Werner Herzog is a nonpareil filmmaker. Yes, one might argue that a Stanley Kubrick or an Ingmar Bergman, a Federico Fellini or an Akira Kurosawa were greater directors of films, but all of them have a more fundamental connection to the central, if not conventional, core of the art of filmmaking. Herzog is farther off into his own cinematic dimension than any other director. If there can be such a thing as instinct into so rigorous an art as filmmaking, then Herzog is as close to a pure beast in that art as one can get.
His hour and fifty minute-long 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder Für Sich Und Gott Gegen Alle -- literally Every Man For Himself And God Against All, a much more apt and poetic title than the English language version), he wrote, produced, and directed himself. It won that year’s Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and is about the infamous case of a wild child who strode into Nuremburg in 1828, with a note proclaiming his name, and a bizarre tale of being raised in a dark cell for perhaps a decade and a half.
The real life case led to decades of articles, books, and a place in Fortean lore. This is one of those films that no other filmmaker could make. Yes, there have been other films that have touched upon the case, but none so viscerally, and of all the post-Nazi German filmmakers (often referred to collectively as the New German Cinema, as opposed to France’s New Wave) Herzog is the most, for lack of a better term, feral; thus the perfect man to bring Hauser’s tale to the screen.
The film is not so much a linear screenplay as a string of moments and images (one great moment concentrates on a stork eating a helpless frog; yet it’s a beautiful death, while a dream sequence shows pilgrims climbing a mountain in Ireland during a fog, as Pachelbel’s Canon plays onscreen) which act as a bildungsroman not only for the lead character of Hauser, played by the mentally deranged Bruno S., but for the characters that inhabit Nuremburg. They have to learn to be more accepting of someone whose origin, life, and entry into their world makes him as close as one could get to an extraterrestrial being without being one. Hauser is not only outside of their experience, but also outside their very realm and conception of difference, and as he learns 19th century Germany’s customs and manners he sees how stilted and absurd many of them are. So does the audience, via Herzog’s ecstatic art beyond analysis.
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