Reconnecting With Herzog’s Mystery Man

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Among my college crew of obsessive moviegoers, Werner Herzog was always held in high regard. In film classes, we loved to score points by noting how precisely Francis Ford Coppola had ripped off elements of the director’s 1973 “Aguirre: The Wrath of God” for the fateful gunboat cruise in his “Apocalypse Now.” We loved all those crazy stories about Mr. Herzog’s reckless antics on set. And we loved that he lost a bet with the documentarian Les Blank, and ate his shoe on film.

None of us would have bet that, nearly 30 years later, Mr. Herzog would be enjoying the most prominence of the trio of filmmakers who gave the German new wave movement its late 1970s vogue. He was sensational, and made great copy, but for all the horror and ecstasy of his films — features and documentaries alike — there was a lingering sense that essential aspects of them were mere stunt work. Rainer Werner Fassbinder had the richest and wildest body of work, but he died in 1982. Wim Wenders, whose existential and elliptical pieces might not have presaged the lush romanticism of his 1988 breakthrough “Wings of Desire,” unfortunately has been stranded on a plateau ever since. All along, Mr. Herzog, bobbing in and out of critical and commercial favor, has endured.

Of course, the success of the recent documentaries “Grizzly Man” and “The White Diamond” could turn sour if the upcoming “Rescue Dawn,” a Vietnam War saga, is as middling as some of Mr. Herzog’s latter-day dramas. For now, he’s enjoying a heyday. In a timely move, BAMcinematek has revived one of Mr. Herzog’s classics, 1974’s “The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser” for a one-week run. It’s an archetypal film for the director, who excels at blurring art and life in a bid to expose the greater truths of both. If, to capture the essence of deranged conquistadors, jungle-mad opera lovers, and mesmeric vampires, he turned to Klaus Kinski — an actor whose blood type was a perfect match –— Mr. Herzog was no less resourceful casting amateurs.

“Kaspar Houser” retells the tragic-yet-transcendent story of a 19th-century “wild child,” kept like a dog in a basement from birth. At the age of 17 he is given his freedom by the mysterious man who has tended to him, and he materializes in the town square of Nuremberg. To play the iconic Kaspar, Mr. Herzog discovered a street musician named Bruno S., an off-and-on resident of mental institutions and a bit of an enigma himself. The abused son of a prostitute who abandoned him at age 3, Bruno S. had spent 23 years behind locked doors, raised among other children who were severely retarded and rather profoundly unsocialized.

While “Kaspar” is, on one level, the compassionate rendering of a kind of national myth, it’s also a crypto-documentary: the story of Bruno S., 41, as Kaspar H., 17. The character’s journey from degradation to grace is meant to hold up a mirror to the society that seeks to decipher him, exploiting the feral boy as a sideshow freak or a medical curiosity. Yet it also offers the phenomenological spectacle of a Herzog foundling re-enacting his own interior struggles, his blasted gaze burning a hole through the lens.

As Mr. Herzog noted at the time, the actor never changed his costume for the length of the six-week shoot and slept on the ground near the exit of the hotel where the cast was housed, in case he had to make a run for it. Bruno S. supposedly readied himself for the role by screaming in solitude for hours every day. Perhaps he was an inspiration to Lindsay Lohan. Kidding aside, like many of Mr. Herzog’s films, “Kaspar” zeroes in intensely on a singular individual who is at once dispossessed and strangely compelling. (The film’s German title makes this sense of alienation more evident: “Every Man for Himself and God Against All.”)

Were “Kaspar” shown on a doublebill with, say, “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School,” it might be easy to see the main character as a kin to punk-rock outcast Joey Ramone — to cite a 1970s cultural contemporary. But Bruno S. is not a mere footnote. He is equally memorable in the 1977 “Stroszek,” in which he plays the accordion and winds up in a Wisconsin trailer park, behind on payments. The lost black comedy also is prime for a revival, if only to prove that Mr. Herzog has a funny bone to go with his taste in the extremes of human experience.

Through December 19 (30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).


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