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Published on: January 11th, 2009

… and also some film-makers, as this woefully misbegotten, very early effort from Werner Herzog so amply and depressingly proves. Easily one of the most excruciatingly terrible movies made by a respected, 'name' director (others include Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4-Ever and Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park), it's an aggressively unpleasant fable of revolt and anarchy, one whose major gimmick – and it is just a gimmick – is that the entire cast comprises adults of restricted growth: dwarfs and midgets, if you will. Herzog, who is himself of "normal" size, has stated that the film was inspired by the idea that "if Goya and Hieronymous Bosch had the guts to do their gloomiest stuff, why shouldn't I?" Pretty fast company for a then-unknown chap in his early twenties, you might suppose, but this Old Masters angle is used by Herzog as a thin pretext to indulge all manner of pretentious, wayward, mostly incoherent nonsense – dutifully acted out by his hapless cast.
   The story, such as it is, concerns the aftermath of some kind of small-scale revolution that has taken place in an institution in a remote, scenic corner of Lanzarote. The hated boss of the institution has been overthrown, and the "inmates" now make merry in and around a large courtyard below his office, where he has holed himself up along with a giggling "hostage." The boss's former charges, increasingly desperate to get their hands on their former tormentor, embark on an orgy of destruction, anti-social behaviour and nihilistic, juvenile japes. Indeed, Herzog – who often films his cast from above – seems to see the characters (and perhaps the actors) as freakish children rather than rational, adult individuals, goading them on to ever more extreme forms of misbehaviour.
   These include numerous scenes in which animals are severely mistreated: several chickens are so brutally mishandled that we see them die on camera; a cockfight is staged; a small monkey is paraded around in a sub-Bunuelian sequence of larkish blasphemy, tied to a cross and squirming in evident severe discomfort. The scenes with the fowl and the monkey contravene UK animal-cruelty laws and are usually thus excised from prints shown in Britain, and Herzog's "defence" of the latter makes for startling reading: "There is real taboo-breaking in the film," be brags to interviewer Paul Cronin in the book Herzog On Herzog. "The animal rights people, for example, were furious at the scene where the monkey was tied to the cross and paraded about, even though it was tied down with very soft wool."
   This comment is particularly sickening as (a) Herzog clearly realises that the animal has been caused significant distress by its use in his film, and (b) he supposes that, because "soft" wool was used, this somehow alleviates or obviates the fact that the creature's experience is anything but a pleasant one. Perhaps Mr Herzog would himself like to be tied – with very soft wool of course – to a larger crucifix for a spell, and see how he likes it.
   During the Cronin interview, Herzog – who airily (and hilariously) compares his witless, tasteless farrago with Tod Browning's superb, sensitive Freaks (1932) – also makes some inadvertently revealing comments about the human participants in his enterprise:

"The dwarfs in the film are not freaks, we are the dwarfs. They are well proportioned, charming and beautiful people. If you are only two feet tall that means the world around you is totally out of proportion… We all have a dwarf inside us… It is a very real nightmare for some people who wake up at night and know that basically, deep down, they are just a midget. Sometimes when I was working on the film, I would wake up in terror at night and had to feel about with my arms and legs: was I still as big as I was when I went to sleep?"

So one minute Herzog is claiming to regard the dwarfs as "well proportioned, charming and beautiful", and the next he's admitting to having "a very real nightmare" that he himself has turned into one of them. Something doesn't add up, here. Herzog's defence is that "it comes quite simply down to this: nightmares and dreams do not follow the rules of political correctness." And indeed this is the case – but "nightmares and dreams" take place inside the head of the dreamer, and (like paintings) do not involve the actual physical exploitation of other living entities. Nor are they projected in public for others, having paid for the privilege, to watch.
   Even Dwarfs Started Small, however, is a work of cinema, and must be assessed as such. Laughably sophomoric in its philosophical and political "subtexts," tedious in its crushingly repetitive monotony, it wastes both the talents and time of the performers and also the consistently striking monochrome cinematography from Thomas Bauch. It's become something of a succes de scandale over the years, described as "the ultimate cult movie" due to its outre style and elusive inaccessibility – as if anything so extreme from such a respected director must somehow be some kind of a crazed masterpiece, instead of the unacceptably cruel, exploitative, opportunistic, meretricious trash which it really is.

Neil Young, 15th January, 2009

original title : Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen
director : Werner Herzog
country : West Germany
year : 1970
run-time : 91m approx (BBFC)

seen : 11th January, 2009
cinema : Star and Shadow, Newcastle, UK
format : 35mm
paid :  £4*

MVP : Thomas Mauch (cinematographer)
respected second opinion : Keith Phipps, The Onion

*(plus  £1 annual membership renewal)