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The outsider's "terribly hard fall" into civilization, imagined by Werner Herzog as a rough Kokoschka canvas far from the Chardin of L'Enfant sauvage. A cut from an undulating sea of grass to a soggy cellar sets up the synergy of inner and outer zones, Kaspar Hauser (Bruno S.) in his dungeon scratches atrophied, shackled legs until he's dragged outside and left at the town square. Suddenly born fully grown after years in darkness, what's a grunting "gallant rider" to do in 19th-century Bavaria? Curiosity becomes mockery as the stranger goes from oddball houseguest to sideshow centerpiece ("The Four Riddles of the Sphere") to a scientist's pupil and budding biographer. (Observing the trajectory are a pompous military officer and a wizened scribe with stovepipe hat and quill pen, a comic duo out of early Lubitsch.) The drive toward domestication is the drive toward death in Herzog's great fable, a travesty of uplifting dramas to go with Aguirre's travesty of swashbuckling epics. Art soothes momentarily ("The music feels strong in my heart," Kaspar says, each word like a cinder block), but for the Romanticism of the protagonist only Nature and the 8mm reveries pulsing inside his head (a procession up a misty hilltop, a caravan into the Sahara) will do. Surrounded by effete rationalists, vicious patriarchs, unbalanced frames and hypnotized chickens, Kaspar might be the New German Cinema itself, an inquisitive visionary simultaneously suspicious of the cultural landscape and struggling to find a place in it. (He's also a captivating blur of performer and role, with the eyes of the remarkable Bruno S. twitching and burning in sync with those of his awestruck character.) A work somehow both doggedly nihilistic and profoundly humanistic, a superb Frankenstein movie, an ode to the misshapen brain that can hear "the horrible screaming men call silence." Cinematography by Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein. With Walter Ladengast, Willy Semmelrogge, Brigitte Mira, Michael Kroecher, and Hans Musäus.
--- Fernando F. Croce |