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Social structure "like a giant's robe upon a dwarfish thief," Werner Herzog recommends a thoroughgoing demolition. The Institute might be a school or a prison, drums and barrels and chickens pockmark the barren courtyard while volcanic peaks watch from afar. Sometimes it rankles to rattle inside an oversized world, "you really have to raise hell for the old pig to notice," the little inmates turn not just against the fatuous leader (Pepi Hermine) but also Nature. Eggs smashed, typewriters disemboweled and flower pots set ablaze as the prize palm tree comes tumbling down. The jalopy is hot-wired back to life only to run in circles, a Giotto O amid the camera's jagged swoops. Microcosms within microcosms: A brief break in the bacchanalia dives inside a cigar box to contemplate beetles and spiders in bridal veils and hats, "ja ja ja, wunderbar." Back in the barricaded office, the principal frets over the motto ("Cleanliness and Order") while the prisoner on his swivel chair can't keep a straight face. Buñuel and Vigo are the precedents, the excruciating comedy that is the Herzog onslaught leaves no stone unturned. (A mock-prayer before a raucous food fight points up the debt to Browning's Freaks.) Like a shrunken James Cagney, Hombre (Helmut Döring) sits astride a growling motorcycle or, unable to climb onto a vast white bed, giggles at nudie magazines. The pecking order and the Beavis snicker (cf. Downey's Putney Swope), through thick smoke a procession for the crucified monkey. The reeling carnival of a vandal's revolution, ignore it at your own peril. (Sightless witnesses are left riding a dead sow and slicing the air with canes.) "When we behave, nobody cares. But when we are bad, nobody forgets." The camel later from Kaspar Hauser's hallucination has its knees broken here, the ultimate timbre is suspended unforgettably between cackling and choking. Cinematography by Thomas Mauch. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |