The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

A truely visionary work!!I have always been fascinated with the story that this film tells.Herzog seems to be an expert at showing the way that an outsider relates to the world.Bruno S. is amazing in the lead role , Herzog has definitely made the right casting choice.the movie is just a must for all fans of cinema,even if your not a Herzog fanatic you will still be moved by this extraordinary vision!!!

Fmovies: Kasper Hauser is one of the great masterpieces of the New German Cinema and stands as one Werner Herzog greatest achievements. It is a powerful movie that will strike at the heart of the viewer through it's strong visuals and thought provoking story. Those who are use to the spoon fed narratives of Hollywood may find Kasper Hauser hard to deal with. But those who are willing to engage themselves both mentally and spiritually will find the movie richly rewarding.

Werner Herzog's film deals with the true story of Kasper Hauser (Bruno S.), a young man who appears, supposedly out of nowhere in a small German town of Nuremberg in 1828. The film deals with Kasper's slow educational process and his introduction into polite society by Professor Daumer (Walter Ladengast). Kasper is a true outsider, and the film looks at the problems this creates (for example, Kasper is unable to believe that god could create the entire universe from scratch, so he his shunned by the church elders).

The films title (The Enigma of Kasper Hauser is just one of many others) seems to sum up the film perfectly. We never really know just who Kasper is and why the mysterious man wants to hurt him; the film ends up giving us more questions than answers. But the beauty of the film lies in the performance of Bruno S. his child like innocence and odd take on life is so pure and beautiful, I love the scene where he talks about how he sowed his name in seeds, and how someone had trodden on it. This seems to be a pretty clear metaphor for the film, how Kasper was crushed by the town folk, and used for social merit.

Herzog's visuals are also fantastic, from the soft focus opening of the boat on the lake; to Kasper's dream of the caravan at the end he fills the film with a mixture of the naturalistic and the surreal. No other director has given his films such an air of the hypnotic and the style works wonders with this story. Kasper Hauser is a beautiful, if at times painfully slow film, that gives us yet another interpretation of the outsider in society, definitely worth the watch.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser fmovies. Herzog's characters tend to have an uneasy relation to language, whether they are Kaspar, who lives years in his life without language at all,Bruno(Stroszek,1976)who, rather than explaining his emotions,builds a "schematic model" of his feelings, or Fini Straubinger(Land of Silence and Darkness 1970),who cannot explain in words how it feels to be blind and deaf.Indeed, virtually all of Herzog's films are populated by marginal beings who resist language or who affirm its insufficiency to produce "true" meaning.For Herzog, their resistance to language is clearly a sign of their purity.More importantly, this resistance has the effect of rendering such figures opaque and image-like.An image that is visually striking but not wholly susceptible to verbal explanation.Their opacity gives them the quality of an unformulated image, an image that to some extent retards or actually interrupts the narrative flow with its non narrative effect.Kaspar is "outside of language and outside of difference," and later resists the patriarchal narrative with which he is equipped.Despite the pronounced literary subtext in these films, the dismissal of writing as a secondary mediation in contrast with the immediacy of the image occurs persistently in Herzog.The words of Kaspar's name spring up as the watercress he has planted, becoming living things in a triumphant romantic gesture that recalls Holderlin's longing, in BREAD AND WINE, for "words which spring up like flowers."By gestures such as these, Herzog has, in his view, redeemed language by transforming it first into a thing and then into an image.The lack of erotic impulse in Herzog's narratives is pronounced: the sexualized body is not of interest to Herzog and in his characters libidinal impulses tend to be sublimated into an all-consuming vision or to disappear into introit by some other means.Kaspar's enthusiasm for knitting that so shocks Lord Stanhope and in his general refusal to distinguish between male and female tasks.The black caped man who initiates Kaspar's entry into narrative, a symbolic father whose identity nevertheless remains enshrouded in mystery, resembles on one so much as Dr. Caligari in his black cape.As in some measure the "founding text" of German cinema and as an allegory per SE, THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI would naturally speak to a filmmaker anxious to create a bridge between German films of the Weimar period and those of his own time.So the black caped father functions here as the symbolic father of German cinema as well.Within the overall narrative of the film, it is the Caligari figure who intervenes with violence at various junctures in order,it would appear, to be able to direct its course.This violence, in turn, generates in the imagination of Kaspar a succession of visionary images that, like Herzog's films, begin with landscapes.When, in one dream sequence, Kaspar creates a mythical landscape of the Caucasus, a landscape with golden temples for which there has been no equivalent in his experience, Kaspar is creating with natural signs, like Herzog in hoping to bring "the real" into his film-making.

Not only is THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER Werner Herzog's best film but I also believe it to be the greatest film ever made along with Stanley Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. KASPAR HAUSER has some of the most incredible and powerful images ever filmed.

The opening shot is that of a rye field blowing in the wind; we hear Pachelbel's 'Cannon' and the following words appear on the screen; "Don't you hear that horrible screaming all around you? The screaming men call silence." This sequence perfectly captures the spirit of this film; the beauty of suffering seen through the eyes of a human that is untainted and unformed by society.

This film changed my life. I now see the world with a new set of eyes. It has the most amazing photography, brilliant use of music and an amazing performance by Bruno S.; a schizophrenic street musician who never acted before and who had been incarcerated for most of his life.

Even if this film had failed on the level of character or narrative (which it doesn't), I would still love this movie for its incredible imagery. The memory/dream sequences are haunting and will never leave my head. The opening shot of a field, long blades grass bowing under the wind to the music of Pachelbel, is extraordinary. And of course there's the performance of Bruno S, the most intensely hypnotic and genuine performance you will ever see.

But my favorite scene is of the impresario and the dwarf king and his kingdom. This is a true Herzog moment -- bizarre but somehow still a moment of striking epiphany -- the dwarf a parallel, isolated soul to Kasper's own isolated, lonely soul. The extremity and weirdness of moments like these seem commonplace and everyday in a Herzog film, and therefore somehow commonplace and everyday even in our own lives.