Review: Even Dwarfs Started Small (Herzog, 1970)
Werner Herzog's Second Feature Film is a Dark-hearted Allegory
Jul 20, 2009
A band of misfit dwarfs are confined to a police station waiting to be charged. How did they get here and what have they done? Even Dwarfs Started Small is a darkly comic fable about mans inhumanity to man and the catastrophic problems inherent in the total liberation of the human spirit.
Synopsis of Even Dwarfs Started Small
When the lilliputian inmates of an isolated institution stage a rebellion and overthrow the patriarchal rule of their keeper, their world erupts into irreverent celebration and chaotic depravity. Sick of being told what to do and how to live, the inmates take charge and live their lives as they have always dreamt. As the inmates struggle to free one of their colleagues, held hostage by the head of the institution, they embark on a series of physical and emotional explorations of a world previously off limits.
One of the inmates fixes an abandoned truck and, rather than escape their captivity, the dwarfs instead choose to place a weight on the accelerator and tie the steering wheel in full lock, leaving the vehicle circling the yard until it runs out of fuel. Two of the inmates are forced into a bedroom by the rest of the group, but their attempts to consummate their relationship are thwarted when the male dwarf is unable to climb onto the bed. A pair of blind inmates are taunted by the main group, a pig and several chickens are killed, a feast of spaghetti and wine ends in a food fight and a marriage ceremony is held for two dead bugs, complete with miniature bridal wear.
Werner Herzog Tells an Allegorical Tale
Within the microcosm of the institution, humanity is represented by its inability to resolve differences, both physical and ideological, and trivial conflicts are reduced to squabbling between grotesque, infantile creatures. As an allegorical tale of how society treats its outcasts and what happens when the ruled become the rulers, there seems to be no end to the anarchic behaviour of the inmates until the head the institution manages to flee the main building, seemingly driven insane by his captors.
With Even Dwarfs Started Small, director Werner Herzog had set himself apart from the rest of the German New Wave directors. Unlike some proponents, whose relatively conventional dramas were lauded as the future of German cinema in the 1970s, Herzog was looked upon as little more than an oddity. Every group has it's strange one, and for the New German Cinema in the 1970s, Herzog was certainly that one.
Thankfully, he remains a 'strange one' to this day.
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