The legend of Kaspar Hauser is well-known in Germany, and has a continuing resonance. A young man was discovered in the town square of Nuremberg, barely able to walk or speak, carrying a note. He wasn't able to say where he'd come from, and it was later established that he'd been imprisoned in a basement for many years. He became a curiosity, especially to the educated and fashionable, who attempted to deduce theories of natural behaviour and intelligence from this specimen. The Romantic fallacy of the child of nature was indulged in Kaspar.
The idea of the 'holy fool' has existed for centuries - the most famous literary example being in Lear - and still appears in culture now. Forrest Gump is the most recent successful example of the genre, but Peter Sellers in Being There was a precedent. The thesis is that our civilisation has led us away from natural truths, and simple people, detached from society and unaffected, are closer to them than we are. It's attractive, but no more true than the pastoral fallacy.
Herzog plays with the story, and puts Kaspar at the centre of it. People react to him, revolve around him, he is the physical and moral centre. The effect of this is not just that we sympathise with him, but that we see his views as correct and those of society as frivolous or absurd. Kaspar endures religious, social and intellectual tests, and subtly rejects or subverts them, to comic effect. Most amusing is the logician, who rejects Kaspar's alternative answer to his conundrum, then ties himself in knots justifying it.
Throughout, Kaspar has great dignity, and this is due not only to Herzog's script and direction, but to the extraordinary performance by Bruno S. Rarely has there been such a coincidence of experience between character and actor, especially to such an extreme - Bruno had been kept in brutal institutions for more than 23 years; this was, Herzog said, his story.
Herzog is using the convention of the fool to lampoon society's absurdities, turning the examination of the freakish outsider inside-out, so that we are being examined, but the subtlety of his work exceeds others. For example, Kaspar's life as we know it is defined by paper documents. There are four of them, at the beginning and the end of the film: the one on which he is forced to practise writing his name, the anonymous letter he holds in his hand in the town square, the anonymous letter he has at his fatal assault, and the history of his life written by the old town clerk.
All of these documents have analogues in our lives - the signature that defines our identity, our birth and death certificates, and the story of our existence, as written by a third party, that is what is left to posterity. The joke at the end, that the curiosity of Kaspar is explained by the shape of his brain and his liver, is at how history is told, how our lives will be remembered. The clerk is writing down notes throughout the film, and trriumphantly has the answer at the end - this is the story people will read, but it's not Kaspar's story, which is the one Herzog has told.
Kaspar Hauser is closer to The Elephant Man than to either of the films mentioned above - I've no doubt Lynch acknowledges the debt. But whereas in the Elephant Man the contrast between the grotesqueness of Merrick's appearance and the refinement of his character highlights the prejudice in favour of beauty in society, Kaspar's exclusion by his ignorance of social conventions, making him little more than the circus freak that Merrick once was, condemns society's superficiality.
Herzog apparently does a very good commentary on this DVD, which I'll watch some time.
IMDb
The idea of the 'holy fool' has existed for centuries - the most famous literary example being in Lear - and still appears in culture now. Forrest Gump is the most recent successful example of the genre, but Peter Sellers in Being There was a precedent. The thesis is that our civilisation has led us away from natural truths, and simple people, detached from society and unaffected, are closer to them than we are. It's attractive, but no more true than the pastoral fallacy.
Herzog plays with the story, and puts Kaspar at the centre of it. People react to him, revolve around him, he is the physical and moral centre. The effect of this is not just that we sympathise with him, but that we see his views as correct and those of society as frivolous or absurd. Kaspar endures religious, social and intellectual tests, and subtly rejects or subverts them, to comic effect. Most amusing is the logician, who rejects Kaspar's alternative answer to his conundrum, then ties himself in knots justifying it.
Throughout, Kaspar has great dignity, and this is due not only to Herzog's script and direction, but to the extraordinary performance by Bruno S. Rarely has there been such a coincidence of experience between character and actor, especially to such an extreme - Bruno had been kept in brutal institutions for more than 23 years; this was, Herzog said, his story.
Herzog is using the convention of the fool to lampoon society's absurdities, turning the examination of the freakish outsider inside-out, so that we are being examined, but the subtlety of his work exceeds others. For example, Kaspar's life as we know it is defined by paper documents. There are four of them, at the beginning and the end of the film: the one on which he is forced to practise writing his name, the anonymous letter he holds in his hand in the town square, the anonymous letter he has at his fatal assault, and the history of his life written by the old town clerk.
All of these documents have analogues in our lives - the signature that defines our identity, our birth and death certificates, and the story of our existence, as written by a third party, that is what is left to posterity. The joke at the end, that the curiosity of Kaspar is explained by the shape of his brain and his liver, is at how history is told, how our lives will be remembered. The clerk is writing down notes throughout the film, and trriumphantly has the answer at the end - this is the story people will read, but it's not Kaspar's story, which is the one Herzog has told.
Kaspar Hauser is closer to The Elephant Man than to either of the films mentioned above - I've no doubt Lynch acknowledges the debt. But whereas in the Elephant Man the contrast between the grotesqueness of Merrick's appearance and the refinement of his character highlights the prejudice in favour of beauty in society, Kaspar's exclusion by his ignorance of social conventions, making him little more than the circus freak that Merrick once was, condemns society's superficiality.
Herzog apparently does a very good commentary on this DVD, which I'll watch some time.
IMDb
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