| Even Dwarfs Started Small [1969] | | |
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 worth seeing January 31, 2004
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
interesting, disturbing, provoking but lacks impact of herzog's best movies. i usually like his hipnotic and apocalyptic visions and I do find some of them here but some other are just borring. worth seeing though if you're not in a hurry.
From Humble and Small Beginnings... August 30, 2006
Mr. S. Anderson (Hereford, England)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Werner Herzog's second feature film still retains its ability to both shock and disturb and highlights the maverick German's propensity to covet controversy and take risks. In it's depiction of a world entirely made up of dwarves he forces the audience to ask the uncomfortable question of what it is too be normal? The film's detailing of a dwarf uprising at an unnamed and mysterious institution, has an allegorical echo of the many protests and rebellions hitting the USA, Mexico and Germany itself around the turn of the decade. The question of normality thus takes on frightening and nightmarish tones when one considers the various human rights violations occurring in the world at that time. The sense of a nightmare also lends the film a strange and cloying atmosphere, not unlike that found in an effective horror film. The desolate and dead landscape of the Spanish island of Lanzarote only goes to reinforce this sense of fear and isolation and is one of the most effective spatial metaphors to surface in Herzog's cinema. He effortlessly exposes our deepest and innermost anxieties and how we take so many things for granted (such as opening a door or climbing onto a bed). Accusations of exploitation have been levelled at Herzog in regard to this film, but in reality he affords the dwarves a decency and humanity, and a sense of reality by the manner in which he shoots them and composes them in the shot. With an open ended narrative structure and an equally strange soundtrack, Herzog showed the world that his lexicon of film language was to be different. Not an intentional deconstruction like Godard, but a much more naturalistic form of film-making, film-making based on gut instinct. If one can persevere through the form and the nihilistic tone, one discovers a treasure trove overflowing with symbolism and metaphor, and at the film's conclusion a better understanding of the human condition.
 Interesting...bizarre.. but not Herzog at his best January 7, 2008
Ian (London)
Interesting, in the sense that it makes you think about things, but below par to the rest of Herzog's later oeuvre. Although some of the imagery is quite startling, this one's only for hardcore Herzog fans...
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