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As his best-known film "Aguirre, Wrath of God" (and indeed all his work) testifies, German director employs highly distinctive characters and situations, peculiarity, and eccentricity even, to lay bare the human condition. Even now, long after his golden years as a big-screen original, his television documentaries reveal his ongoing fascination with the variety and sheer oddness of mankind. Herzog may well be an intellectual, but he is also the excitable schoolboy with his nose pressed hard against the sweet-shop window.
"The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" is based on the true, 19th-century tale of a simple, uncoordinated young man, who suddenly appears in 1828 Nuremberg in a collapsing, scruffy heap and can barely grunt, let alone speak. Seemingly kept in a cellar, and thus with no connection to society, he becomes an instant sensation.
Two things fascinate Herzog: firstly, the limitations of bourgeois life, of the rational thinking of all the great, good people who bring their learning to bear on the beleaguered Kaspar; secondly, the sheer grind endured by an outcast struggling to make his way in the world (in other words, a perfect metaphor for Herzog's own tussles with the film business). The director's distaste for traditional dramatic structures (a view he shared with other German New Wave directors) means that the film has turgid stretches, but this flaw is largely overwhelmed by compositions which are meaningful and hypnotic, and a startling performance from Bruno S as poor Kaspar.
In German with English subtitles.
"The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" is re-released at the NFT on Friday 31st August 2001. For more information visit the .
