‘A film studded with glowing moments of humanity’: The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser reviewed in 1975
In an original Monthly Film Bulletin review of Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, critic Tom Milne argued that its protagonist has much to teach us about ‘the freakish systems on which civilisation is founded’.
It is doubtless no accident that, in direct contrast to the sense of plenitude and fulfilment suggested by the bowl of milk in L’Enfant Sauvage (or the jug of water in The Miracle Worker), Kaspar’s first sign of understanding is associated with the emptiness of the cup he attempts to drain. In fact, given the close parallels in subject matter, and more particularly the striking resemblances between Dr. Daumer and his housekeeper and the analogous characters in L’Enfant Sauvage, it looks almost as though Herzog had made his film as an antidote to Truffaut’s, much in the same way as Rio Bravo was delivered as a riposte to High Noon. Not that Herzog is necessarily suggesting that the Wolf Boy and Kaspar Hauser ought to have been left in their states of brutish innocence; rather, that the miracle of rebirth into humanity brings these creatures into a paradise made a purgatory by human beings.
In the exquisite opening sequence shot by Klaus Wyborny, with its sense of dreamy summer calm as a rowing-boat drifts on the placid waters of a stream past banks overhung with lush green foliage – an idyll haunted both by the close-up of a pretty girl and by Tamino’s aria from The Magic Flute – the image of an Eden is abruptly shattered by the shot of a washer-woman kneeling on the bank and looking up, hostile and suspicious, as the camera drifts by. Herzog has commented that the aria, whose lyrics hang wistfully over the entire film – “Will this sentiment be love?”; “Yes, yes, love alone” – is a way “of suggesting that if there really is love and sympathy, there can be a place for a phenomenon like Kaspar Hauser”. But in the case of such a phenomenon, the film goes on to demonstrate, there may need to be a redefinition of the terms ‘love’ and ‘sympathy’.
The two main strands of the film, closely interwoven, show Kaspar’s emotional and intellectual development as guided and admired, or dissected and disapproved, by the world into which he has been born as an adult. The first is studded with glowing moments of humanity as we recognise it: the little boy patiently teaching Kaspar the meaning of language; the mother offering her baby to the wondering Kaspar to hold; Kaspar tenderly feeding the lost fledgling on his windowsill; the real distress of Daumer and his motherly housekeeper when the wounded Kaspar disappears.
The second strand, in which Kaspar graduates from circus freak into being a caustic examiner of the freakish systems on which civilisation is founded, is kept within equally recognisable limits: subjected to trial by reductio ad absurdum, religion, logic, natural philosophy, society and even human nature are all found wanting. But there remains the enigma of Kaspar Hauser – the vision, perhaps, of some immeasurable fall from grace by the world of rational man – which causes him such intolerable pain and despair that he yearns for the dark solitude of his cellar as a preferable alternative to society.
Right from the beginning, Herzog (making superb use of the unusual physical co-ordination and hyperactive eyes of his leading actor, who was himself immured in prisons and asylums from the age of three) has presented Kaspar as an obscurely indefinable threat, dragged from his cellar and manipulated like a puppet until he stands erected in the town square, a visitor from another planet waiting to be set free to deliver his message. He undoubtedly receives sympathy and understanding, but always in our terms, not his. The point is made with beautiful simplicity in the “clever apple” scene (when an apple falls from a tree, Kaspar suggests that it is tired; to prove that the apple has neither feelings nor will, Daumer rolls it so that the pastor can stop it with his foot; but the apple vindicates Kaspar by rolling on after bounding over the foot on the uneven ground).
Until some attempt can be made to understand Kaspar’s alien vision, the love adumbrated in Mozart’s aria will remain impossible for a race of men seen – in Kaspar’s hauntingly unfinished story – as struggling aimlessly across a vast, empty desert in the wake of a blind leader.
► The Enigma of Kasper Hauser will be re-released into UK cinemas for its 50th anniversary on 19 January. It is available to stream on BFI Player.