09 · 17 · 26

EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL: Herzog and the existence of the extraordinary

Alonso Díaz de la Vega

A few days ago, during the Venice International Film Fest, the renowned German filmmaker Werner Herzog caught the attention of international audiences due to a statement he made that many spectators found unexpected: according to his own words, he would have liked to show his brand-new film, Bucking Fastard (2026), to his US-American colleague David Lynch; however—as we all know—his death made it impossible. The weirdest thing was imagining Herzog inviting Lynch to a screening, since we usually perceive Herzog as a filmmaker of the authentic and a man of adventures; while Lynch is understood as a dream explorer. Herzog himself stated that, although he was aware of the huge differences between both filmographies, both directors shared a common reading of the world. Perhaps, a detailed analysis of his work could uncover the connection between the two directors, as well as the reason why Herzog's premiere ended up being dedicated to Lynch.

Bucking Fastard tells us the story of a pair of women—based on the Chaplin sisters—who were identical twins that lived together in Northern England. They dressed alike, walked and talked in unison; but, all of a sudden, they ended up gaining national fame after a man filed a restraining order against them for harassment. Science was never able to explain why this pair behaved that way, but Herzog was sure that Lynch would have been fascinated by this mysterious and kind of filthy story. Herzog’s admirers should feel the same way—that is to say, fascinated by the unusual and the ambiguous—rather than holding on to the familiar image drawn from a single film—Fitzcarraldo (1982)—in which the director earned his nickname ‘the conqueror of the useless’ for moving a ship across an Amazonian isthmus.

Herzog is, above all, a hunter of miracles fascinated by the world’s oddity, and a man determined to prove that reality is closer to myth than science is willing to admit. His pursuit is to discover what he calls the ‘ecstatic truth’ and capture it through his lenses. In this sense, Herzog’s cinema is devoted to the revelations offered by poetry and visual expression, rather than the meticulous documentation of the material world. Herzog is not a cartographer or an anthropologist at all, but an observer of dreams and the rare instances when they cross the border into our world and leave us astonished. Clearly, Herzog’s imagery may not be as staggering as Lynch’s, but that is because the US-American director constructed the images he extracted from his own consciousness, while Herzog has made an effort to find them in the world itself with a degree of spontaneity. This explains his persistent wandering between fiction and documentary, in which his fictional works are filmed with the rawness of documentaries, while his documentaries are often so extraordinary that they seem almost staged and suggest artifices.

Very few films capture this fusion as powerfully as Herzog’s feature film Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), which transcends the limits of an emerging career and stands as a manifesto. One day that film may be regarded as a testament, for although it revealed Herzog’s early cinematic vision as a filmmaker, with this movie he ended up anticipating everything that would shape his future and entire career—as if it were a memory sent from the future.

Watching this movie once again (while taking my usual notes) I compiled a list of images that—arranged in order—reflect the progression of their intensity, which ranges from considerable to excessive. In the first image we see is a character with dwarfism (the whole cast shares this trait in one way or another) struggling with a plaque for several minutes while the police try to take his mug shot, after this shot, we see a hen eating another already dead, and then the body of a little mouse; in the second photograph, two characters appear posing with oversized motorcycle goggles that make them look like extraterrestrials, while another proudly shows off his collection of insects; in the third one, a car circles endlessly with no one at the wheel, and someone steps forward to bullfight it; finally, in the last photograph, a large part of the cast toward the end of the film engages in a food fight, burns some flowerpots, initiates a cockfight before culminating in a procession—in which a little monkey is tied to the cross. There are further examples, but these are enough to get the idea.  

Each of these images invites the question of why. Why the car, the little monkey, the fire, the goggles, and so on? The answer probably exists, but for the audience it remains completely unknown. Nevertheless, Herzog does not construct his images in pursuit of meaning, but out of his ‘ecstatic truth’; in other words, the ultimate goal does not reside in the message it seeks to express (as Louis B. Mayer rightly said, if you want to send a message, Western Union is far more effective than a film), but in the images themselves: exceptional, unrepeatable—and this, for the better. During the production, one of the actors was hit by a car in motion, but stood up as if nothing had happened, only to burn himself later on one of the blazing flowerpots. This was not a serious incident, but the interaction with animals remains, at the very least, controversial. It is unlikely that images like these will be produced in our time (for the better, it must be clarified), but they already exist, and they are worth observing, since their strangeness speaks volumes—now truly—about the nature of cinema.

Herzog would later make films with a stronger essayistic tendency: his voice-over in many of his documentaries proposes questions that do not always lead to concrete answers, though they trace a certain linearity and structure. It should be noted that this is not the case with his first and radical feature films, in which the absence of his voice makes them even more philosophical. In doing so, Herzog suggests that the image is not a language governed by precise grammar, given that verbal language is, in itself, unstable. For instance, the word “dog” could evoke very different mental images: it could be either a husky or a yorkie, some hairier than others, some more or less blond, etcetera. The images become increasingly ambiguous, as Even Dwarfs Started Small exemplifies, where there isn’t even an explanation for what is presented within the frame. In those cases, we can discern even less the precise significance of a particular type of shot or editing choice.

The vague storyline of Even Dwarfs Started Small unfolds in an institution in Lanzarote, Spain—I infer the location because it was filmed there and some names are in Spanish—where the protagonists are confined. One day, they escape and provoke a disturbance, while the supervisor locks himself with one of them as a hostage. That’s all we have. We’re never told why they were locked up or how they got out, since the characters’ dialogues reveal nothing at all. In a similar way, here, verbal language is insufficient to explain or describe the utter disorder, and the actions seem to symbolize nothing other than the evident: the chaos itself. Herzog orchestrates these events motivated by the intention to capture the impossible. Probably, no one in his audience will ever witness this kind of event firsthand; therefore, the true achievement lies first in making it happen and then recording it for posterity. The dangers of filming are themselves part of the design, as they signify more than delusions and eccentricities of a filmmaker; Herzog uses recurrent wide-angle shots to leave no room for intervention or artifice, so the danger feels unmistakably real.

It is evident that watching this film does not equate to experiencing it directly, but it reveals an astonishing phenomenon and elicits intense reactions that shatter disbelief and strive for total immersion. This is Buster Keaton’s method, aimed at offering his audience a superior spectacle and creating an archive of audacity and joy on both sides of the camera.

On multiple occasions, we see the characters laughing and enjoying the pranks Herzog inspires them to perform. This also reinforces the film’s peculiar realism, since its anarchic energy derives from capturing genuine emotions. If art is conventionally a form of representation or simulation, Herzog pursues real events instead of their mere imitation. His work is thus distinct from that of the artist who philosophizes before the camera or the writer who lends his words and ideas to the characters; rather, it belongs to one who provokes reactions by attempting to replace reality with the image. This results from questioning what cinema is.

Bucking Fastard sounds Lynchian from its very plot, yet the fact that it was filmed with two sisters who genuinely move in sync (Kate and Rooney Mara) evokes Herzog’s lifelong obsession with capturing real phenomena. Although his latest film aligns more closely with the mission he shares with Lynch of depicting what typically belongs to the realm of dreams, his whole body of work chases the strangeness dispersed across the real world, as if seeking to make a documentary of the nonexistent. In that sense, Herzog stands as a poet of the unconscious.

Translated by Michelle Olvera