Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)
Directed by Werner Herzog

Film Review

The maddest film ever made, from the maddest director of them all?  Or a superb allegory of mankind's deepest fears, a chilling nightmarish vision of a world tumbling into chaos as man's desire for freedom finally asserts itself?   Even Dwarfs Started Small remains Werner Herzog's most controversial and abstract film, one that has bemused, fascinated and provoked even his most stalwart devotees.  The film was Herzog's personal reaction to the cultural and political revolutions that were sweeping the world in the late 1960s, although it may also have been influenced by his early childhood experiences in post-Fascist Germany.

There are some striking similarities with other auteur films of this period, most notably Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967) and Luis Buñuel's Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972), but none of these is as off-the-wall and viscerally disturbing as Herzog's film.   It is impossible to get the full impact of Even Dwarfs Started Small in a single viewing; it has to be seen at least three times for the true undiluted horror of what it presents to be fully appreciated.  What Herzog is showing us is a vision of Hell (evoking the work of the 16th Century painter Hieronymus Bosch), where a well-ordered but repressed society implodes under its constraints.  This is what happens when the elastic bands holding back our primitive impulses finally snap.

The film is an unsettling synthesis of the real and the surreal.  The intimate handheld camerawork and naturalistic performances lend a documentary-style realism which is totally belied by the almost alien setting (Lanzarote in the Canary Islands) and bizarre content.  Herzog projects the spectator into a dream-fantasy where his own world can be glimpsed, through the distorting mirror of the imagination.  It is not the dwarfs that frighten us; it is the world they inhabit.

The dwarf symbolises what man has become - mentally, morally and spiritually stultified by the constraints and false ideals of the bourgeois system.  Man no longer fits the world he was born into and it comes to tyrannise him.  Even the nuptial bed presents an insuperable obstacle.  Inevitably, mankind runs amok, destroying two emblems of the bourgeois imperialist straitjacket: the motor car and the typewriter.  And that's just the start.

Very quickly, we begin to identify with the characters in the film, and there is a point at which we stop seeing them as dwarfs and realise that it is the world around them that is out of proportion.  Just as the rules of civilised behaviour are breached and set on fire (along with the geraniums), the natural order also breaks down, with chickens starting to eat one another.  The whole of creation appears to be caught up in the insane process of revolution and there is no knowing where it will end.   Once the wheel of change has started to turn, the descent to anarchy appears unstoppable.  Why should a bird fly back into the cage from which it has escaped?

Even Dwarfs Started Small was the third feature that Herzog made, following his award winning debut film Signs of Life (1968).  It came immediately after Fata Morgana and Herzog has stated that his troubled experiences on that film (which included falling seriously ill with malaria and spending time in an African jail) affected his mood when he made Even Dwarfs Started Small, with the result that the film was much darker than he had intended.

Unable to get the film approved by the censorship board in his own country, Herzog was compelled to distribute it himself.  The reaction he received was overwhelmingly negative.  Critics and the public reacted in equally hostile vein to his apparent exploitation of midgets and the perceived animal cruelty seen in the film (which included the crucifixion of a monkey and the slaughter of a pig, as well as the aforementioned poultry cannibalism).  The film, like much of the director's work, was far better received in other countries, particularly the United States.

Like Tod Browning's Freaks (1932), the film that partly inspired it, Even Dwarfs Started Small has acquired something of a cult status and has had a strong influence on other filmmakers, including David Lynch and Harmony Korine.  Even in Herzog's diverse body of work, it stands apart as something that defies both categorisation and an unambiguous literal interpretation.  Although this film is less well-known and generally less well-regarded than some of Werner Herzog's other films, it is unquestionably a work of great merit, and may well be the one that posterity remembers him by.

Film Synopsis

In the midst of a dead, barren landscape there sits a secluded institution, which might be a prison or a lunatic asylum.  All of the people in the institution - the director, the guards, the inmates - are dwarfs.  Everyone in this world is a dwarf.  One day, the inmates of the institution rise up against the director, who reacts by taking one of the prisoners hostage and locking himself in his office.  At first, the inmates make use of their new-found freedom to commit minor offences.  But, as they acquire a taste for anarchy, they embark on a wild orgy of destruction...