by Paul Cronin
What is the “great ecstasy”?
The word comes from the Greek “ekstasis”, meaning “to step outside oneself,” like the mediaeval mystics did, experiencing faith and truth in an ecstatic, visionary form. Ecstasy in this context is something you would know about if you had ever been a ski jumper. You can see it on the flyers’ faces as they sweep past the camera, mouths agape, with their extraordinary expressions.
Ski flying isn’t just an athletic pursuit; it’s also spiritual, a question of how to master a fear of death. Those jumpers who thought they could beat Steiner only through athletic means never stood a chance. There is a profound solitude in what these men do. These are lonely people who train for ten years to prepare themselves for a few seconds in the air, when they step outside all we are as human beings. It’s as if they fly into the deepest, darkest abyss there is, in flagrant defiance of gravity, chasing one of mankind’s oldest dreams: to move through the air without a machine. Overcoming this mortal fear and deep anxiety is the striking thing about ski flyers. You rarely see muscular athletic men up there on the ramps; usually these are young kids with deathly pale, pimply faces and an unsteady look in their eyes. They dream about flying, about stepping into the ecstasy that pushes against the laws of nature. I don’t particularly care for gravity, so I suppose it’s no coincidence that several of my films – Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Wings of Hope and The White Diamond – are about people who dream of flying, are punished for it and crash to earth. I always saw Steiner as a brother of Fitzcarraldo. Both defy the laws of gravity in their own way.
We had five cameramen and special cameras on either side of the ski ramp that could shoot in extreme slow motion, at something like four or five hundred frames a second. Filming at this speed is a challenge because the entire reel shoots through the camera in only a few seconds, and enormous physical force is placed on the celluloid. For this short moment of acceleration the cameramen follow the trajectory of the jumper through the air, trying to keep him in frame and focus. The result is slow-motion shots of these men endlessly floating down to earth. Once seen, these images are never forgotten.
Steiner tells the story of his raven.
I went through his family album and found a picture of him as a kid with a raven. I asked him about it, but he turned the page and wouldn’t say anything. It took three more attempts on different days before he agreed to tell the story. You can see how uncomfortable he is in the film when he explains that when he was twelve, his only friend was a raven that he reared on bread and milk. Both the raven and Steiner were embarrassed by their friendship, so the raven would wait for him far away from the schoolhouse, and when all the other children were gone it would fly onto his shoulder and together they would ride on his bicycle. When the raven started losing its feathers, other birds began pecking it almost to death, and it was eventually so badly injured that Steiner was forced to kill it himself. “It was torture to see him being harried by his own kind because he couldn’t fly any more,” he says in the film. From that scene I cut to Steiner flying in slow motion, a shot that lasts more than a minute. A written caption appears, taken from a text by Robert Walser: “I should be all alone in this world, I, Steiner, and no other living being. No sun, no culture, I, naked on a high rock, no storm, no snow, no streets, no banks, no money, no time and no breath. Then I wouldn’t be afraid any more.”*
The story with the raven made such an impression on me that a couple of years later I borrowed it for a short film called No One Will Play with Me, made at a school for problem children in Munich. No one will play with Martin because, say his classmates, he stinks. He tells Nicole, a girl in his class, about his talking crow called Max, and they both visit it. Nicole then invites Martin to her home, where Nicole’s mother takes care of the bruises and cuts on Martin’s feet. It turns out he has been beaten repeatedly by his father and eats only popcorn because his mother is bedridden and dying of cancer. The conclusion I came to after making No One Will Play with Me is that there is no such thing as problem children, only problem parents. As with The Flying Doctors of East Africa, what interested me were questions of human perception, and before filming I spent time with the children, showing them prints of various paintings. One was of a city with castles, a harbour, a fish market and hundreds of people unloading ships; there were all sorts of things going on. I projected a slide of the picture for maybe ten seconds before turning it off, then asked the children, “What have you seen?” Four or five of them shouted in one voice, “A horse! A horse!” “Where on earth is the horse?” I thought to myself. I put the slide back on and searched. “Down there!” they all shouted, pointing. Hidden in the corner of the picture was a single horseman with a lance, standing next to a horse. Then we watched an American film, and I asked them to talk about what they had seen. Several said they liked the soldier leaning in a doorway. I couldn’t understand where they had seen this figure, but then replayed the scene and noticed that at one point the prince and princess leave the castle and a solitary soldier is standing guard. No adult would even have noticed this minor character, but for some of the children it was the thing most strongly imprinted on their minds. It makes me think to this very day.
Do you make a point of reading the reviews of your films?
Rarely. A positive review doesn’t make a film better, nor does a negative one make a film worse. I’ve never been interested in circling around my own navel; I try to avoid myself. I might glance at some of the more important reviews because they can influence box-office takings, but generally none of it has anything to do with me. Audience reactions have always been more important than those of professional film-goers. When it comes to other people’s work, I trust the professional even less; urgent recommendations are what I prefer. Some reviewers – like John Simon – have hated almost all my films, but that’s okay. I never minded Simon dunking me underwater for as long as he could, and actually like him for his hostility and all-pervading vitriol. He is dismissive of a film from beginning to end. The man is not apathetic.†
He wrote that The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is historically in accurate because Bruno S. – a forty-year-old man – played a sixteen-year-old boy.
When it comes to that film, age doesn’t matter. Bruno looked like a sixteen-year-old and is so unbelievably good on screen; he radiates such profound tragedy and radical, unblemished human dignity as no one else ever has. He’s the finest actor I have ever worked with, and at the time I insisted he win the Academy Award for his performance. I remain convinced he gives one of the greatest performances ever on film; no other actor in the world has moved me so deeply. As with some of the situations in Aguirre that were genuinely dangerous for everyone involved, when you see Bruno on screen you aren’t watching an actor merely playing a role and pretending to suffer. Some filmmaking is all about stylisation, but Bruno’s fundamental identity as a human being was untouched in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Watch the film and witness genuine human suffering, not theatrical melodrama. Anyway, who cares about the man’s age? I’m a filmmaker, a storyteller, not an accountant of history. Whether Bruno was forty or seventy or fifteen years old isn’t important. Criticism like this comes from the knowledge that audiences bring with them, and has nothing to do with the film per se.
Some reviewers compared it to Truffaut’s film L’Enfant sauvage, which had been released a few years before and is about the doctor who cared for the Wild Boy of Aveyron, a young child who was found in a forest, unable to speak or walk properly. Truffaut’s film is about a child raised by wolves who has some kind of social system instilled in him, even if it was that of wild animals. But Kaspar has no nature whatsoever, not that of bourgeois society, nor of wolves. He is, simply, human. Over time there have been several documented cases similar to the one in Truffaut’s film, but Kaspar’s story is unique. Nobody could tell exactly how old the real Kaspar was, though there are plausible guesses that he must have been about sixteen or seventeen when he was pushed out into the open as a foundlin
g, unable even to walk.
Who was Kaspar?
Nobody had any idea where he came from or who he was when he showed up in Nuremberg in 1828. When the townsfolk tried to communicate with him, it turned out he had spent his entire life locked away in a dark dungeon, tied to the ground with his belt. Like many of the characters in my films, Kaspar emerged from the blackest night. He arrived never having had any contact with or understanding of human beings; food was pushed into his cell every night while he was sleeping. He was unable to walk properly, had no idea what a house was, knew nothing about table manners and thought the belt around his waist was a natural part of his anatomy. It’s fascinating to read some of Kaspar’s own writings, where we learn he was even frightened by birdsong. His mind was unable to co-ordinate what it was hearing because he had no conception of the world. A couple of years after being taken in by the town, and once he had learnt language, word got out that Kaspar was writing his autobiography. Soon after came the first attempt on his life, followed by his murder. It was about two and a half years since he had been found in the town square. To this day no one knows who killed him.
When we hear the story of Kaspar Hauser, we think about how civilisation manipulates and remodels, always bringing us into line. His problems are our problems, the anxiety and difficulties we all have in adapting to the world, in connecting and communicating with others. Kaspar is the most intact person in this unnamed town; he has the kind of genuine intelligence you sometimes find in illiterates. But everything spontaneous in him is systematically deadened by this philistine society. Kaspar is propelled into the world as a young man who hadn’t experienced society in any way, and is doomed from the instant he arrives in town. The stultifying and staid existence of the people surrounding Kaspar reveals itself very potently within the historical setting of the Biedermeier era, the most intensively bourgeois period of German history, with its interminable rituals and rules. There’s a scene in the film when a young child holds a mirror up to Kaspar’s face; it’s the first time he has ever seen his reflection, and he immediately feels confused and shocked. This is what Kaspar is doing to everyone around him: forcing them to confront their day-to-day existence with new eyes. He is the stumbling block over which society trips.
At one point Kaspar spontaneously starts weeping after being given a baby to hold, then says, “Ich bin von allen abgetan” [“I am so far away from everything”]. In another scene, a professor of logic tests him by explaining there is one village inhabited by people who tell only the truth and a second where people tell only lies. A man is walking between the two villages. What is the only question, the professor asks Kaspar, that can be asked of this man to determine whether he is from the village of truth-tellers or the village of liars? In terms of strict logic, the only solution to the professor’s problem is the one he gives Kaspar, but Kaspar’s answer – that you can ask the man if he is a tree frog – is also correct. In the autopsy scene, the townspeople are like circling vultures as they feverishly attempt to find some physical aberration in Kaspar, and are overjoyed to discover that apparently he has a malformed brain. Finding this physical difference between themselves and Kaspar makes them feel better about how they treated him when he was alive. There is an inevitability about someone as uncivilised and uncultured as Kaspar not being able to survive that environment, and if the real Kaspar hadn’t been murdered, I would have killed him at the end of the film anyway. In terms of a coherent cinematic narrative, he has to be finished off.
How much historical research did you do?
When the film came out, I was asked if I used Jakob Wassermann’s novel Caspar Hauser as the basis of the story, though to this day I’ve never read it. I did look at Peter Handke’s play Kaspar, about the origins and distortions of language, and there is also a beautiful poem by Verlaine called “Gaspard Hauser chante”. I took time to read a volume of original documents and essays that included the first part of Anselm von Feuerbach’s report, alongside the poetry and autobiographical fragment Kaspar wrote, and details of his autopsy. Various things in the film – like Kaspar’s toy wooden horse, him being carried to a hilltop where he is taught to walk, his extremely tender feet, him spitting out food in disgust but delighting in bread and water – come from this source, as well as the text of the letter found in Kaspar’s hand read by the cavalry captain and Kaspar’s own beautiful line, “Ja, mir kommt es vor, dass mein Erscheinen auf dieser Welt ein harter Sturz gewesen ist” [“Well, it seems to me that my coming into this world was a terribly hard fall”]. The Kaspar Hauser archives are in Ansbach, the town where he was killed, but I never went there. A thousand books and more than ten thousand articles and research papers about Kaspar have been published; I asked myself whether I really needed to involve myself with such extraneous scholarship. The vast majority of this material focuses on the criminal case and frames the facts as a detective story or a police thriller, or digs into Kaspar’s origins, speculating on whether he was Napoleon’s illegitimate son. A film version of the story even suggested Kaspar was a prince from the royal house of Baden,‡ a theory disproved when a German magazine did a DNA test on the blood from the shirt Kaspar was wearing when he was killed and compared it to blood taken from a living member of the house of Baden. It’s everything beyond these things that is truly interesting about Kaspar.
As with Aguirre, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser doesn’t purport to be a factually correct retelling of history. The film tries to reach a more profound truth than that of everyday reality, something made clear with the visualisations of Kaspar’s dreams. Only the most basic factual elements of his life as we know them are contained within the story; the rest is invented. As far as we know, he was never exhibited in a circus, he never talked to a professor of logic and never spoke about the Sahara. The real Kaspar – having escaped the attempt on his life – said that he had, in a flash, recognised the assassin as the man who had brought him from the cellar and taught him to walk, which is why I used the same actor in both roles.
Like Fata Morgana, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser has elements of science fiction to it.
If you strip away the story and look only at the dream sequences, you would be left with something that feels like Fata Morgana, just as if you strip away the story of Signs of Life and keep the shot of the windmills. I always felt that The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is almost Fata Morgana with a narrative. The tale of this boy is almost a science-fiction story similar to the idea of aliens arriving on our planet, as with the original conception of Fata Morgana. They have no human social conditioning and walk around confused and amazed. The real question is perhaps anthropological: what happens to a man who has crashed onto our planet with no concept of the world, no education or culture? What does he feel? What does he see? What must a tree or horse look like to him? How would he be treated? What interested me was the story of someone who was uncontaminated by society and outside forces. There is a moment when Kaspar sits calmly as a swordsman lunges at him, because he has no understanding of danger. In another scene he burns himself on a flame because he has never seen fire before. When Kaspar was first found by the townspeople, he spoke only a few words and a handful of phrases he clearly didn’t understand, including, “Ich möchte ein solcher Reiter werden wie mein Vater einer war” [“I want to be a gallant horseman the way my father was”]. He spoke the sentence like a parrot.
Some of the shots in the film are held for an unusually long time, like the one near the beginning of the rye field blowing in the wind. I want audiences to empathise with Kaspar by looking anew at certain things and seeing them through his untainted eyes. The music – Pachelbel’s Canon – represents Kaspar’s awakening from his slumber. What contributes to the power of this moment are the words that appear, from Büchner’s Lenz: “Don’t you hear that horrible screaming around you, the screaming men call silence?”
The literal translation of the film’s German title is “Every Man for Himself and God Against All.”
The evening I fini
shed the screenplay I watched a Brazilian film called Macunaíma, directed by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, in which one of the characters says, “Every man for himself and God against all.” I jumped out of my seat because I knew it was the perfect title for Kaspar’s story. I wrote a sequence for the film but never shot it, a discussion between the priest and Kaspar after the first attempt on his life in which Kaspar says, “When I look around at people, I truly have the feeling God must have something against them.”