Werner Herzog | Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen (Even Dwarfs Started Small) / 1970, USA 1971

the horror

by Douglas Messerli

 

Werner Herzog (screenwriter and director) Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen (Even Dwarfs Started Small) / 1970, USA 1971

 

Presumably the title of Werner Herzog’s 1970 film refers to the fact that even “little people” began their lives as babies and young children, despite the deformity of their bodies in their adult life. And that fact, in turn, suggests that they should be treated with equal respect with all others. Clearly that is not the case upon the volcanic island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands where the action takes place.

      We have no idea why the dwarfed individuals are being held there, nor who, in fact, is confining them, forcing them to water the plants and feed the several chickens, the sow, her piglets, and the pet monkey. Most of the asylum-folk are apparently taken into the city on a weekly voyage, and there is some evidence of their being educated, since another little person is described as the “instructor.”

      We also know very little about why the group of 8 individuals (along with two blind little people) who, on the day most of Herzog’s narrative occurs, have been forced to remain home. We can only imagine, particularly, after their rebellion, that these few have been left behind as a kind of punishment. Several times they claim they get more attention by behaving badly than being good.

 

     The uprising begins with seven of them chasing a younger member of their group, Pepe, who is ultimately caught and “saved” by the instructor, who ties him to a chair in the institution director’s office. Angry for the boy’s removal from their group, they begin banging on doors, killing the sow, starting up a car that eventually runs in a circle in the courtyard for more than a half hour, toying with the blind tenants, burning down the asylum director’s favorite palm tree, joining in a massive food fight which ends in breaking plates and other tableware, burning the asylum flowers, staging a cock-fight, and holding a mock crucifixion of the monkey.

      In between their often frightening but always fascinating antics, they threaten the instructor, pour over the instructor’s magazines filled with pictures of naked women, and gasp over one of their members’ insect collection for which she has created dresses, hats, and other clothes. Mostly, throughout this madness, they simply laugh uncontrollably, delighted by their wicked spree.

      By the end of the day, the instructor has gone mad and abandoned the institution, lecturing a leafless branch for pointing at him. We know from the very first scene that eventually the asylum director did return, order was restored and that the least active of their group—who, it appears, is half-witted and merely reports back what the others say—is blamed for the melee, or, at least, expected to explain it, something he refuses to do.

     In using little people as his actors, Herzog calls up several other films, a kind of in-between confrontation of the brutal children of Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies and the joyful hellions of Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite. Yet strangely—despite even the horrific act of killing the sow feeding her piglets or the violence of the cock-fight—there is something truly liberating, even beautiful in the mayhem they create. They are perhaps even less dangerous than the cinematic children, almost unimaginative in their attempts to disrupt their world, and often are happy just to mock the religiosity and pomp of those who control them.     

     There is, in fact, something sad about many of their actions; for example, when they attempt to force the two smallest of their group to “get married,” meaning that they should have sex (reminding one a bit of an early scene in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo), the male cannot, even with a running start, climb upon the bed where he might attempt to consummate the act. When they attempt to torture their blind cohorts, the two quite handily (at least at first) fend them off with their walking sticks. Even to check out their behavior, the instructor must climb up upon a chair to peer through a glass darkly.

    At moments there is a kind of surreal poetry to their actions, particularly when they set the flowering plants afire, arguing that the flowers are now truly “blooming.” Their awe and wonder of the little cabinet of dressed up insects, the spider having 8 legs (the number of their own little gang) for whom the owner wanted to make 8 tiny boots, might almost make one tear, were it not for the absurdity of her desire.

      Yes, this is a parable, in part, of ostracism, of the extremes those who have been rejected by political and social systems will go to be heard, even if their fists can only pound against impenetrable doors, wherein, as in one instance, one has lost her shoe. Herzog’s use of wonderful South African native music makes that quite clear. But Herzog also seems determined to show us something far more profound about human experience.

       As in so many of his films, Herzog reveals the instinctual chaos of both animal and human nature and his fascination in observing it. And with actors such as these little people, reminding one at times of the madness of the characters played by Klaus Kinski and Bruno S., Herzog, he is almost always able to get right to get the heart “the horror, the horror” of human behavior. In that sense, we might argue that Herzog is kind of a later-day Joseph Conrad with of touch of Jack London in him.

 

Los Angeles, May 8, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2017). 

Lewis Milestone | The North Star (revised as Armored Attack!) / 1943

no longer young

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lillian Hellman (story and screenplay, with added dialogue by Burt Beck), Lewis Milestone (director) The North Star (revised as Armored Attack!) / 1943

 

Lewis Milestone’s 1943 movie The North Star has got to be one of the strangest films in all of Hollywood. The project began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s suggestion to film producer Samuel Goldwyn that he do a film about America’s Russian ally, particularly given the recent attacks on the Soviet Union by the Nazis. Not so coincidentally, Roosevelt’s son, James, was then president of Goldwyn studios.

     Whether or not James helped put further pressure on Goldwyn is uncertain, it is, nonetheless, apparent that Goldwyn himself was very keen on the idea, hiring Lillian Hellman to write a story that might possibly be filmed as a kind of documentary. Hellman particularly wanted to focus the work on Ukraine, a choice that seems somewhat odd given the fact that in 1941 Ukrainian nationalists, with the Soviets retreating from the Ukraine in preparation for battles, declared independence—a struggle that had been simmering since the Russian revolution. The independence group (OUN), centered in Lviv, sided with the Socialist Nationalist government of Germany under Hitler, which startled even the Germans, who when they attacked Russia and Ukraine arrested most of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, sending many to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, ultimately killing 80% of their members. Hitler himself ordered that troops be particularly brutal with women and children involved with the OUN group.

      Although Hellman had never been to Ukraine, she based much of her story and script on experiences she had had in her previous trip to Russia, where she had visited a collective farm. She apparently researched extensively.

      Goldwyn, meanwhile, hired the experienced director of All Quiet on the Western Front, Lewis Milestone, who, along with the studio, signed a notable group of actors, including Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan, Ann Harding, Jane Withers, Anne Baxter, Dean Jagger, Erich von Stroheim, and Farley Granger (in his first screen role).

      On top of that the studio signed the great American composer Aaron Copland and noted lyricist Ira Gershwin to write music and lyrics for the film. Noted cinematographer James Wong Howe was also brought aboard.

     The very fact that Milestone-Goldwyn had brought in such major musicians might have given Hellman some clue that the serious document she was writing was perhaps at odds with the way the studio perceived the project. But evidently Hellman had no idea just how far apart was her vision of the film from Milestone’s. Once shooting began, Hellman began battling with both producer and director as they entirely restructured her script and, as she correctly puts it, “turned the village festival into an extended opera bouffe by music comedy characters.” As Phil Karlson notes in World Film Directors, at one point during the peasant festivities it appears that “the entire Bolshoi Ballet…has dropped by for an impromptu workout.” The lighthearted ridiculousness of the songs, particularly the Broadway-like lyrics, doesn’t help. And the entire first half of The North Star is filmed against a seemingly idyllic village as if John Ford’s expressionist Bohemian village of his silent film Four Sons had been dropped upon the set of Brigadoon.

      In fact, in its uses of sunflowers, rows of corn, and swelling hills, the set of The North Star is somewhat closer to Ukraine perhaps than Hellman’s possibly imagined Russian steppes. But the whole, as many critics of the day, and many more since are argued, is pure hokum. The very idea of using the character-actor Walter Brennan as a comrade pig-farmer who becomes a freedom-fighter brings on the giggles.

     It not surprising, accordingly, that at one point early in the filming Hellman burst into tears, and later bought her contract back from Goldwyn, refusing to do more films with him.

     Yet if one can close one eye a little, overlooking the silly and quite sentimental first “act” of the film—accepting it for its establishment of a kind of rural paradise about to be destroyed—the film that follows is often quite remarkable. Milestone, as he made clear in other films, was never one to wash over the terrors of war, and in this work he portrays the Nazis not only as brutal conquerors—who break a leg and arm of an elderly woman simply for being the wife of an escaped freedom fighter and who vampirishly bleed the village children to death in their attempts to blood transfusions for their own soldiers—but as beings who blithely shoot down everyone their planes encounter, wandering children and adult workers equally. Erich von Stroheim is particularly convincing as the German surgeon (Dr. von Harden) who dismisses those around him as being incompetent beasts, while he justifies his murderous actions. 

    Even Brennan, in one of his least overacted roles, becomes quite convincing, as does Huston as the elderly Dr. Kurin, who, after witnessing the death of a village child, leads his fellow villagers to oust and kill the Germans.

      The fascinating quartet of the younger generation, Kolya and Damian Simonov (Dana Andrews and Farley Granger), Marina Pavlov (Anne Baxter) and the somewhat comic and yet quite enduring Clavdia Kurin (Jane Withers) begin the movie as school kids on their way to the big city, Kiev. But very soon encountering the Nazi planes, they admit that they are no longer young after witnessing several of their compatriots killed by German planes and as they grow quickly into heroes in the struggle to bring guns to the freedom fighters hiding in the forest. 

    Several scenes—the villagers’ attempts to torch their own homes filled with their personal belongings, the intense gun battles between the youths and German caravans, and the final battle between the returned freedom fighters and the entrenched Nazi troops—represent the best of war and adventure cinema genres, with Milestone often showing the scene from one perspective only to immediately follow it up from another, so that the audience feels it has a kind of early panoramic vision of the action, creating not only great tension but revealing an intense horror of war that kills its victims not once, but twice.

      If the film seems to begin, accordingly, on a slightly loopy soundstage full of eccentric village simpletons, it ends as a quite serious exploration of just how much people are willing to give up in order to maintain within themselves a tiny possibility of hope for a new existence and the will to create a new society.

      Although William Randolph Hearst insisted that his reviewers describe it simply as “UNADULITERATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA” (when a positive review slipped out in his New York Journal-American, Hearst pulled it by the next edition), other critics reviewed it credibly, and the movie received six Academy Award nominations.  

      Over time, however, critics seem to have ignored any of the positive qualities I have just enumerated. In part, it was the times itself that changed notions surrounding the film. Over the next decade, US viewers lost any sense of differentiation between Russia and Ukraine, and, particularly during the 1950’s McCarthy witch-hunts the director, writer, producer and actors were forced to face the House Committee on Un-American Activities (the film have been labeled as being one of three supposedly “Commie”-supporting films, the other two being Mission to Moscow and Song of Russia). Particularly after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, everyone involved was forced to back away from the original.

     In 1957 the film was severely edited, with long anti-Communist statements added, and released as Armored Attack! Strangely, today, at least to my taste, the remake—sans the silly idyll of collectivist living—seems to be more propagandistic than the original, which, in some respects, has more in common with the films of Dovzhenko than with other American portrayals of war-time survival.

 

Los Angeles, August 7, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (August 2014)

 

Lisa Marie Gamlem | Bennys gym (Benny's Gym) / 2007

rehearsals for a male heterosexual life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lisa Marie Gamlem (screenwriter and director) Bennys gym (Benny's Gym) / 2007 [25 minutes]

 

Alfred (Atdhe Belegu), age 12 or 13, is regularly bullied by some of his classmates, Benny (Kim Erik Tena Eriksen), Petter (Johannes Sejersted Bødtker), and others, a kind of school gang of which Benny is the leader.

 

    There is no logical reason why they have chosen Alfred at this age, except that he is quiet, intelligent, and refuses to fight, the last a particular requirement for young hetero-conforming boys. There is no evidence throughout this film that Alfred might be gay—except that he does not conform to the heterosexual standards in which young toughs like Benny have come to define males based, in Benny’s case, on his own mean and brutal father who runs a gym. Alfred’s refusal to spit back when Benny spits in his face is evidence enough that he is a “fagula” (faggot) (which the English-language translation of this Norwegian film renders as “chicken,” “kylling,” not the word Benny speaks).

     The film begins with Alfred on the run, the other boys catching up, with Petter, and others doing the beating, while Benny leaves through Alfred’s sketch book with his toe before pissing on it.

      Alfred’s behavior, evidently, not only disturbs the school bullies, but also his own father (Michalis Koutsogiannakis), who, not liking his son’s cap, steals it and refuses to give up unless Alfred fights for it; instead, he pleads with his mother for its return, his father unable to comprehend what the fuss is all about.

      These are the first signs of a young boy’s sexual difference, all gender stereotypes that adults create, often categorizing young males who have had no thought of sexual desires, let alone contrary sexual identification, and who sometimes don’t even know what the names they are called such as “fagula” mean.

       What we can observe is this young boy is quite aware that he is different in some respects; he realizes, for example, that Benny wouldn’t have the slightest notion of whom Gandhi was, obviously one of Alfred’s heroes; but he hasn’t a clue later, when Benny describes himself as having “souped up” his brother’s moped, what those words mean.

      One might say that his parents have perhaps pandered to his tendency to stay to himself, having built a full treehouse for him to which he retreats when he arrives home from school and where he sleeps at night.

      Strangely, that very night, he is visited by Benny, who asks to come up, promising not to be mean to him—obviously displaying an awareness of his own behavior. Amazingly, and revelatory perhaps of the beautiful Alfred’s loneliness, is the fact that he allows Benny to climb up, like a prince in his tower. It seems Benny is interested in having Alfred draw a half-nude female figure on his bicep in lieu of a tattoo. He has brought a picture he wants Alfred to recreate, which the boy does, the two sleeping together without any sexual interchange, together for the night.

      When Benny climbs down in the morning, with Alfred’s mother hanging laundry and his father hulking about the yard, the boy looks over at the mother (Ågot Sendstad), he winks at her before calling over to the father “Hey, you got lucky there.” The father cannot understand what Benny’s trying to say, so the boy explains it: “That she’s so foxy!” “Foxy?” he giggles to himself. “Yeah, Foxy,” Benny repeats. Playing into the stereotypical heterosexual conceits, the son’s new friend makes both happy, making them feel almost young again, and Alfred noticing that, shares their joy as well without comprehending that Benny has simply played into the gender conceits of a heterosexuality that he hasn’t yet learned.

     Having been served pancakes for breakfast, Benny promises Alfred that he will come again soon, leaving the son also in near euphoria.

     The next Sunday at church, Benny signals Alfred to join him outside. Once there, Benny knocks him to ground and calls him prick, but immediately after invites to come by his place since he something to show him.

      Indeed, that meeting shows Alfred a great deal about his new friend. Knocking at the house door, Alfred asks for Benny, being told there is no one there by that name. Soon after, called over discretely by his friend into a nearby garage, Benny shows him the souped up moped that I previously mentioned. But when the father shows up, having heard their voices, Benny signals absolute silence as the two hide in near terror of being discovered by the brute.

 

     A frame later they’re speeding down the highway in the moped, an absolute look of joy upon both of their faces. Benny takes Alfred to what is evidently a high school dance, breaking in through the basement. He grabs one of the towering girls and begins to dance with her, pointing out his friend. The giant—in comparison with the runt of a 12-year-old boy—pulls Alfred on the dance floor as, in a slow dance, becoming engulfed between her teenage breasts.

 

     There’s no conception of the reality of sex here, simply its heteronormative images; but that’s enough for the two boys who, this time with Alfred driving, hoot it up as they return via moped back to Benny’s farm.

      The closest thing to sex and real love is Benny’s leaning into Alfred’s back for the voyage home, one of the most beatific moments of the constantly emotionally shifting movie.

       When Benny asks why Alfred never hits back, he replies “Because you want me to.”

      But Benny, uncomprehendingly attempts to take the logic further. “If I wanted to fuck your mother?”

       “That’s your problem.”

       “What if I wanted to fuck you?”

       “Right!” Alfred answers, mostly in jest but nonetheless hinting that it is closer to a possibility.

       “I really do! I really do!” continues Benny, dancing around the body of his now beloved friend. 

       “Forget it! I’m fucking Gandhi” replies Alfred, the moment when after Benny draws a blank, he announces, “No one you would know.”

        Suddenly, Benny lurches forward and kisses Alfred on the lips, Alfred spitting in mock disgust. It is the only gesture Benny knows to express love, and that he has chosen his former enemy to express that feeling suggests the complexity of his emotions of the moment. If sex means love, he wants sex with the friend who has given him so much joy—a totally innocent expression based on adult distortions of the true innocent moment of genderless boy-on-boy love. The complexity of this moment is so immense that it is virtually impossible to fully explain. But most recently Flemish director Lukas Dhont has attempted just that in his film Close (2022) in a situation that does not end so felicitously.

        Only a day or two later, attempting to approach Benny at school, Alfred discovers the rules. Benny cannot even pretend to know him around his other friends. The mistakenly identified “fagula” is still that to all others, even if Benny himself knows he might now be said to better express that indefinable slur.

         The rejection deeply pains the boy, as he sits alone on the pier in tears. His friend is his only in private, mirroring what later so very many young gay boys experience when they discover young love with other males who attempt to remain in the closet among their fellow peers. But this feeling is even vaguer, more difficult to comprehend. Alfred has done nothing but be a friend. It is only the meaningless labeling of him that forces a distance between them, a label based on the heterosexual norms these young men are learning to which Alfred either cannot or simply will not conform.

 

        We get a further insight into the sexual politics at play in this complex short film, when, in the middle of rainstorm Benny dares once more to visit his Rapunzel, this time with a black eye giving evidence to the beating he has received from his father’s hands. He just wants to sit there, he explains, until his father falls asleep, demanding Alfred not to even look at is face. Alfred gives him a handkerchief for his bloody nose. The two again fall to sleep side by side.

        When Alfred awakes in the morning, Benny is gone. This time Alfred arrives at a place where others are playing soccer and hanging out to return Benny’s jacket. But Benny pretends to not even comprehend how Alfred might have gotten hold of his jacket, his friends highly suspicious of events, questioning him whether he might have truly spent time with the outsider they hate and resent.

        When Benny describes him as loser, however, Alfred finally proves that he indeed may be just that, certainly “losing it,” as all the repressed anger of his childhood rises up in protest, forcing him to attack and strike Benny—who isn’t, after all, a very good fighter, the other boys having to pull Alfred off.

        Soon after, as Alfred attempts to leave, however, Benny and his gang are again on the run after him, this time scooping him up in his backpack and tossing him into the lake. When Alfred doesn’t return to the surface, the boys begin to argue that they should have removed his backpack, Benny, in particular, turning away in the horror of what has apparently happened, his nose beginning to bleed profusely of its own accord.

 

       After too long a while, the others hurry off, fearful that they have drowned Alfred, only Benny remaining in tears, complete despair, and remorse. Alfred meanwhile waits under the pier and eventually returns to land, meeting up with Benny. But instead of joining his old friend, he moves off, Benny running after him, the two finally in stride breaking out in smiles. Alfred asks, “Hey, what’s your real name?”—a question that recognizes the fraud Benny, in his learned imitation of heteronormative behavior, has been all along. The boy answers “Reidar,” the two walking away, almost arm-in-arm, into a different future than either of them might ever have imagined. There is no Benny, no gym evidently. The boy’s name, derived from the Old Norse Hreiðarr, means a “nest of home warrior,” a fighter for the home life.

        Several times in these pages, I have commented on the excellence of the short films of the first decade of the 21st century. You can add Norwegian director Lisa Marie’s Gamlem’s movie to that list.

 

Los Angeles, July 29, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).