I generally like Herzog a lot, but this is definitely not one of my favorite films of his. Yes, it has a lot of fabulous images and moments, but for me, the problem is that it doesn't work as a film very well. It's kinda poetic, kinda surreal, kinda nightmarish (Herzog has said that the film is a prolonged nightmare in his view), and kinda like a lengthy performance art piece, but in my view, the individual elements are not tied together as well as they should be. It does seem like he simply took a group of dwarfs out to the desert, gave them some rough improvisational boundaries, told them to go crazy, filmed it, and somewhat randomly edited it.
In a very rough way, the film does have a plot. It begins with a group of dwarfs in something like a prison. Someone off-camera seems to ask one about a crime, and then most of the film is in flashback, giving us the story of how the dwarfs ended up in their situation at the beginning of the film. The backstory has the dwarfs rebelling at some kind of institution. At first it seems like maybe it was a mental home, but then an authority figure keeps referring to himself as an "instructor", and there is talk at various points of a "principal" being away, so maybe it's supposed to be a school.
The bulk of the film is just the dwarfs rebelling, by doing things like breaking manufactured objects, harassing a couple blind dwarfs, torturing animals, destroying plants and trees, burning stuff and having a food fight.
As fun (in a dark, twisted way, of course) as a lot of this stuff is in isolation, and as entertaining as some of the dialogue and behavior of the dwarfs is--the laughing is particularly infectious, there's not a lot of structure to anything, including, on a meta level, to the film as an artwork. There are thematic and content resemblances to Tod Browning's film Freaks (1932), you can see how some of this stuff probably influenced David Lynch, and Herzog made slight allusions to films like The Wild One (1953), but Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen is not as good as either the films that influenced it or the films that it influenced.
There are themes explored, and interpretations abound because the film is so intentionally ambiguous. You can see the film as a critique from many different angles on rebellion, you can see it as a meditation on entropy, you can see it as a commentary on people inheriting a world they didn't make . . . you can see it as many things. While all that stuff is interesting to think about, having an intriguing theme isn't sufficient for having a good film, either.
Still, Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen is worth a watch for fans of weirdness because of its arresting images and content on a trees level, but I would hardly recommend it to anyone else, and even for us freaks, it's a pity that this couldn't have been a better movie. The potential was there.
In a very rough way, the film does have a plot. It begins with a group of dwarfs in something like a prison. Someone off-camera seems to ask one about a crime, and then most of the film is in flashback, giving us the story of how the dwarfs ended up in their situation at the beginning of the film. The backstory has the dwarfs rebelling at some kind of institution. At first it seems like maybe it was a mental home, but then an authority figure keeps referring to himself as an "instructor", and there is talk at various points of a "principal" being away, so maybe it's supposed to be a school.
The bulk of the film is just the dwarfs rebelling, by doing things like breaking manufactured objects, harassing a couple blind dwarfs, torturing animals, destroying plants and trees, burning stuff and having a food fight.
As fun (in a dark, twisted way, of course) as a lot of this stuff is in isolation, and as entertaining as some of the dialogue and behavior of the dwarfs is--the laughing is particularly infectious, there's not a lot of structure to anything, including, on a meta level, to the film as an artwork. There are thematic and content resemblances to Tod Browning's film Freaks (1932), you can see how some of this stuff probably influenced David Lynch, and Herzog made slight allusions to films like The Wild One (1953), but Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen is not as good as either the films that influenced it or the films that it influenced.
There are themes explored, and interpretations abound because the film is so intentionally ambiguous. You can see the film as a critique from many different angles on rebellion, you can see it as a meditation on entropy, you can see it as a commentary on people inheriting a world they didn't make . . . you can see it as many things. While all that stuff is interesting to think about, having an intriguing theme isn't sufficient for having a good film, either.
Still, Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen is worth a watch for fans of weirdness because of its arresting images and content on a trees level, but I would hardly recommend it to anyone else, and even for us freaks, it's a pity that this couldn't have been a better movie. The potential was there.