Les nains aussi ont commencé petits

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!

Werner Herzog's sophomore effort is probably his most bizarre to date. The whole cast is compromised of dwarfs who take over an institution and wreak havoc. This treat for Herzog fans is very entertaining.

The film does have its problems though. The first half hour is hard to sit through but this is the type of film that gets better as it goes on. Also, I was expecting more of an ending. The ending, although funny, seems that it just does not fit and ended too abruptly.

As I said in my title, I think this has Herozg's most powerful images. With the dwarfs wreaking havoc and celebrating with smiles on their while African tribe music is playing, the scenes are very bizarrely beautiful. The movie is very entertaining and very funny. Hombre has probably the best laugh I have ever heard in my life. He definitely brings real evil to the film. The cinematography is great (yeah, what else is new in a Herzog film?). The message of the film is also very profound.

Although this is definitely not Herzog's best, it is one hell of a 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'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.