Les nains aussi ont commencé petits

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.

I'm almost ashamed to say it but...this film truly TERRIFIED me! Usually speaking, this is like one of the best compliments a movie can ever receive, but I'm afraid that in the case of "Even Dwarfs Started Small" this feeling is very misplaced. Werner Herzog's minor masterpiece is intended as an allegoric social portrait, hence I'm not very proud to admit that it haunted me all night long. As wrong and unsympathetic as it may come across, these little people look naturally eerie and their appearances made an impression on me that was even stronger than the mesmerizing story. "Even Dwarfs Started Small" is a revolutionary film, pretty much covering all the daily wars every human being wages, only the protagonists are all dwarfs. Since these people's position in society already are oppressed as it is, this film looks extra powerful and compelling. All the actors and actresses deliver amazing performances, even though none of them had any experience in cinema. Especially the 'main' character Hombre is a truly intriguing man. Other aspects that increase the depressing intensity of this film are the black and white cinematography, the extended sequences showing farm animals and – most of all – the raw, tribal music. This definitely was one of the toughest reviews I ever wrote, simply because this is such a multilateral classic and I regretfully can't get past my personal fear of small shapes...

I actually admire what writer/director Werner Herzog was going for with Even Dwarfs Started Small even if I think he didn't quite execute it in a manner that involved me enough. It's got a great idea behind it- inmates at a mental institution, on one of the Canary Islands pre-tourism, create an anarchic uprising with practically no one else in sight, and the headmaster locks himself in with a retarded patient while the others go wild and crazy, albeit still staying in the confines of the grounds of the area. I also liked when Herzog went for an interesting route in the picture psychologically and in mood, which was to show how chaos and disarray, even if among little people, can actually become rather aimless and uncanny.

There is no plot, it's just a series of interconnected segments that seem to be happening in real time, where they do things like ogle at naked girls in magazines, kill a pig randomly, give constant torture to a couple of blind dwarfs, circle around a constantly 360 degree spinning car, and with Herzog sometimes just as interested in the animals (chickens, a camel, the pig, a monkey) on the premises as he is with his whacked out little folk.

But the problem arises then with the work that since it is plot less- even if it ends with the headmaster, talking to a branch outside, as a metaphor for human control and what is and what isn't a free will or spirit perhaps- there's the danger of becoming tedious with what goes on, and that's exactly the trap that I think Herzog falls into here. It's not that he is out blatantly to mock them (although, like with Stroszek, the tendency to laugh is hard to avoid at times, especially with its documentary-style anything-goes approach), but there isn't any grand metaphor I could really obtain from the material, at least from a first viewing, and Herzog seemed to be having too much fun getting the dwarfs to do both the mundane and whatever to get something consistently interesting.

While he does have one character who ends up being quite memorable, the freaky-laughing, hilarious Hombre (all one-note, of course, but then again isn't everyone here), there's nothing to tie the parts together that are worth watching for to make it good enough for the whole. There's surrealism of course (the fate of the monkey and the car), and an image or two that strikes greatly (when the headmaster or whomever tries to get the attention of the one-passerby on the island), but it just didn't compel me or surprise me in ways that Herzog at his best can do.

Not that I'm telling you to not see the film, as a fan I mean. The title alone should be a calling card to anyone who might have a bit of interest in the subject matter, and I'm sure a work like this has inspired a few avant-garde director's out there (I saw it as a possible fore-father for Korine's Gummo). Yet it's own lackadaisical use of narrative and Herzog's insistence on ambiguity and derangement, makes it a kind of schizophrenic work that makes it a fun yet flawed trip.

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 made his madman mark with this, his second feature film. Inmates at some sort of institution take over for hilarious and anarchic results. You laugh for a while until it sinks in. The haunting tone, other world locations and sympathy with those on the edge of society set the scene for Herzog's later and better-known masterpieces AGUIRRE and MYSTERY OF KASPAR HAUSER. The German director doesn't exploit outcasts; he loves and defends them, showing that normal people are the ones with something to prove. He insists that it is not the actors who are small, but "the world that has gotten out of shape." Filming was rough: one actor was run over by the driver-less car in the film and another caught on fire. Herzog promised the actors that at the end of shooting he would jump into a spiny cactus to show his understanding. He still has some of the needles in his leg. But this won't appeal to a lot of the usual trash film hounds, as they really want the mainstream versions of "edgy".