns to suffer. At first, Kaspar’s responses seem arbitrary and unconvincing, but Bruno S. is never ordinary; as an actor he’s as awkward, hallucinatory, and stylized as Herzog is as a filmmaker, and he begins to take hold of the part. His Kaspar has sly, piggy eyes, like Michael J. Pollard in Bonnie and Clyde, and a short, piggy nose, yet he’s so totally absorbed in experiencing nature, his head thrust out ecstatically, straining to grasp everything he was denied in his cave existence, that he becomes Promethean; the light dawning in that face makes him look like a peasant Beethoven. Kaspar is the only one who hasn’t lost his innocent responses to the world about him, who hasn’t been blighted by society. He’s still got his soul. The film becomes The Passion of Kaspar Hauser.

Herzog is a film poet, but he’s a didactic poet, and what he has to say is extremely fashionable right now. The film says that society stultifies you under the guise of civilizing you, and that education destroys your innocent, true perceptions. In Truffaut’s account of a lost boy, The Wild Child, he regarded the boy’s pain as necessary if the howling, frightened animal-child was to come into his human heritage; Truffaut cast himself in the role of the doctor who became the boy’s teacher and guide. Herzog says that society puts you through the pain in order to deform you, and he makes it absolutely impossible for you to identify with anyone but Kaspar.

Incidents are devised to show how society attempts to degrade him. He is exhibited as a sideshow attraction, along with other sad, dignified figures (they are characters from earlier Herzog pictures), and he and the rest of the freaks run into the countryside to escape and are chased like runaway animals. An effete English lord makes a protégé of Kaspar in order to exhibit him, like a trained ape, to aristocratic society. The representatives of education and church and government are shown to be trapped in their systems of thought and too obtuse to respond to anything spontaneous. A logician poses a conundrum to test Kaspar’s mental processes, and rejects Kaspar’s perfectly logical answer, because it wasn’t the textbook answer. Kaspar is a holy innocent whose wisdom stumps those dummies. (Throughout, Herzog’s assumption is that philosophers don’t raise the questions that Kaspar does, though they are precisely the questions that philosophers have worried over endlessly.) Typically, Herzog sets up what might be a dramatic situation and then just lets it sit there, flat on; and it can be effective in its formality. He’s worst when his purposes are clearly decipherable (as with the logician, or in an even more specious scene involving Kaspar’s belief that apples have feelings), because then he’s pointing up the idiocy of those who can’t understand Kaspar. The local churchmen urge Kaspar to acknowledge that he felt the presence of God when he was still attached to the dungeon floor, and are baffled by his refusal. The town officials make careful records of all the externals of his life but perceive nothing of how he feels. In West Germany, Herzog’s folk-art jokes about bourgeois institutions must have special satiric force, but here they seem merely reflections of a popular mood.

The larger ideas come from all over. They’re lying around in the pop storehouse of people’s heads: ragtags of German Expressionist movies and half a hundred mystical works—the same paraphernalia of the deep which American film students draw on when they ponder the question What is man’s destiny on earth? Kaspar, dying, describes the vision he has had; it’s ye olde seer’s chestnut about the caravan lost in the desert and the blind Berber who tastes a grain of sand and says “Go north.” You may wonder if there were stacks of the Reader’s Digest in that dungeon. And at the close Kaspar, the outsider who could never be one of the crowd, is a cadaver in the autopsy room; his brain is poked about and dissected, and is certified abnormal. The pedantic little town clerk is overjoyed that at last the mystery of Kaspar Hauser has been solved, and the camera stays on the clerk’s figure as he recedes, a limping, dwarflike creature himself, down the zigzag road out of the frame. It’s ten-ton irony—Buñuel with lead feet.

Personalizing the unknown in the form of that black-caped murderer, Herzog creates a fable of a demonic universe—“Every Man for Himself and God Against All”—which is just the reverse of the faith that the churchmen want Kaspar to accept. It’s Christianity turned upside down, and given a bitter, malignant tinge, but Herzog has found in Kaspar Hauser a new, uncorrupted Christ figure. And then had him martyred all over again. This film was considered by some to be the peak of the Festival, and Herzog is being compared to Buñuel and Bergman, but if it succeeds at all with audiences the reason will be, I think, that it presents a sentimental view of man’s natural state. One of the oldest audience-pleasing gimmicks in mass culture is to show the simpleton outwitting the learned. Herzog has given this gimmick a metaphysical framework that could make it appeal to present-day moviegoers who want to believe that the spacey innocents have the answers.

There’s something of a contradiction involved in using modern film technology to argue against learning in favor of an innocent response to nature; a filmmaker is not exactly a hewer of wood. Werner Herzog comes as close as he can, though. Like Bergman, he compares himself to the anonymous artisans of Chartres, and he even speaks of his physical relationship to cans of film. A writer-director, he has worked as an individual artist, answerable to himself only, right from the start—with shorts and then with his first feature, Signs of Life, in 1967. (Still in his early thirties, he raises the money he needs through scrounging, foreign sales, TV sales, and cash awards from the Bonn government.) His technique owes little to previous commercial films; it doesn’t owe very much to previous films of any sort. And there are penalties for working as a self-conscious artist in movies, as there are in the theatre (where it’s even less common). A movie or a play has a duration, and a director who has never served a commercial apprenticeship may rhythm his work in ways that seem punishing to an audience. Herzog’s pacing may be masterly in terms of his cool, objective, controlled style, but the hour and fifty minutes of this film is a trial for anyone of a restless disposition or an agnostic temperament. You fight to keep your eyes open. Buñuel’s best work draws upon irrational sources of humor; Herzog is anti-rational, in an almost self-satisfied way. In Buñuel’s world, everyone is alive; there’s a raucous, lewd energy in the characters. Herzog’s people are unanimated; life is dormant in them. And though one could not fault this in a painter’s vision, in a filmmaker’s it is numbing.

A pretty fair case can be made for the idea that a little corruption is good for the soul: it humanizes you. Werner Herzog is an artist before he’s a human being, and we may experience his dedication to art as a form of priggishness. Bergman may be obsessive, he may be frightfully high-toned, but he’s a man of the theatre. In a corner of his mind, Bergman knows there’s an audience out there. Herzog has just about everything to be a great film artist but this alchemical element: there’s no theatre in his soul. As with Robert Bresson, we can admire Herzog’s work abstractly, intellectually, but we may find it perversely academic. A film artist such as the ascetic mystic Bresson expresses his vision through an austere repression of the personalities of the actors, and it can make his films a freezing experience. Kaspar Hauser allows Bruno S. to participate creatively, and that gives the film some tension and life, but in Herzog’s dedication to film art he denies us the simple pleasures of story involvement, of suspense, of interest in the people on the screen, of sexuality. His goodness saps our strength.

The New Yorker, October 20, 1975