The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser - A German Film By Werner Herzog: Events in Hyderabad

REVIEW FOR THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR...

The Hyderabad Film Club is organising a 5-day retrospective of Werner Herzog films, from 5th to 10th June, at the Sarathi Studios in Ameerpet. Today, the third day, The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser will be screened at 6:30pm.

In 1828, a man was found standing in the town square of Nuremberg holding a letter to the local army captain in his hand. He was barely able to speak or even walk. Assumed to be an idiot, when given a pencil and a piece of paper, he wrote "Kaspar Hauser".

Over the next 5 years, attempts were made to teach him to fit into society. He learned to talk, and with the assistance of a professor, made an attempt at writing his own history.

Hauser's origins were never discovered, but he was rumored to be the illegitimate son of royalty. What is known is that he seems to have spent his early life up until the time he was found in the Nuremberg square, in a tiny cell, and had little human contact.

Nearly 150 years later, Werner Herzog took this true story and fashioned a strange film out of it. Like many European movies of the 1970s, it unfolds in its own time and fashion, seemingly without any narrative impetus in the accepted sense. It appears to be merely observational, documentary-like and lacking in viewpoint. But in fact, it is a film that makes some points about the social and linguistic reality which we accept as factual, and questions what it is about our lives that is socialised and what is natural.

Werner Herzog (born Werner Stipetic on September 5, 1942) is a critically and internationally acclaimed German film director, screenwriter, actor and opera director. He is often associated with the German New Wave movement (also called New German Cinema), along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schl