Hacker Cinema
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle
1974 · Film · 109 min
Directed by Werner Herzog
The film follows Kaspar Hauser, who lived the first seventeen years of his life chained in a tiny cellar with only a toy horse to occupy his time, devoid of all human contact except for a man who wears a black overcoat and top hat who feeds him.
3 positive2 neutralfrom 5 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
5 comments on Hacker News
Interesting... I will mainly always remember "My Best Friend" (1999) [1] and "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" [2]. Mainly this scene in the later [3].
What writings do you recommend from Herzog?
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0200849/
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071691/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9uqPeIYMik
Or a feature film, Werner did one about another curious mystery called "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaspar_Hauser
Here's Roger Ebert on Herzog's Nosferatu, one of my favorites: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-nosferatu-the-vampyre-1979 . For me, the quality of Herzog's films is wildly variable, but in his best films, he's a poet of human extremes and vulnerabilities, as in his documentary The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner, about a champion ski jumper https://slate.com/culture/2018/02/the-genius-of-werner-herzogs-the-great-ecstasy-of-woodcarver-steiner.html and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-enigma-of-kaspar-hauser-1974
This reminds me of the story of Kaspar Hauser[1] (which was made in to a movie by Werner Herzog[2]) and of the fascinating book Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks.[3]
In his book, Sacks investigates various cases of children growing up without language, how they cope (or don't cope) with it, how they finally acquire language (if they do), and how differently they see the world in both the pre-linguistic and post-linguistic states. Hauser was one of the most famous cases of this sort, Helen Keller[4] was another.
Reading this book inspired me to learn sign language, which I expected to be radically different from spoken and written language, and more powerful in many ways, as you can physically describe things in ways that has little parallel to spoken and written languages.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaspar_hauser
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enigma_of_Kaspar_Hauser
[3] - https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Voices-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0375704078
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_keller
Great movie: "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" (original title "Every Man for Himself and God Against All") - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071691/