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The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser |
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The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser
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by New Yorker Video
Sales Rank: 40769
Price: $29.95
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In his widely acclaimed attempt to fathom <I>The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser</I>, director Werner Herzog probes a real-life mystery that has puzzled German society for nearly two centuries. In the title role, Herzog ingeniously cast the equally mysterious street musician Bruno S., whose mesmerizing performance is unique in the history of film. Isolated since infancy in a dank cellar, the now-adult Kaspar is abandoned in 1820s Nuremburg by his unknown custodian; townsfolk futilely speculate on his origins, and he's shaped by a bourgeois villager who places rigid, conflicting restraints on his new and peculiar perspective on the world around him. It's telling that Herzog's preferred title is <I>Every Man for Himself and God Against All</I>, for this is an eerily effective cautionary tale about an innocent man of nature who moves from one prison to another in a cruelly fateful universe. The mystery lingers, making <I>The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser</I> a deep, resonant reflection on the nature of humanity. <I>--Jeff Shannon</I>
Viewer Reviews
It seems that every Herzog film I see is better than the last, and "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" continues that trend. Herzog tells the story of the apparently feral youth who showed up in a Bavarian town in the early 19th century, and of the five years he lived being groomed for "civilization."
In Herzog's hands, the tale is a melancholy and occasionally poignant one. Hauser is unspeakably abused for most of his life by his jailer (his father?), chained to a cellar basement with no human companionship, never having seen the light of day. Upon his mysterious release, he's barely able to speak or stand, and is viewed as something between a "noble savage" and a monster. Taken in hand by a kindly doctor, Kaspar gradually learns to speak and to feel and haltingly express sometimes overwhelming emotions when confronted with the beauty of the natural world, music, and poetry. But he feels trapped inside his own limitations and frustratingly stymied. As his Sehnsucht deepens, he finds himself increasingly alienated by the civilized world into which he's been cast and the identity that's being forced on him by those authority figures who think they know best.
The depth of Kaspar's soul-hunger is expressed several times throughout the film, but perhaps the most memorable occasion is when he's asked if he ever dreamt during his years of speechless imprisonment. "Yes," he replies. "I dreamt of the Caucasus." He dreamt of high, cold, pure places. In that single line, it seems to me that Herzog captures the mystery, joy, and tragedy of the human longing for transcendence.
The script is excellent, the cinematography entrancing--corn rippling in the wind, Kaspar sucking an egg and gazing out through a crack in the shed where he sits, the interspersions of magic lantern-like images of tall mountain peaks and barren deserts--and the musical score nicely accenturates the scenes and story. But without a doubt, the center of the film is the incomparable performance of Bruno S. as Kaspar.
Viewers might be interested in comparing Herzog's "Kaspar" with Truffaut's "L'Enfant sauvage."
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