This film is devoid of traditional narrative or dramatic structure. It is full of incomprehensible images, more like a hypnotic tale. It also reflects one of the most enduring trends in the work of Werner Herzog: films of people with exceptional psychological states.
The film is based on the true story of Kaspar Hauser, a young man who unexpectedly appears in a market square in the German city of Nuremberg in 1828. This strange coming has become one of the most enduring sources of inspiration in German history, literature and science. More than 500 books have been written in this case. When he was first discovered, the sounds he was making were all grunting, let alone talking. Then caused an inexplicable sensation among local residents. After living for several years locked up with only a toy in the form of a horse, he was left by his “protector and breadwinner”, a mysterious man in black. Isolated from all humans except his mysterious protector, Caspar is suddenly plunged into a civilization where he is expected to adapt to nineteenth-century society. It becomes a public spectacle, with everyone in town lining up to watch it. Soon, local authorities in the city decide that he is too "expensive" a burden, so they try to capitalize on the public interest, where he is handed over to the circus boss who runs the carnival freak show, as he is believed to be one of the "four mysteries." But when Caspar falls under the tutelage of a sympathetic professor, he gradually acquires an impressive degree of socialization and learns to express himself with a reasonable degree of clarity, where most of the accepted norms, manners and thoughts - to which he must adapt - play an important role in nineteenth-century life.
Werner Herzog applied the technique of including cinematic material in the film, shot by other directors. At the beginning of the film, shortly before Kaspar was found in the town square, Herzog used material shot on the Bavarian landscapes of Dinkelsbühl, in the old parts of the city that were almost all destroyed, but Herzog firmly decided that it was perfect for his film. These grainy shots, accompanied by the remarkable composition of Orlando di Lasso, are some of the most memorable in the film. The dream that Houser saw is also one of the important moments during the filming of this scene. In them, Werner Herzog used material he had previously filmed in Western Sahara. I don’t know of any other director who has used this technique so impressively.
39: This is a story of the soul, said someone, and I totally agree, because loneliness is described here through a slow-paced plot and endless silence that makes us see Caspar Hauser not as a human but as something more mysterious, almost like a creature from another universe. Bruno’s acting is very touching and brings tears (the candlelight moment), and the use of time in storytelling is perfect for a film of this kind where the story develops gradually. The creative vision of Werner Herzog is very peculiar and unique, it can be loved and hated, but can not be ignored. He doesn’t care about the audience, he does what he wants, shoots as he likes and this is the praise of European cinema, this is what distinguishes European authors from American ones.
Herzog did a fantastic job retelling the legend of Caspar Hauser on screen. Of particular interest is the casting of actor Bruno Schleinstein for the role of Caspar. He was a street artist in Berlin when Herzog found him and decided he was perfect for the role. Before that, Bruno had a difficult past. After his mother brutally beat him, he lost his hearing and was placed in a boarding school for mentally disabled children at the age of three. At the age of nine, while trying to escape, he was transferred to a correctional institution. In further attempts to escape, he committed a number of criminal offences and spent more than twenty years in prison. Bruno’s authenticity brings an element of childlike sincerity to this film, almost impossible not to empathize with his efforts.
He died in August 2010 at the age of 78, not bad for someone who started life so sadly. What a joy that he stayed with us in this film, this unique man with clean baby eyes.
I honestly continue to review the list of one hundred films – the foundations of world cinema, recommended for viewing by the Ministry of Culture. And from some of the paintings, of course, in surprise. I am almost 40 years old and even I find it difficult to watch some of the masterpieces of world cinema, and there is nothing to say about teenagers. I think that many films from this list can withstand only students of film studies faculties.
Werner Herzog tells the story of a “little man,” a blissful, innocent and sincere young man who is suddenly overwhelmed by a whole world. On the flawed characters of his tapes, the author said: “It is not they who are crazy, but the society that surrounds them.” The environment in which they find themselves is insane.” That is, according to the director’s concept, civilization perverts and destroys us, forcing us to live in traditions and the same with everyone. Stupid, measured philistine existence.
The title of the film is very bright, provocative. “Everyone is for himself and God is against everyone.” Whatever we do, fate is unpredictable. The most beautiful person can suddenly die, a loved one can get cancer, and a close relative can betray. We can only ask the sky, “What for?” Find answers in religion, fortune tellers and horoscopes. The truth is that there is no answer to this question.
I am interested in the identity of the black man who raised the main character. Tie him up, not letting him walk or crawl. He only fed bread and water. Beating. And in the end, he brutally killed. That's the real psychopath. What is in the mind of a man who keeps a child in a chain for many years in the basement?
The film has very beautiful pictures of nature. Natural. And a lot of classical music: Tommaso Albinoni, Orlando Di Lasso, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Pachelbel. A separate art form is the friendship of the protagonist with birds. It is also great to watch how the detached view of Mowgli found gradually changes to the conscious view of a well-groomed, interesting young man.
I will not recommend the film for viewing, because it is still purely cinematic, for the pleasure of film critics. Festival film.
This film refers to the most fruitful creative period of Werner Duke of the seventies and eighties. It began with the legendary picture 'Aguirre' and will end a decade later no less legendary 'Fitzcaraldo'. Both on the subject and in style 'Everyone for himself...' most fully expresses the essence of the creative method of the director of that time.
You can start with ideology. For the Duke, two topics have always been of particular interest. The first was the fall of civilization, enveloping the entire Earth global system of equalization. The second topic was life 'little people' in modern conditions. He tried to explore the existence of those who can be called rejected, abandoned, exposed to the margins of existence. These were dwarfs who created their own microcosm within an alien society and people with disabilities, whose life was literally in a vacuum due to an innate or acquired lack of hearing, vision or both, or even small peoples of other continents, to which the democratic gaze of civilization reaches only for the purpose of seizing lands rich in minerals. In general, for his films, the Duke always chooses only characters that have not yet undergone standardization, so in most of his paintings there is nominally no plot, because everything that happens with such characters can not fit into the traditional canvas of the story told.
In this picture, the protagonist is placed in the center of the narrative on the one hand somewhat typical, on the other completely unique - a person with a soul like a clean, unwritten board, an individual who has not yet been spoiled by civilization and its poisonous system, norms and rules. In the same literature, heroes of this kind appear regularly – it is enough to recall, for example, Tarzan, Mowgli, the heroes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – in fact, they serve a certain purpose: on the mirror-clear surface of their souls, society has the opportunity to see its own reflection from the outside. However, this film is still exceptional. And its distinguishing feature is the lack of a fixed point of view on what is happening.
We can say that other works of art of this genre exploit the image created by them ' Immaculate' an image for a critical assessment of the existing political and social formation, debunking hypocrisy and lies that prevail in society. Herzog’s film has a much more abstract and philosophical connotation. Strictly speaking, this is a picture in which the subject of the narrative is absent, that is, the personality of the main character simply dissolves and is dispersed in the surrounding world, he is not capable of any confrontation, defending and maintaining any ethical or moral positions, which from his point of view are correct, thus winning sympathy and audience interest. On the contrary, the task of the Duke in this case was, first of all, to create an atmosphere of impersonal existence, in which the subject is not yet separated by self-consciousness from the surrounding reality and is completely merged with nature and the current moment - with this ray of light, with a flying bird, with a piercing golden field, inclined by gusts of wind, and so on.
Kaspar Hauser (by the way, a real human being) is a kind of exception to the universality called the ‘Sensible Man’ ('). For us, he is practically a man from another planet (I would like to say Ka-Pax), who, living with us in the same space-time continuum, nevertheless exists in his unique universe, which no one will ever see or understand. The Duke perfectly recreates the image of a completely hollow subject, which can only be compared to the character of Hoffman from "Rain Man" & #39. It has no past and no future. First, because he simply does not know what it is, so he does not suffer from hopes or fears for the future, as well as regrets or remorse for the past. Secondly, his birth, as well as his sudden departure from it, remains a mystery - a man, literally without history - moving like a comet from the eternal to nowhere.
Of course, the Duke would not have been able to portray his character with such a degree of shocking completeness and authenticity without a perfectly suited lead actor. In his other projects, the problem of casting he solved simply - if he was shooting a film about the life of dwarfs, then invited them to shoot, for a project about the deaf-blind, he together with the film crew went to the largest in Germany boarding house, for a picture of the lives of natives, together with the film crew flew to the sultry desert of Africa, and when he needed a madman with a flaming eye, he just called Klaus Kinski. For the role of Caspar Hauser, Herzog found a real mentally disabled person who spent almost his entire life outside the walls of the clinic. Therefore, it cannot be said that Kaspar’s role was a role for him. Rather, faithful to his tradition of hyperrealism and super-authentic authenticity, Herzog made his next documentary, but this time in the entourage of a bygone era and with a more detailed plot.
Also, it is worth noting that the picture throughout the entire timekeeping traces the antithesis of the protagonist and the surrounding civilization. The solitary protagonist is accepted as authentic, while the social, structured and unified life of the rational society of the early nineteenth century appears as a labyrinth for lost souls. This Fuqian society of control seeks to bring everything under a common denominator, to write down everything that happens on paper, to give the situation a history or assessment.
Naturally, ' a being' like Kaspar is a thorn in his eye, a white spot that cannot be explored, reduced, or embedded in the system. Just at that time, the Matrix 39, fueled by the scientific and technological revolution and developing capitalism, began to grow, so all who did not fit into its plan, it simply destroyed or forgotten - they were criminals, vagabonds, revolutionaries and madmen, a close group rallied in prison dungeons. Ultimately, ' Each for himself...' in a way a requiem for innocently destroyed individuals whose fault was only in their unlikeness to others.
It is also worth noting the incredible beauty and atmosphere of Herzog’s stylistic work on the composition of the frame and the fascinating, hypnotic presentation. Together with his permanent cameraman Jörg Schmidt, he tries to solve the problem of breaking the boundaries between sleep and reality. Here they clearly came in handy experience with past tapes 'FataMorgan' and 'Aguirre' thanks to which the Duke and Schmidt managed to build incredible beauty, grace and plastic scenes in the spirit of Tarkovsky, as if filled with an invisible life-giving spirit. The entourage of the early nineteenth century is perfect, and the music from the classical and authentic ethno-repertoire, as always with the Duke, is perfectly selected. All this makes the film ' Each for himself, and God against all' one of the best creations of German cinema. It is an extremely unusual, almost transcendental picture, whose genius consists in going beyond images, plot, time or place to some other luminous universe of pure subjectivity, capable of eternal happiness in its unique true world and so quickly and tragically fading away in the matrix delusions of our being.
After one of his key tapes “Aguirre, the wrath of God”, which showed the story of a real historical character – the distraught Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre, who found himself in the “world of savages”, became distraught with the idea, befuddled by power, Werner Herzog began his next work, about the same real eccentric. But this story goes up and down from the story of Aguirra.
Kaspar Hauser is a found, “child of Europe”, a savage who will have time to visit all sorts of society, from ordinary peasants to aristocratic receptions at counts and lords, he reaches for knowledge, behaves calmly and peacefully, masters an extremely existential view, enjoys the simplest and fleeting things. At the beginning of the film, the hero can’t even walk. Herzog dared to translate his adaptation of the life of a savage, revealing who, or even what, Caspar was while living in "prison." The man who carried him through beautiful and landscaped places, threw him away in the city, reminds of God who threw man into nature, not really teaching him to write and even walk.
A God who is against everyone, only because people go for themselves. After spending a lot of time with people, and mastering many areas of art and science, Caspar says that the imprisonment was better than among others. And no one around him takes him seriously, and considers his philosophical views a savagery.
A man who keeps records, repeating every word carefully. The reaction of a leading mathematician to a cleverly solved logical problem. The dream of the main character, which can be interpreted in completely different ways. Interesting views on the life of Werner Herzog, through the mouth of Kaspar. The film is filled with such pleasant little things that maintain interest and lead the viewer to the integrity of the picture and to their own perception of the message and the main idea of the film.
The theme of the film was found in all kinds of literature in a huge number of examples. Brave New World by Huxley, Pygmalion by Shaw, The Jungle Book by Kipling. Examples from movies include Truffaut’s Wild Mowgli and Lynch’s Elephant Man. But despite all sorts of similarities in art and the frequent use of this theme, this picture is an independent masterpiece.
The clash between the natural man and the hostile bourgeois world is illustrated by Herzog’s most famous painting, each for himself and God against all. The story of Caspar Hauser, who grew up in complete isolation from the outside world, a creature innocent and helpless, fragile, told with incredible power and artistic depth. Especially successful is the scene of Kaspar’s conversation with the professor of logic, who offers him to solve a simple problem, however, he solves it nonlinearly, using the resources of his imagination and penchant for poetry.
Understanding between people in the world of Herzog is impossible in principle, because part and whole are incommensurable, the existential depth of a person seeks the same depth in the external world and finds it in the most amazing corners of the Universe, but does not withstand this meeting and breaks like Pascal reed.
The path in the films of Wenders and Herzog is understood in different ways, but quite in line with existential philosophy: any journey is always a journey through internal landscapes, a search for an answer commensurate with ontological inquiry, a continuous search for truth. Finding a way out of the dungeon of solitude, of the confines of the bourgeois world, to meet a dream, or a hallucination, or an unexpected discovery.
Travel is always a thirst for communication, a thirst for finding oneself in a world that is ontologically reliable and stable, but not hostile. The odyssey is made for the sake of enrichment not with new impressions and adventures, but with a new vision of oneself and the world. Every Odysseus always returns to a new home.
The title of the film in the American version sounds like the Mystery of Caspar Houser - after the name of the main character. Distributors, or do not understand who and as if they saw a blasphemous statement in him, one can only be surprised how they did not find in the name of the main character a reference to the Mauser rifle and did not reject it. And the story, like the previous film of the director, is based on a real event that existed in the 19th century man was born an adult. One day in the burgher town of H, one Sunday morning, stained with dirt and uttering only one word - a horse that was drilled into him by an unknown person, bringing food to the cellar where he lived - with a letter in his hand, telling of the young man's desire to become a cavalryman, like his father, he appears in the square. After that, as it turns out, he is not able not only to control the horse, but also just eat and talk - he is left in the care of the city treasury and one family who showed participation. At home, at lunch, in glasses and plates, he learns such simple concepts as empty and full, in short, an ironic metaphor for his condition. And the subsequent filling of Caspar Hausar, as well as the legend around his name and history, on which many writers also later speculated, runs through no less bitter truth.
As it is filled, language pushes the boundaries of the personality, forms it in its own likeness in the very society whose interest has awakened from an unexpected find. When he performs in the circus, where for the first time Kaspar in the role of a joke and one of the wonders of the world understands, while on an intuitive level, why these spectators need him, looking at a bear in a cage. There is a conflict that can be recalled in the film Elephant Man of David Lynch, the most consonant from the world cinema: both in essence showed the inferiority of society with externally normal bodies and manners, and internally decomposed morality and dead logic.
Taking refuge in the home of a writer, Caspar learns music, the only thing that, apart from his bed and dreams, excites and touches. Trying to educate him, the owner of the house – a man named Daumer – is confronted with a pure perception of life and contemplation and a lively attitude to things: where a fallen apple can get tired and want to sleep. Having invited teachers of theology and logic, these same learned men stupor their pupil, in the sense of their questions, which reveals their rational and logical world like a cardboard box. And this also reproduces the visual series, where sleep and reality interfere, which is sometimes difficult to distinguish between Caspar and the viewer.
Werner Herzog himself compared Kaspar Hauser to Drey’s Jeanne Dark, calling him a saint. Ironizing the emasculated materialism in the image of a mad hatter, leading a shorthand of events, the director affirms the language of cinema, capable of both an unfinished story and Kaspar’s vision of a caravan in the desert, which leads a blind old man to the city, to lead people to new horizons.
And speaking of the original title - Each for himself, and God against all - you can understand the director, who saw in the character of Bruno Stroszek the mystery of the person closest to God.
It is very strange for me that this film has only positive reviews and it is this fact that made me write a review.
The movie is totally uninteresting! This is the case when a Wikipedia article is much more interesting than watching a movie. Unfortunately, but a fact.
The life of Caspar Hauser is shrouded in mystery, the secret of his origin caused so much interest that for almost 200 years, a lot of versions have accumulated on the topic. It was only recently that DNA tests proved that he belonged to the royal family. It's an intriguing story, isn't it? It is enough to express it well on the screen, not much is required.
But on the screen, instead of a 16-year-old boy, some uncle appears, who, instead of surprise, fear and at the same time interest in everything that is happening, shows his face with a brick. What is happening to him seems a stupid invention of the writers, because there is no logic in anyone’s movements, no explanation for what is happening. For example, why does someone containing Caspar let him go? After 16 years in prison?
In general, no whole story - no interest. All I had to do was bring the real mystery of history to the screen.