Review: The Enigma of Kaspar Hause

Opting to eschew any exploration of its subject’s possible charlatanical status, Werner Herzog instead employs the famously suspect story of Kaspar Hauser (Bruno S.) – who, after practically materializing in Nuremberg, Germany one morning, garnered notoriety after claiming that he’d been shackled in a cellar for the first seventeen years of his life – as a means to muse on the unconscious behavioral conditioning that’s inherent to the human experience. A lens of focused yet fleeting observance establishes Herzog’s cinematic landscape as one of curious discovery, as shots covetously linger in order to mirror Kaspar’s orientation to this newfound world. The result is both a cynical and celebratory glimpse into the social strings that schlep us about, with the filmmaker’s humanist inclination practically seeping out from behind his beauteous imagery.

For Herzog, the story of young Kaspar appears to be of more value in its ideological implication than possible historical recitation. The now-grown orphan represents a blank slate of a being, one that’s physically aged but still developmentally lagging, impoverished even. He snorts while eating, knows not of etiquette or grace, and, as a defense mechanism, falls into a comatose state upon encountering conflict. By showing these instinctual actions – and, more importantly, their place in relation to societal norms – Herzog is able to present the concept of human ecology as an organic cultural medley, illustrating, through their foreignness to the feral child, how agents like art, language, tradition and religion shape the individual entity. Before coming to Nuremberg, Kaspar had no way to apprehend the scope of his previous imprisonment because he lacked the skills needed to conceptualize conscious thought. In this, Herzog weaves a dialogue between the past and our relation to it, provoking the viewer to look back on their own evolvement and, to some extent, contemplate how life experience expands our personal universes.

But the film’s thematic plum lies in the dynamic of Kaspar and his handlers, if you will, and how, despite influencing the boy knowingly, they’re comically unaware of the unseen forces guiding their owns hands. Much like the circus animals we see being trained for specific tasks, the personalities in Herzog’s world are all products of, however subtle, manipulation; Kaspar seems to, at times, see through this. As the young man develops intellectually, poignantly realizing that his cognitive potential is capped by his years of developmental stagnancy, society’s more salient injustices become obvious to him, as he’s unable to place them within a formative context afforded those raised within their realm. “It seems to me that my coming into this world was a very hard fall,” he states, recognizing himself as an outsider amongst other people. And although Herzog paints some of these derivatives of domestication as humorous – both blind faith and tediously bureaucratic transcriptions are skewered with aplomb – he also realizes the tragedy inherent to disparity and bias: How, in a world where we’re capable of empathy and interpersonal apprehension, economic, occupational and gender statuses have become depressing standards through which we weigh human worth. Ergo, if we’re to buy into this interpretation, humanity’s greatest failure lies not in our arbitrary favoritism of one group over another but how far removed we are from recognizing this social affliction.

As the film progresses, Kaspar takes a liking to music. He learns to play the piano and expresses himself with a certain poeticism by way of some deliberately felt keystrokes. It seems that, if nothing else, Herzog is positing art and its universal reach as something that transcends the manufactured bondage that we unknowingly fall captive to. Although it lacks the power to entirely subvert convention-based constraint, art appears to provide us with a glint of hope in what can be seen as an otherwise aphotic existence. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is a fine example of this.

Joe Galm

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Even as my tastes evolve and the breadth of my cinematic experience increases, I’ll always see film as existing in a state of reciprocity with our perceptions of both life and the world at large. My writing tends to reflect this, as I excavate any universalities that I can find within works and wax generic on their applications within contemporary social and artistic arenas. I also like loquaciousness and revel in having fun with the language; it doesn’t always work.

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