EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL (Herzog, 1970)
Shout! Factory, Blu-ray, Release Date July 29, 2014
Review by Christopher S. Long
Seeing a chicken in a Werner Herzog
film is no surprise, but when the first chicken you see is
cannibalizing another chicken, you get the first inkling of why the
director describes his second feature film as “the gloomiest of
gloom.”
No, the title “Even Dwarfs Started
Small” (1970) doesn't make any sense, but then neither does the
world – the real world, the world of the film, take your pick. Shot
in stark black-and-white on the volcanic island of Lanzarote in the
Canary Islands, the film depicts a nightmare landscape that has grown
wildly out of proportion. Some critics at the time charged Herzog
with exploiting his cast of dwarfs (the term used in the title) by
portraying them as freakish, but the director countered by claiming
that his stars were the normal ones and that the sick world of
commerce and consumerism was the garish, oversized spectacle
enveloping them.
The patients (inmates?) at an isolated,
run-down institution rebel against the impotent, bloviating
instructor, and spend most of the film wreaking havoc in the
courtyard and surrounding countryside. They uproot the instructor's
favorite palm tree, burn the potted plants, and throw broken pottery
at a truck they've set to turn in an endless circle (an image that
will crop up in many Herzog films, and which he attributes, perhaps
tongue-in-cheek, to his brief tenure as a parking attendant.) The
instructor retaliates by taking one of them hostage, but even bound
with rope to a chair, Pepe just laughs dismissively at his would-be
captor. Authority has no authority here.
The premise invites multiple
interpretations and drew criticism both from the left (who thought he
was mocking student revolutions) and the right (who cares?), and
earned the film a ban from German censors. But I take Herzog at face
value when he explains that he made the film, in part, as a way to
express the dark thoughts gripping him after his harrowing
experiences (near-fatal illness, imprisonment - the usual) while
shooting “Fata Morgana,” filmed just before “Dwarfs” but
released after, and perhaps to exorcise those demons. For better or
worse, Herzog has long striven to compose shots and stage sequences
divorced from real-world context, audiovisual spectacle meant to be
appreciated purely for its aesthetic qualities and its poetic
evocations. And with “Even Dwarfs” he creates some of the most
memorable images in a career marked by the fanatical quest for new
and distinct images.
I'll just (mostly fail to) describe a
few. There's the bug menagerie, a collection of dead insects on stick
pins dressed in teeny-tiny clothes for the most depressing wedding of
all-time, the mock religious procession fronted by a monkey tied to a
crucifix, the futile efforts of tiny Hombre (Helmut Doring, by far
the shortest of the cast members and also the most magnetic
performer) to mount a full-size bed , the instructor ordering a tree
to put its arm down, and the constant reminders of the hopeless,
desiccated landscape in which this pocket apocalypse explodes and
implodes. I refuse to pick a favorite ending to a Herzog film (OK,
Stroszek's dancing chicken), but the last scene of this film ends on an absolutely terrifying note, with Hombre laughing maniacally while
a camel (not previously seen) repeatedly stands and kneels. A
spoiler? Please, there was no other way to end it.
The sometimes difficult production of
this film provided some of the earliest stories in the snowballing
Herzog legend. When one cast member caught on fire, Herzog
immediately threw himself on top of him to extinguish the flames. As
a way of apologizing for the trouble he put his cast through, Herzog
wrapped shooting by jumping into a cactus patch. The human actors
were amused, some of the other performers less so. Though Herzog
insists that the poor tormented monkey was only inconvenienced for a
few minutes and that the camel was merely responding to its trainer's
commands, I doubt the chickens enjoyed being grabbed by the wings and
flung about.
The net result is a film that comes as
close to capturing true anarchy as I've ever seen, “Zero de
conduite” by way of Bosch. And it's a genuinely frightening source
of some of the most nervous laughter you'll ever enjoy. If you enjoy
that sort of thing, but of course you do. Herzog describes good
cinema as the agitation of the mind. “Even Dwarfs” provides all
the agitation you can handle.
Old Anchor Bay DVD cover |
Video:
The film is presented in its original
1.33:1 aspect ratio. This is the first disc in the expansive Herzog collection
from Shout! Factory, details of which you can read here. It is essentially a dupe of the old Anchor Bay
DVD release but with a high-definition upgrade. The improvement over
the old SD is significant, but the new high-def transfer isn't quite
top-of-the-line. There are some instances of damage and distortion
and some of the whieter black-and-white scenes look a bit washed out
with a lack of detail. However, it's the best version of the film
I've seen, and it's really quite fine. Let's call it perfectly
adequate, but not eye-popping.
The low-quality pictures included in
this review are most definitely not taken from the Blu-ray, and are a
testament to the lousy versions of the film most of us had to watch
before this high-def release.
Audio:
Look, I'm not gonna post the same
boring audio reviews for each and every one of these discs. Or,
rather, I will, but it'll be this short one. The sound is fine. Not
great. Just fine. You won't complain. Except maybe about the
subtitles which are occasionally tough to read and don't handle
apostrophes very well.
Extras:
As with most of the discs in this set
(most of which are just high-def upgrades of previous DVD releases)
the only extra is a commentary track by Werner Herzog, hosted by
Norman Hill and also featuring actor Crispin Glover who loves the
film so much he made his own movie inspired by it (“What Is It?”)
Like most Herzog commentaries, it's a work of performance art unto
itself and if you can handle it, I recommend watching the movie
regularly, then immediately re-watching it with the commentary. How
did Herzog come up with that idiosyncratic song for the opening
credits? Well, he heard a local 11-year-old girl with an interesting
voice and then directed her to “sing her soul out” of her body
while recording her in a cave. Which is how Hollywood has done it for
years, of course.
Final Thoughts:
Few films truly merit the overused
adjective “unforgettable.” But “Even Dwarfs Started Small” is
one of them. You will never, ever forget it. Never. Ever. No matter
how hard you try. Have fun.
Shout! Factory Box Set Cover |
No comments:
Post a Comment