October 9 2007
Even Dwarfs Started Small
What did early audiences find more offensive about Even Dwarfs Started Small, that the cast was entirely midgets or amateurs? Neither contribute to an easy narrative in this surreal dark comedy that makes Freaks look like mainstream fluff. Director Werner Herzog creates a bleak, ashen nightmare world populated by dwarfs but built for larger beings. The story is difficult to discern: something about inmates taking over an asylum. The headmaster threatens to torture the remaining prisoner if the escapees don’t stop raising hell outside. Ignoring him, the gang proceeds to destroy all manner of property. It seems like Herzog instructed the cast to just go nuts on camera, which they do in gleeful abandon. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, and then it’s even more fun. The unrehearsed anarchists have occasional accidents – catching on fire, getting run over by an unmanned car – which only encourage them. Some scenes poignantly illustrate the problems of an “us versus them” society. Characters find high beds and doorknobs to be cruel obstacles. Chickens attack a one-legged hen. There is much hysterical laughter at the expense of authority and crudeness. It may be a warning for average viewers not to take their delicate world for granted. Looking at things a little differently (or from a different height) turns the normal world into a madhouse.
Crispin Glover interviews the director on the commentary track. It’s easy to see Dwarfs as a major influence in Glover’s bizarre film What Is It? Herzog proves he is a man of his word, recalling a promise made to his spirited actors: if they survived the shoot he would throw himself into a cactus patch. He did. Speaking of promises, the short documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (available on the Burden of Dreams DVD) follows up on a bet made with Herzog’s fellow filmmaker Errol Morris. Herzog promised his friend that if Morris ever completed the film he kept talking about making (the critically-acclaimed documentary Gates of Heaven) he would eat his own shoe. Even though Morris didn’t remember the remark, Herzog cooked and ate his shoe for the audience at the film’s premiere. Could it be that Herzog is truly a masochist that just happens to make great movies as a side effect?
