I don't quite know what to make of this film. I might have to watch it again to see if ideas coalesce. Herzog, if nothing else, makes you think while you watch the images move. His dramas are so stylized that you almost have to approach them from a tangent, stealthily, which is how he seems to view life.
There's no main character to focus on here. Instead we focus on the society and how it functions. It seems that full-grown people are treated like Homeric Greeks treated the Gods: indifferent observers, manipulators of fate. But the dwarfs play God, too. They seem indifferent to any life deemed less significant than their own. They destroy the nature surrounding them. They seize the devices of their Gods (the car, for example) but are left unable to find and appropriate any usefulness in them.
I can't figure out why Herzog chose dwarfs (little people) as the subject of the film, other than to take what would have been a very different picture and give it a good dose of quirk. Since this, we've seen Living in Oblivion, In Bruges, and countless others point out the silliness of this conceit with some sharp self-referential wit. I hate to be critical of Werner Herzog, a man who (after watching his documentaries especially) obviously possesses a gentle, probing soul and a deep intelligence, but I just couldn't quite discern this.
The best guess I have on the first viewing is a nihilistic view of God vs. man vs. beast. To some extent we are all three at any given point.
There's no main character to focus on here. Instead we focus on the society and how it functions. It seems that full-grown people are treated like Homeric Greeks treated the Gods: indifferent observers, manipulators of fate. But the dwarfs play God, too. They seem indifferent to any life deemed less significant than their own. They destroy the nature surrounding them. They seize the devices of their Gods (the car, for example) but are left unable to find and appropriate any usefulness in them.
I can't figure out why Herzog chose dwarfs (little people) as the subject of the film, other than to take what would have been a very different picture and give it a good dose of quirk. Since this, we've seen Living in Oblivion, In Bruges, and countless others point out the silliness of this conceit with some sharp self-referential wit. I hate to be critical of Werner Herzog, a man who (after watching his documentaries especially) obviously possesses a gentle, probing soul and a deep intelligence, but I just couldn't quite discern this.
The best guess I have on the first viewing is a nihilistic view of God vs. man vs. beast. To some extent we are all three at any given point.