"Even Dwarfs Started Small" - Werner Herzog (1970)

Werner Herzog shot Even Dwarfs Started Small (Auch Zwerge Haben Klein Angefangen) on the Canary Islands immediately after shooting (but before releasing) Fata Morgana during his travels to East Africa. Though the film was immediately banned in Germany, it made the young director famous and remains as one of the most distinctive (and grotesque) films ever made. The story concerns some sort of institution in a desolate volcanic landscape, where all the inmates and the supervising personnel are dwarfs. In fact no non-dwarf is seen in the film.

At the outset, we see a police investigation post-mortem concerning a revolt that has taken place at the institution. The off-camera policeman asks how all this destruction got started, and then we cut to a narrative in flashback that comprises the remainder of the film.

When the principal and some of the instructors were temporarily away, the inmates started their rebellion by attempting to storm the administrative building. The Director barricades himself inside, along with an inmate taken hostage, Pepe, whom he ties up in a chair. Giddy with excitement from their newfound freedom from authority, the rebellious inmates start to engage in various naughty acts, such as looking through just-discovered adult magazines that belonged to their instructors. Soon they move to progressively more destructive actions, such as burning and destroying a lone palm tree that was a graceful feature of their desolate environment. They then go on to torture and kill barnyard animals at the institution and even their fellow blind inmates. All the while they are madly giggling with joy at how all the rules are being broken at will: it’s the sheer love of wanton, destructive behaviour.

The film that most strikingly comes to mind when watching Even Dwarfs Started Small is Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932). Both films confront us with ultimate questions concerning just what we are and what constitutes our humanity -- and at the same time they stir within us a deep sense of horror. Certainly Dwarfs is one of the bleakest films from a filmmaker whose trademark is human depravity and despair. What is particularly disturbing is that throughout this film we are torn by the opposing tendencies to see the dwarfs either as innocent children, or as wizened, deformed, and unnatural creatures. The dwarfs laugh innocently and play childish games one minute, and then gleefully engage in some cruel act in the next minute. Perhaps thankfully, the most violent events in the film take place off camera: the killing of the mother sow suckling its piglets, the murder of their fellow inmate, and the thrashing of Pepe.

The narrative doesn’t seem to traverse any clear-cut course, but it does leave one with a collection of disturbing images long after the lights come on. Here are some reflections on a few of them:

• The musical soundtrack mostly alternates between a wailing gypsy minstrel song and a native African choral piece. Both pieces have undertones of primitive urges that are far removed from modern Western society.

• Herzog is known to despise and fear chickens, and they must represent something overwhelmingly repulsive to him. Their relentlessly spasmodic movements and their often fierce, mindless savagery conjure up a sense of meaningless animal brutality. In this film, he repeatedly shows chickens and roosters attacking, killing, and sometimes eating each other. This is Herzog’s view of the benignity of Nature.

• There are two blind inmates in the institution who can only defend themselves from their fellow-inmate tormentors by wildly swinging plastic bats in random directions. The utter futility of this exercise and the hopelessness of their circumstances is a repeated motif in the film.

• There is a moment in the middle of the film when the inmates are somewhat contemplative as they are shown a “doll house” of artificially dressed-up dead insects and spiders that have been collected by one of their members and kept in a cigar box. The absurdity of these bugs being cast in human social roles and just how far those roles are from their brute reality is clearly a metaphor for the dwarfs, and by extension, to all of humanity.

• The inmates gleefully set fire to a bunch of potted pots that have just begun to flower. This shows their contempt for Nature and perhaps symbolizes their revenge for what Nature has done to them.

• Late in the piece, the dwarfs engage in a solemn and ceremonial procession as they carry about on a cross a live monkey that they have crucified. This is evidence not only of their own ritualistic brutality, but is also a suggestion that all religions are little more than mindless exercises in barbarity.

• In the final scene, the smallest and meekest of the inmates, Hombre, laughs hysterically at a kneeling camel that finally defecates on camera. The sheer stupidity and pointlessness of Hombre’s nonstop laughter is all that we are left with at the end of the film.

Critics complained that the film rudely disparaged the student revolutionary activities of the late 1960s. Others complained of racism and obscene humour in the film. But the overarching metaphor goes far beyond such narrow concerns. What it says to us is that we are all like the dwarfs in this film, trying hopelessly to make sense of a cruel and brutal dystopia and merely inflicting more harm on ourselves and on our fellow creatures. It’s a grim but unforgettable vision.
★★★½

"Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne" - Robert Bresson (1944)

After an early career as a painter, photographer, and writer, Robert Bresson made his first feature film, Les Anges du Péché (Angels of the Streets) in 1943. Even with this first directorial effort, Bresson was sufficiently established with the French intelligentsia to have Jean Giraudoux work on the dialogue. With Bresson’s next film, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne), another stellar figure, Jean Cocteau, wrote the dialogue for a script based on an episode from Denis Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et Son Maitre, but updated to a modern setting. The film is considered to be something of an anomaly in Bresson’s oeuvre, since it had a more or less conventional romantic narrative structure and employed professional actors. His famous cinematic style is more consistently manifested in his subsequent films, such as Diary of a Country Priest (Journal D'un Curé De Campagne, 1951) and A Man Escaped (Un Condamné à Mort s'est Échappé ou Le Vent Souffle où il Veut, 1956).

The story begins with two upper-class lovers, Hélène and Jean, discussing their relationship. From the very outset, we can see that Hélène is guarded and cautious about revealing her true feelings, while Jean is a transparent and guileless personality who wears his heart on his sleeve. In an attempt to discuss their deteriorating relationship without losing face, Hélène tells Jean that her passion for him is growing cold. Jean immediately and enthusiastically responds that he feels exactly the same way, and he suggests that they set themselves free and remain “good friends”. Hélène covers her overt responses, but it is evident that she is deeply wounded by Jean’s reactions. She sets out to take her revenge.

Hélène visits an old friend of high social standing from the countryside who has recently become impoverished and has moved to Paris with her beautiful daughter, Agnès. Faced with economic ruin, the daughter must now support her mother by working as a cabaret dancer and taking money for sexual favours from male patrons; but the mother and daughter are ashamed of the lives they now lead. Hélène’s goal is to shield their past from Jean and to present Agnès as woman of impeccable modesty. Hélène arranges a “chance” meeting in the Bois de Boulogne, a large Parisian park, between Jean and the two ladies, and, of course, Jean is immediately fascinated with Agnès. Hélène stage manages the subsequent interactions, and Jean is inevitably ensnared in the spider’s web of attraction. Finally he proposes marriage, and Hélène makes sure that the marriage ceremony is a gala affair with all their high-society acquaintances invited. Immediately afterwards, Hélène triumphantly announces to Jean that he has just married a tramp and has disgraced himself. Jean, dumbfounded and made a fool, asks Hélène why she did that to him. Hélène reminds him about the fury of a woman scorned.

Agnès’s situation throughout all this has been ambiguous. She had been reluctant to play along with Hélène’s plot and had avoided Jean all along. But this avoidance had only inflamed Jean’s passion and had led to even more amorous gestures on his part. In the end, she had reluctantly succumbed to his entreaties and fallen in love with Jean, even knowing that her scandalous past would be revealed at some point. When the secret is finally revealed at her wedding, she suffers from complete despair and humiliation. When Jean goes to visit her after the wedding, he learns that she has suffered a heart attack and now faces imminent death. Weak and barely conscious, Agnès tells Jean that she is worthless, but that she loves him. She tells him that he should forget all about her, but hopefully not condemn her. But now, in a denouement that thwarts Hélène’s malicious plans, Jean swears his undying love for and commitment to Agnès and begs her not to leave this world. Weakly and with her eyes still closed, Agnès smiles and promises that she will stay. This is the closing shot of the film.

The style of the film is seductive and shows a different side of Bresson, although it retains many of his cinematic touches. Like his other films, the soundtrack has very crisp, distinctively identifiable sound effects that convey an “interior” sense of the story, as it might be told on reflection or recollection. But, here, the visuals also have this stylized effect. The imposing and glossy presence of the automobiles in the film seem to convey a sense of structure and ritual that goes with the lifestyles of the characters. The repetitive, stylized actions of the principal characters establish their visual signatures, which we come to associate with our understanding of their inner dimensions.

For the most part, we don’t see much physical action in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne: for such a romantic story, for example, it is interesting that there are no real embraces or kisses. The romantic development of the relationship between Jean and Agnès is skipped over, and we cut straight to the wedding. There is one particularly interesting scene, however, at an evening party, at which Agnès is seen dancing with one of her “gentleman” customers. The shot-reverse-shot editing of this sequence is skilled and precise, and it presents an interaction between the two characters that, though still stylized, is dynamic and revealing of Agnès’s character. This kind of dynamic editing was not much followed up in Bresson’s subsequent films, but it represents something that perhaps could have been put to further effective use.

Much critical attention has been on the rather mesmerizing image of Maria Casares, in the role of Hélène. Indeed, the Spanish-born Casares, who had already been featured in Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise (Les Enfants Du Paradis, 1945) and was Albert Camus’s lover, is a fascinating central figure. Only 22 when she played in Les Dames, Casares appears here to be a much older and more experienced woman, always maintaining a civilized but equivocal demeanor. Her reserved, half-smiling expression betrays to the viewers, but not to Jean, her determination for revenge. She went on to star in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) and to have a distinguished career on the French stage. Interesting though she is, however, one shouldn’t merely focus all one's attention on Casares here. Bresson, who understood the expressive power of the film camera to capture intimate feelings and how inappropriate it often is to portray theatrical staging on film, imposed a highly restrained style on all his actors. Thus Paul Bernard’s performance as Jean is also very flat and subdued (something that doesn’t play as well for a role of a passionate romantic). Most interesting to me, however, is the performance of Elina Labourdette, as Agnès, which I believe carries the narrative even more compellingly than does the role of Hélène (which doesn’t evolve much past the opening scene). Agnès’s sense of shame, anxiety, and ultimately her complete surrender to love, transform the film from just a nasty story of vindication to a transcendent plane of feeling that would characterise many of Bresson’s subsequent films. When you see this film, watch Agnès struggle (and ultimately succeed) to find her way.
★★★

"A Man Escaped" - Robert Bresson (1956)

Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (Un Condamné À Mort S'est Échappé Ou Le Vent Souffle Où Il Veut – "A Condemned Man Escaped or the Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth”, 1956) tells the story of French World War II prisoner of war André Devigny's incarceration by the Nazis during their occupation of France. At the beginning of the film, Bresson states that it is a true story (he, himself, had also been a Nazi prisoner of war) and is presented without adornment. By all accounts this appears to be the case. Yet it is to my mind Bresson’s finest film and ranks as one of the great artistic achievements in cinema. With this work, alone, Bresson assured himself a place in the Pantheon.

The lengthy French title is worth bearing in mind while watching the movie, because the story depicts a man who is determined to do something about his seemingly hopeless circumstances, and at the same time is dependent on the mysterious currents of unpredictable events. The “wind bloweth where it listeth” (pleases), as Jesus said to Nicodemus, and we must find a way to live under those conditions. Throughout the film we watch a man engaged in the struggle to exert his will and realise his slim possibilities for life. He is always at the mercy of the fates, and yet he is not a fatalist: he struggles on. During his imprisonment, the prisoner, Fontaine, is once asked by a fellow inmate who happens to be a priest whether he prays. Fontaine answers that he does, sometimes, and the priest admonishes him, suggesting that God didn’t arrange the world to make it so easy for the sometimes prayerful. Fontaine responds that in fact the much-too-trivial arrangement of the world would be simply to let God handle everything and to be passively resigned to one's fate and pray. For Fontaine, the only truly authentic path is not prayerful resignation, but to struggle mightily against oppression. One must act.

The opening shot of the film shows a close-up of Fontaine’s hands, and then the camera pulls back to show the prisoner riding in the back of a car with another prisoner and looking for a chance to jump. He finally makes his move, but the camera remains fixed on his now-empty seat. In a minute we see that he has been recaptured by the Nazi police. He is taken to the prison, where he is severely beaten by guards, again off-camera, and then deposited in a heap into his tiny cell. As Fontaine comes to, we finally here his voice-over for the first time. He describes how, now handcuffed, he discovered that he could talk through his cell window to some fellow prisoners in the courtyard and could communicate with his unseen cell neighbour by tapping out the letters of the alphabet on the wall in order to compose messages. Eventually, he learns how to pass small parcels through his cell window to his courtyard comrades and obtains from them a pin, by means of which he manages to unshackle his handcuffs. All this is important, because he knows that executions are being carried out inside the prison, and he may be summoned for execution at any time. Soon, however, he is transferred from his first-floor cell to another cell on the top floor. This time he is no longer shackled, so his work learning how to undo the handcuffs amounted to nothing. And furthermore, now he has no friendly neighbour with whom to communicate by tapping, and he is not able to pass secret parcels in and out through his upper-level window. His only interactions with others now take place when the prisoners on his floor file out to empty their slop buckets and then wash up in the lavatory.

Still determined to find a way out, he stares at his oaken cell door for long periods and finally decides that it may be possible to dismantle some of the slots by painstaking effort. He fashions a small chisel out of his spoon and begins working away at the door. After weeks of work and the amazing good luck of finding a needed second spoon, he is able to remove the door panels so that he can exit his cell when the guards are not around. Soon he is roaming the corridors of the prison at night in order to learn more about the layout and figure out an escape plan.

Eventually, Fontaine discovers a skylight through which he could escape and passes the crucial information to another prisoner, Orsini, who wishes to flea with him. Now Fontaine and Orsini set to work trying to fashion the ropes they will need by cutting up any scraps of clothing and bedding that they can find. There are detailed scenes of Fontaine’s hands engaged in the painstaking work to make the long, wire-reinforced cloth rope that he will need. Meanwhile, Orsini, growing antsy, decides to take off on his own in broad daylight and manages to make it up to the prison rooftop. He is eventually caught by the prison guards, though, and he is returned to his cell, awaiting a next-day firing squad. Though he failed, Orsini manages to pass on to Fontaine, just before he is executed, some crucial information about how to make the strong grappling hooks that he will need in order to make it beyond the prison rooftop. Once again, fate has intervened and supplied Fontaine with a crucial piece of the puzzle. Fontaine sets about working to make the grappling hooks, and again we see detailed shots of his hands engaged in the laborious work.

When Fontaine has his equipment ready, he knows that there’s no time to lose. But he feels he needs a partner in order manage the ropes during the escape, and Orsini is dead. But just then he is taken out for an interrogation and told that he will be executed in a day or two. When he is returned to his cell, he discovers that he has now been assigned a cell-mate – Jost, a 16-year-old French boy who had joined the German army, but who had gotten himself into trouble somehow. Here is a potential partner, but can this turncoat be trusted? Fontaine must decide whether to let Jost in on his plan or try to kill him. These are the only alternatives.

Fontaine and Jost, now alone in their cell, engage in a long conversation, the longest in the film, as Fontaine searchingly tries to learn about Jost’s character. Agonisingly uncertain, Fontaine decides to risk taking Jost with him, and they set out the next night through the skylight. The final fifteen minutes of the film cover their breathtaking passage. One critical hurdle: Fontaine must kill one of the armed guards outside the inner prison wall, with his bare hands and without making much noise. The tense build-up to this moment shows Fontaine waiting until a passing train makes enough noise to drown out his actions. The actual murder is not shown – again we must use our imagination for that violent act.

None of the violent events in the film are shown on-camera. The jump from the car in the early scenes, the beating of Fontaine, the beating of Orsini, the executions, the killing of the guard during the final escape – all of these events are shown off-camera. What we do see is enough for us to feel the inner turmoil of the characters, who must maintain emotionless countenances in order not to provoke the prison guards. The soundtrack is spare, but it features Bresson’s characteristic insertion of specific, crisp, and distinctive off-screen sounds that intensify our concentration. At various moments the soundtrack features music from Mozart's Great Mass in C Minor, (K. 427), and this is particularly effective in conveying the solemn life-and-death struggle that we are witnessing.

How much of this story can be seen as a metaphor for human existence? We all identify ourselves with Fontaine, though the events described are far from our own personal experiences. Certainly the music, the riveting performance by François Leterrier, as Fontaine, and the careful focus of the individual shots and sounds all contribute to the experience. This is a film whose narrative buildup was unmatched in Bresson’s other efforts. The final moments of liberation at the close are among the more exhilarating aesthetic experiences in screen history.
★★★★

Robert Bresson

About Robert Bresson:

• Robert Bresson

Films of Robert Bresson:

• Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne - Robert Bresson (1944)
• Diary of a Country Priest - Robert Bresson (1950)
• A Man Escaped - Robert Bresson (1956)
• Pickpocket - Robert Bresson (1959)
• The Trial of Joan of Arc - Robert Bresson (1962)
• Au Hasard Balthazar - Robert Bresson (1966)
• Mouchette - Robert Bresson (1967)
• Lancelot du Lac - Robert Bresson (1974)

Robert Bresson

Films: Les Ages du Péché (Angels of the Streets, 1943), Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne, 1945), Journal d'un Curé de Campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951), Un Condamné à Mort s'est Échappé ou Le Vent Souffle où il Veut (A Man Escaped, 1956). Pickpocket (1959), Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc, 1962), Au Hasard Balthazar (Balthazar, 1966), Mouchette (1967), Une Femme Douce (A Gentle Woman, 1969), Quatre Nuits d'un Rêveur (Four Nights of a Dreamer, 1971), Lancelot du Lac (Lancelot of the Lake, 1974), Le Diable Probablement (The Devil Probably, 1977), L'Argent (Money, 1983)

Robert Bresson (1901-1999) stands apart from all other directors. He has a distinctive style, but there is considerable disagreement concerning what, exactly, is the nature of that style. Although there is much written about him, yet he seems still to be the least understood famous director. There is even a dispute concerning his birth year: it was either 1901 or 1907. The one thing that people seem to agree on is that he was very good. Although his films were not successful at the box office, he still has a major following among serious cineastes, was well respected by his fellow film directors, and was a significant figure in the French intellectual scene.

So what can we say about that style of his? Critics and scholars often refer to Bresson’s style as “spiritual”. Paul Schrader, prior to launching his career as a screenwriter and director, characterised Bresson’s style as “transcendental” [1]. Although these terms strike a chord, there is no common agreement as to what they entail precisely. The discourse on this subject is somewhat encumbered and made more complicated by several factors that are brought up in the analysis of Bresson’s work. One issue is his Roman Catholic upbringing and the extent to which he was influenced by Jansenism and the various disputes that the Jansenist movement generated. In addition some French scholars have been influenced by postmodernist thinking, which in my view is overly reliant on a linguistic-based structuring of existence and is inappropriate for Bresson’s highly visual style [2].  If a cinematic experience is to be profound and to have a direct impact, however, then it should not require such a background analysis for appreciation.

So let us just consider the evidence of Bresson’s films as we have them available today. They represent, in my opinion, thoroughgoing examples of Existentialism in Film, for they all confront us with the issues of a lonely individual’s attempts to come to terms with his or her ultimate fate in the universe. But unlike many Existentialist films, Bresson’s films are not representative of Expressionism in Film. We do not see a “coloured” world that represents the exteriorisation of someone’s inner turmoil, as is the case in an Expressionistic film. Instead, we are presented with seemingly meaningless visual fragments, or impressions, which we must collect and assemble into a coherent understanding of the inner turmoil of the principal character. Thus, we could say that Bresson is an “Impressionist”, rather than an Expressionist. But there is no Impressionist movement with which we could associate Bresson’s work: he stands alone as his own archetype.

This Impressionistic cinematic style might have evolved from Bresson’s early career in painting. One can think of his individual scenes almost like Van Gogh’s palette knife: each shot, always of short duration, is individually crafted like a thick stroke of the palette knife to fit into the larger mosaic of his film. Thus Bresson had no interest in having actors “play a role” (he was famously unpopular with actors), and so usually chose actors with no professional experience.

Once chosen, the actors are rehearsed repeatedly with instructions not to think or inflect, and not to invest the words with any intent or motivation. As Bresson prescribes, everything is “weighed, measured, timed, repeated ten, twenty times” until it is automatic, until it can be done or said unthinkingly. To help achieve this effect, none of the shots are allowed to “play out,” but are usually foreshortened, and the written dialogue is of a deliberately cryptic nature. [2]

Bresson did not want narrative threads to be portrayed by the actors, but, instead, wanted the viewers to be forced to make that narrative composition in their heads. He stated that he disliked the theatre, because it inherently represents the author's own narrative of the events. All the events in a drama, according to Bresson, are connected to identified causes – causes that have been identified by the author. But when we have our own experiences, there are no immediately perceived causes for events – those causes are only attributed later by us, upon reflection. At the time we experience the immediate events, there are no causes tied to them. Bresson didn't want his actors to introduce their own interpretations, either. His actors and actresses are usually expressionless in his movies and appear to be “flat”. They are often shown with downcast expressions, which causes us (the viewers) to contemplate their inner experiences (which are usually not at all obvious to us). As a consequence, after his first two films, Bresson always used actors (which from his background in painting he preferred to call “models”) with no previous acting experience. Intriguingly however, though his models usually played people from very ordinary or working-class circumstances, they were often drawn from highly intellectual circles. For example, Florenc Delay, who played the lead role in The Trial of Joan of Arc, was the daughter of a French Academician, and her own novels led to her later elevation to the French Academy. Anne Wiazemsky, who played Marie in Au Hasard Balthazar, was the granddaughter of Francois Mauriac, and she also later become a novelist.

In addition, there is usually no backstory in a Bresson film. We are given very little context at the beginning of the film, even though on many occasions there is a narrative voice-over present which could have been used to supply us with background context, if Bresson had so desired. Just as there is no assumed or understood past that took place before the film events shown, there is usually no clear understanding of a future for the characters when the film comes to an end. Certain things have been resolved, but other aspects remain open.

The camera in Bresson's work does not have the character of the objective silent witness, which it usually has at times in most films. There is no objective point of view and usually no establishing shots that serve to give us an objective sense of a the situation and spatial geometry of a scene. Often we are shown only close-ups of hands and feet concerning a particular activity, and we must extrapolate from then to infer the larger surroundings. From this description, it may sound as though Bresson is merely trying to play a game and keep the viewer guessing, but I don’t think this is the case. The close-up shots of hands seem psychologically realistic in the course of the actions shown. These close-up actions are always individual foci of attention that reflect the way that we actually experience and remember experiences – the experiences associated with our own individual interactions with things in the world. When we watch actors in the film engaged this way, we share and empathize with the nature of that existential experience and find ourselves getting “inside” the character shown in the film.

This empathetic effect is accentuated by Bresson's use of sound. His soundtracks always have very crisp and individuated noises that can be identified with distinct activities that are going on, often off-camera. Of course, all European films made in Bresson's time typically did not use synchronous sound, and sound effects were dubbed in at the editing stage. But Bresson's injection of unique, recognisable sounds was distinctive. It gave the soundtrack the special flavour of sounds we hear when we are withdrawn from normal social discourse and are intensely listening to the sounds around us. Thus the sense of withdrawal on the part of the film character is passed on to the film viewer and further supports our identification with the main character in the film.

Despite the difficulty of Bresson’s cinematic narrative style, he is certainly one of the most interesting filmmakers, and his films bear repetitive viewing. What he showed was the anxiety, uncertainty, and tragedy of existence. There is always an appreciation that, though grace may never be achieved, yet it is perhaps always a possibility. This is the Sufi’s way.

1. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, University of California Press (1972).
2. Jane Sloan, “ ”Chapter II: Critical Survey”, Robert Bresson: A Guide to References and Resource (1983, 2006), G K Hall, http://www.mastersofcinema.org/bresson/Words/Sloan_Bresson_Survey.html