Feb 17

Feb 17 Classic Movie Review : The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

Everybody knows Werner Herzog for his documentary where a man gets eaten by a grizzly bear and generally for saying cryptic and nihilistic stuff unprompted, but he’s been directing for sixty-two years and he has a treasure of odd and fiercely original films that everyone seems to have forgotten about. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is one of his earliest (it’s like, his fourth feature film ever) and I’m here to tell you it will make your life better.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser tells the story of Kaspar Hauser (German cinema legend Bruno S.), a grown man who was raised in a dark cellar, who doesn’t know how to talk or walk. When he is suddenly released by his captors, he is adopted by the people of Nuremberg as some kind of cute curiosity. They teach him about math, logic, religion and whatnot, but no one can quit figure out who he is and why he was let go by his captors.

Apparently, it’s based on a true story.

The Birth of Consciousness

There’s a lot to unpack here: Kant’s nature vs. nurture argument, Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage, the nature of freedom (Kaspar is not exactly happy to have to deal with other people), but I believe the most interesting and mysterious aspect of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is how it functions as an allegory for the birth of consciousness in human beings and how that consciousness is both our greatest gift and alienation.

I’m not gonna spoil anything about the top hat man who jailed Kaspar for reasons that will forever remain nebulous, but he’s a stand-in for God. After all, he puts Kaspar in the world in a vulnerable situation that requires the benevolence of others in order for him to survive and then vanishes like a deadbeat dad. At the beginning, Kaspar has the self-awareness and the dead-eyed gaze of an animal heading to a slaughterhouse.

He’s neither happy nor unhappy. He just exists in a world that feels raw and unprotected to him. His only visceral relationship is to music, which moves him to tears the first time he hears it and motivates him to learn more about culture. As the self-awareness slips in (which is iconically embodied in Bruno S.’s gaze), frustration and resentment at the loss of the primordial oneness he bathed in for much longer than most, settles in.

You know, the typical human experience everyone else lives from 0 to 25. It’s just delivered in a different way.

The Earnestness of Creation

One of my favorite aspects of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is the dream sequences he gleefully narrates to his benefactors, unaware that no one in the history of everything wanted to hear someone else’s dream. There are two in the movie. Hauser never says they’re dreams, he calls them visions and Werner Herzog shoots them from afar, featuring mysterious setups in order to make them truly feel like dreams that anyone can interpret.

That’s another thing that pursues poor Kaspar in this movie: he attracts the interest of the academic establishment, which keeps telling him he’s not doing anything the way he should and the movie takes a stance on this through Kaspar’s visions. There’s no right and wrong way to create meaning for as long as meaning is achieved. His last vision of the settlers going up a mountain is, to me, the embodiment of his understanding that human life is a transient experience.

It never really starts and never really ends. It just lasts the time that it lasts.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is an absolute juggernaut for eggheads who like deceptively cryptic movies that refer to long lost philosophers and whatnot. It’s also beautiful in an humble, understated way even if it’s over fifty years old. Werner Herzog has an eye for poetic images and a patience on the camera that alters your sense of meaning, which was crucial to making this movie work. I love The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

It’s one of these movies that lingers within. I’m glad it’s available again.