También los enanos comenzaron desde pequeños

Herzog is important to me. He seeks out situations that have recoil, he takes chances and makes honest choices. His being is broken, and that means the choices and the power of the situations affect me.

But sometimes he works with a situation that doesn't have psychic danger. Sometimes he makes bad choices. Sometimes his brokenness is all we get.

I can't say that this is a failed project. These things have their own autonomy and find a way that works. I can't say that I am offended or repelled either. It seems no less depraved than most of life. I'm just disappointed that things did not line up so that it could touch my soul.

Herzog is not an accident; he is an engineered vessel. He made himself, makes himself. He works at this. In this case, he successfully created a environment. He already has established the balance he would keep between highly stylized abstractions and discovered raw truth. But his means for abstracting are not yet mature. His choices in what raw things he finds are wrong, wrong for him and us.

I have to think of this as practice for "Hearts of Glass," which is something of a masterpiece along these lines.

A problem apart from all this, all this about him as an immature artist, there is another problem. Werner is German and carries a notion that the guilt of existence can be somehow formalized. This translates for most "reviewers" in this being an allegory of corrupt society I some form; the fears of the reviewer determine the allegory. That stuff gets in the way.

There is a potentially remarkable scene. Since the midgets are of all size and mental carriage, there is a clear order, physically manifest. The two — let's say — weakest members of this society are forced into a bed to have sex. The mob cackles behind the door. Later, a larger wiser woman gives some wisdom to her inferior, the "wife." She shows a cigar box full of dead bugs dressed in formal attire, wedding garments.

"I have a spider here with eight legs. I know spiders have six. I was going to knit it a sweater."

This could have been devastating. This could have changed lives and sparked silent revolutions. A later Herzog would have made it work, found how to make it have power shooting toward us.

Here, it is just part of a dull spectacle.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Director Werner Herzog created a bizarre revolutionary world made up of dwarfs. Every actor in the film is a dwarf, not to mention angry and German too. They all decide to rebel against the system, but a revolution is tough when you can't even reach the door handle. One of their friends is held hostage for interrogation by a rich authority figure. It's dwarfs to the rescue! Watch in shock as dwarfs try to drive a car, look at porn, set fires, break things and even torture animals. The film even includes a brutal cock fight and the crucifixion of a monkey. "Even Dwarfs Started Small" may be to disturbing for some. To me, it was challenging but worth watching; it shows viewers that your never too small to fight the system!

This film is hard going, true, but through the chaos and endless repetition can be glimpsed a kind of joy of existence. The dwarves are exaggerations of human behavior, and at the same time, human behavior distilled. Within the confines of the prison complex where the film plays, their actions become more and more outrageous, and through all this a kind of tenderness emerges in their very closeness and comeraderie. Herzog revels in pointing the mirror at his audience, making them take a closer look at themselves, and this film is as good as any example of his take on the human condition.

Werner Herzog's upsetting, black and white, documentary-like EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL concerns the rebellion of a handful of dwarves against the institution in which they are inmates. No average-sized actors appear - just the buildings, furniture and accessories that have been constructed for (and seemingly abandoned by) them. Herzog pulls a double whammy by getting his audience to identify with his performers - indeed, they are shown to express great sensitivity and pain - but doesn't cop out by suggesting that the dwarves will be happy now that they've smashed some windows. A difficult film to watch - and certainly not for the easily-offended.

A typically thought-provoking movie from German art-house director Werner Herzog. This is one of his earliest productions and it shows in the black and white photography and the single-location shooting (in Lanzarote, no less), but nonetheless it turns out to be just as well put together as the later, bigger movies in the director's resume.

Like the 1938 western THE TERROR OF TINY TOWN before it, EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL is a film entirely cast with dwarf and midget actors. As with most Herzog movies, much of the fun comes from deciphering the hidden meanings; this one's an allegory about mankind's cruelty to those less than himself, destruction of the environment, and Herzog's overriding theory that the natural state of things is chaos. It has similarities to the two documentaries Herzog made about disability and much in common with the later STROSZEK too.

It's a difficult film to define too much, but as a work of visual style it's certainly electrifying. Herzog captures memorable image after memorable image, and that haunting laugh by Helmut Doring stays in your memory long after. The only reason I can't rate this film higher is that I'm no fan of animal cruelty, and there's a lot of it here, so much that it becomes impossible to ignore towards the end. But that last scene is almost as memorably kooky as STROSZEK's.