Werner Herzog Retrospective: Even Dwarfs Started Small
German auteur Werner Herzog's second narrative feature "Even Dwarfs Started Small" (1970) seems to exist in an altogether different dimension. It's a world completely inhabited by small people. And by small people, I mean midgets, diminutives, the vertically-challenged, indeed the dwarfs indicated in the title. Some may be taller or shorter than the others, but they are dwarfs all the same. There's a complete absence of "normal-sized" individuals who might possibly oppress or abuse these small people. But it doesn't follow that the dwarfs are not cruel to one another. On the contrary. Within this distinctive cosmos, there's a conscious desire to usurp, control, humiliate or abuse one's own kind. They may be diminutive in size, but their mode of thinking and action could possibly go astray and be blown out of proportion.
The film's opening panning shots clearly establish what will remain its setting all throughout: an unnamed white-draped rectangular institution located in an unnamed hilly region not entirely dissimilar to the vast desert highways of America. Whether that "institution" is meant as a reformatory, a detention or a school, it's not made clear. What's made clear is that an anarchy is brewing on its grounds. The institution's handful of residents stage an uprising against its head, who locked himself up within his office together with a resident whom he held all tied up in a chair. It isn't likewise made clear what's the exact reason for the "rebellion", but we can certainly glean from it that the small people aren't happy with how their head wields his authority or how the institution treats them in general. This discontentment is unequivocally expressed when one of them says: "When we behave nobody cares. But when we are bad nobody forgets". Or that: "Whether we're good or bad, we're treated the same".
On the surface, it's easy to liken Herzog's film to Tod Browning's "Freaks", an anomaly of a film unthinkable in the 1930s. But to my mind, the film is closer in spirit to Jean Vigo's "Zero for Conduct", a groundbreaking film ahead of its time in the 1930s. But whereas there's a lyrical playfulness in Vigo's provocation, in "Even Dwarfs Started Small", Herzog gets down to the dirty business of anarchy. Suffice it to say that when he speaks of anarchy, he really means anarchy. And the result is an uncomfortable viewing fare that's altogether surreal, grotesque and unflinching. Upon initially meeting the group of rebel-yellers, it's somehow apparent to us that our sympathies should lie with them. But as the stand-off proceeds further and the mayhem spirals out of control, we begin to wonder if they should be really doing what they are doing. It now appears that rationality and humanity are lost on the proceedings. Herzog once claimed that the film proceeds like his own "nightmare". Well, it's not hard to assert that he wasn't exaggerating with that statement.
Already proving at this early that he's never meant to be a conventional filmmaker (he was only 27 at the time of the film's release;but the film was finished two years earlier), Herzog serves up scenes that may not be for the squeamish: some take longer than usual, some border on repetition and some appear to follow no logic at all. And there are even scenes that may not favor well with animal rights activists, considering the fact that there's no claim by the film's end that no animals were harmed during the shoot. "Even Dwarfs Started Small" offers a taste of things to come in regards Herzog's "drastic" - or "guerilla" - way of filmmaking: he hypnotized his actors in "Heart of Glass", immersed his cast and crew in perilous shooting conditions in "Aguirre, the Wrath of God", commanded the Peruvian Indians to do the gigantic manual labor of dragging a steamship over a mountain in "Fitzcarraldo", to name but just some. For this auteur born of the New German Cinema (along with Fassbinder, Schlöndorff, Wenders, Reitz), the art of crafting a film entails conquering the impossible or pursuing a certain kind of manic fever-dream. Thomas Mauch's black-and-white photography lends that fever-dream a hallucinatory quality, with every image having the feel of being straight out of its creator's subconscious transgressions. Who would've thought that with this particular film, Herzog could channel Buñuel? Sometimes, one couldn't help but compare the dwarfs to the ungrateful beggars in "Viridiana".
The Werner Herzog Retrospective (held all the weekends of May until the first weekend of June at Cinematheque Manila) perfectly opened with the unforgettable grandeur and sweeping ambition of "Fitzcarraldo", undoubtedly the artistic height of Herzog-Kinski collaborations and of Herzog's entire filmography. Now, no better way to cap it than with the feral vision of "Even Dwarfs Started Small". The film's final image appropriately marked off our entire viewing experience in the mini-festival with an exclamation point.
The film's opening panning shots clearly establish what will remain its setting all throughout: an unnamed white-draped rectangular institution located in an unnamed hilly region not entirely dissimilar to the vast desert highways of America. Whether that "institution" is meant as a reformatory, a detention or a school, it's not made clear. What's made clear is that an anarchy is brewing on its grounds. The institution's handful of residents stage an uprising against its head, who locked himself up within his office together with a resident whom he held all tied up in a chair. It isn't likewise made clear what's the exact reason for the "rebellion", but we can certainly glean from it that the small people aren't happy with how their head wields his authority or how the institution treats them in general. This discontentment is unequivocally expressed when one of them says: "When we behave nobody cares. But when we are bad nobody forgets". Or that: "Whether we're good or bad, we're treated the same".
On the surface, it's easy to liken Herzog's film to Tod Browning's "Freaks", an anomaly of a film unthinkable in the 1930s. But to my mind, the film is closer in spirit to Jean Vigo's "Zero for Conduct", a groundbreaking film ahead of its time in the 1930s. But whereas there's a lyrical playfulness in Vigo's provocation, in "Even Dwarfs Started Small", Herzog gets down to the dirty business of anarchy. Suffice it to say that when he speaks of anarchy, he really means anarchy. And the result is an uncomfortable viewing fare that's altogether surreal, grotesque and unflinching. Upon initially meeting the group of rebel-yellers, it's somehow apparent to us that our sympathies should lie with them. But as the stand-off proceeds further and the mayhem spirals out of control, we begin to wonder if they should be really doing what they are doing. It now appears that rationality and humanity are lost on the proceedings. Herzog once claimed that the film proceeds like his own "nightmare". Well, it's not hard to assert that he wasn't exaggerating with that statement.
Already proving at this early that he's never meant to be a conventional filmmaker (he was only 27 at the time of the film's release;but the film was finished two years earlier), Herzog serves up scenes that may not be for the squeamish: some take longer than usual, some border on repetition and some appear to follow no logic at all. And there are even scenes that may not favor well with animal rights activists, considering the fact that there's no claim by the film's end that no animals were harmed during the shoot. "Even Dwarfs Started Small" offers a taste of things to come in regards Herzog's "drastic" - or "guerilla" - way of filmmaking: he hypnotized his actors in "Heart of Glass", immersed his cast and crew in perilous shooting conditions in "Aguirre, the Wrath of God", commanded the Peruvian Indians to do the gigantic manual labor of dragging a steamship over a mountain in "Fitzcarraldo", to name but just some. For this auteur born of the New German Cinema (along with Fassbinder, Schlöndorff, Wenders, Reitz), the art of crafting a film entails conquering the impossible or pursuing a certain kind of manic fever-dream. Thomas Mauch's black-and-white photography lends that fever-dream a hallucinatory quality, with every image having the feel of being straight out of its creator's subconscious transgressions. Who would've thought that with this particular film, Herzog could channel Buñuel? Sometimes, one couldn't help but compare the dwarfs to the ungrateful beggars in "Viridiana".
The Werner Herzog Retrospective (held all the weekends of May until the first weekend of June at Cinematheque Manila) perfectly opened with the unforgettable grandeur and sweeping ambition of "Fitzcarraldo", undoubtedly the artistic height of Herzog-Kinski collaborations and of Herzog's entire filmography. Now, no better way to cap it than with the feral vision of "Even Dwarfs Started Small". The film's final image appropriately marked off our entire viewing experience in the mini-festival with an exclamation point.
(The rebel-yellers in Werner Herzog's "Even Dwarfs Started Small")
Comments