The Great Movies III

Kaspar Hauser was a real historical figure who in 1828 appeared in a town square early one morning clutching the Bible and an anonymous letter. In the movie, as apparently in reality, an unknown captor kept him locked up in a cellar for about the first twenty years of his life. Adopted by the town and a friendly couple, he learns to read and write and even play the piano (in life Bruno also plays accordion and glockenspiel). Kaspar speaks as a man to whom every day is a mystery: "What are women good for?" "My coming to this world was a terribly hard fall." And think of the concept being expressed when he says, "It dreamed to me ..."

In Herzog the line between fact and fiction is a shifting one. He cares not for accuracy but for effect, for a transcendent ecstasy. Kaspar Hauser tells its story not as a narrative about its hero, but as a mosaic of striking behavior and images: a line of penitents struggling up a hillside, a desert caravan led by a blind man, a stork capturing a worm. These images are unrelated to Kaspar except in the way they reflect and illuminate his struggle. The last thing Herzog is interested in is "solving" this lonely man's mystery. It is the mystery that attracts him.

All through the work of this great director, born in 1942, maker of at least fifty-four films, you can find extraordinary individuals who embody the qualities Herzog wants to evoke. In Heart of Glass (1976), challenged to depict a village deprived of its livelihood, he hypnotized the entire cast. In Land of Silence and Darkness (1971) and Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), he tried to imagine the inner lives of the blind and deaf, and dwarfs. These people are not the captives of their attributes but freed by them to enter realms that are barred for us.

Herzog made two films about a German named Dieter Dengler, the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1977) and the fiction film Rescue Dawn (2006). In the first, Dengler, who enlisted in the Navy, plays himself, retracing a torturous escape through the jungle from a Vietcong prison camp. In the second, he is played by Christian Bale. But Herzog has explained that he made up some of the incidents in the documentary, and the feature is in a way a documentary about the ordeal of making itself; Bale looks like a scarecrow; the real Dengler was down to eighty-five pounds. Bale's performance in a way resembles the dedication of Timothy Treadwell, the man who thought he could walk unprotected among bears in Herzog's Grizzly Man, a Zoos documentary based on video footage Treadwell took before finding himself mistaken. And there is Jouko Ahola, a Finnish weightlifter, twice named the world's strongest man, who Herzog uses as the hero of Invincible (2001), about a Polish strong man, Jewish, who poses as an Aryan ideal in Hitler's Berlin. Not an actor, but the right person for the role.

Bale is a professional actor, yes, but hired for what he can embody, as much as for what he can do. Consider also the case of Klaus Kinski, the star of Herzog's films Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Nosferatu (1979), Cobra Verde (1987), and Woyzeck (1979). An actor in 135 films, yes, but Kinski told me he had seen only two or three of them. A man of towering rages and terrifying rampages, which at one point allegedly had him at gunpoint with Herzog. The subject of My Best Fiend (1999) Herzog's savage documentary about the man he loved and reviled. To see Kinski in a Herzog film is to see a man used not as an actor, but as an instrument through which to force the film.

In some ways the most emblematic film of Herzog's career is The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner (1974), a documentary about a ski jumper who must start halfway down the slope, because otherwise he is too good and would fly over the landing zone and into the parking lot. His limitation is his gift, and he dreams of flying forever. So many of Herzog's protagonists, real and fictional, have such dreams of escape, and are so intensely themselves that they carry his purpose unthinkingly.

The Enigma ofKaspar Hauser is a lyrical film about the least lyrical of men. Bruno S. has the solidity of the horses and cows he is often among, and as he confronts the world I was reminded of W. G. Sebold's remark that men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. The film's landscapes, its details from nature, its music, all embody the dream world Kaspar entered when he escaped the unchanging reality of his cellar. He never dreamed in the cellar, he explains. I think it was because he knew of nothing else than the cellar to dream about.