The Auteur and Morality: "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser"
"I suspect that I have annoyed a few people by insisting on the mastery of craft," Ralph Ellison noted to fellow writer James Alan McPherson in 1970. "Craft to me is an aspect of morality. I don't mean that I've mastered it. I think that this irritates some of the writers and makes them think: 'That guy, he thinks he's so good.' Well, that's not what I'm talking about. Every time I walk into my study or into another room of books down the hall I see the great masters. They're the ones I have to measure myself against, not because I want to but because that's what is stuck up there. Those are the standards...Lord knows it would be much easier if you didn't have to work out of a knowledge of what had gone before."
Spend much time around novelists, and you will inevitably find yourself engaged in discussions about the craft of writing. It's a spacious word – craft – and not an uncontroversial one. It has different meanings for different people, but these tend to be centered on questions of style, structure, and approach. Long sentences or short ones, rich description or sparse, uses of interiority, points of view, ways to challenge (or not challenge) the reader, methods of constructing a story – all of these and more are the tools with which writers spin a tale.
Spend much time around film critics, and you will inevitably find yourself running into the idea of the movie director as an auteur. It's also a spacious word and one surrounded by a galaxy of debates. I should say from the outset that I don’t have much of a stake in these debates. Definitive answers make little sense to me. But I do have an idea to throw into the mix.
The notion of the auteur director has a rich and complex history. The earliest claim about it was based on the simple notion that certain directors made better films – in identifiable ways – than other directors. This was a novel idea that arose during the studio era, when people were accustomed to seeing movies as products of those studios rather than as the result of a specific director's vision. Soon backlash arose in critical circles, where it was argued that thinking about a movie as the creation of a single auteur misunderstood the way movies are actually made, which is as a collaboration between many people – directors, actors, camera operators, producers, set designers, sound technicians, costumers, makeup artists, and many more – and also involves larger industrial and financial considerations interwoven through society.
Eventually, like all academic issues, there were debates about the debates, and then debates about those debates in turn: Did the auteur theory, as it came to be known, privilege certain types of directors, and was it unequally applied (leaving out folks like B-movie and genre-film directors)? Did it privilege certain types of film, shifting our attention away from others that were equally worthy (like a Pixar animated film which doesn't lend itself to being read as the work of an auteur)? Was it inherently elitist, was it a function of a too-masculine viewpoint, did it mistake our culture for every culture, could movies be better understood and enjoyed without the notion that they were the result of some specific genius?
As I said, I'm not much for concrete answers. In these areas, I tend to take the line that – as Joseph Campbell once said about religion – theories, insofar as they are true, are true metaphorically. That is, they represent ways of seeing the world and of artworks, ways of interacting with these things, ways of getting at our intuitive responses to them and feelings about them. Past a certain point, insistence on any theory as somehow fundamental becomes, for me, dull and pedantic.
Having said this, what fascinates me about Ellison's idea (and this is very much a part of his work broadly considered as well) is that the various elements that go into making art are an aspect of morality, and that the almost spiritual pressure to try to produce something worthwhile comes from the brute fact of the magnificence of the existing artistic tradition.
This provides an interesting angle on the question of the auteur director, I think. I also helps me understand some of my reaction to that inimitable madman (I say this as someone who adores his work) Werner Herzog, and his extraordinary film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.
Of late, Herzog has become something of a punching bag. The less interesting reasons for this are his outsized personality, his strange unceasing vehemence, and his accent; the internet is full of satires of the man and his pronouncements. The more interesting reason for the Herzog mockery, seems to me to be that people steeped in a culture of self-shielding and at the same time self-promoting irony find it difficult to account for the earnest intensity of his belief.
Kaspar Hauser, made in 1974 and based on a true story that took place in Germany at the beginning of the 19th Century, embodies this intensity in every frame. The opening involves a shot of fields of grass billowing in the wind (for an interesting example of artistic continuity, compare this shot to similar footage Herzog highlights in his 2005 documentary Grizzly Man), accompanied by a quote from the German writer Georg Buchner: "Don't you hear that horrible screaming all round you? That screaming men call silence?"
This quote – which could also serve as an epigraph for a great deal of Herzog's other work – leads us into the story of Kaspar Hauser, a young man who has spent the entirety of his life locked in a cell at the whim of an unknown man. At the opening of the film, this man takes Kaspar out of the cell and leaves him alone in the town of Nuremberg.
The townspeople have no idea what to make of Kaspar, who only knows a handful of words and has been taught to write his name but nothing else. So, as people do, they alternatively mock, torment, and care for him. They crowd around the prison cell in which he's being held to gawk at him and hold candles in front of his eyes to see how he reacts. At the same time, a kindly family also takes it on themselves to feed and bathe him, and a pair of curious children teach him to speak. Eventually the townspeople put him in a carnival to raise money for his lodging, which indecency prompts a well-off citizen to take Kaspar into his house permanently.
As the years pass, Kaspar learns to talk and interact with other people, but never truly overcomes his alienation. He's an outsider, sharing none of the preconceptions that society builds into its members. He can only believe what he sees and feels, and societal strictures are to him nothing more than impositions of an alien culture onto a world that is irreducibly tactile, sense-laden, and unbearably beautiful.
He's pressed by a pastor to admit the necessary truth of Christianity, but with no knowledge of history he has no use for a religion. His response is, instead, one of pure honesty: "The singing of the congregation sounds to me like awful howling. And then the singing stops, the pastor starts to howl." Similarly, when he's pressed by a philosopher to admit the necessary truth of logic he can not accept that it’s particularly useful. To Kaspar the convolutions of the philosopher seem like nothing so much as insisted-on words and phrases that have no connection to anything that has actual meaning.
In the end – as was the historical Kaspar Hauser – he is stabbed by an unknown assailant and dies. Perhaps it was the man who raised him, afraid that Kasper can identify him; perhaps Kaspar is the bastard child of a powerful family who fears his true identity will be revealed; or perhaps there is no reason at all. We do not know.
To close the movie, Herzog gives us a pair of indeterminate images: a dream Kaspar relates in which people climb through heavy fog up a stony mountain at the top of which lies death, and a story Kaspar tells about a blind man leading a caravan through the desert to a city. The final sequence takes place after Kaspar's death, and shows the townspeople conducting an autopsy so that they can look at his brain, in an attempt to see if the physical organ will reveal the mystery of his existence. Or perhaps the mystery of existence itself. It does not.
Any discussion of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser should probably begin with the extraordinary performance of Bruno Schleinstein as Kaspar, without which the film simply would not work. Schleinstein is a fascinating character in his own right – and one of the intense personalities Herzog has always been fond of – but this essay is already stretching out, so I'll keep the focus on my initial question.
What would it mean for there to be a linkage between auteurship and morality?
It would mean that the film, and all of Herzog's work, and all of the work of directors like him, must arise out of the fact that every filmmaking choice is laden with moral implication.
By moral here, I don't mean moralistic, or preachy, or judgmental; I mean that art is at base an attempt to communicate some aspect of the meaning of human existence – the joy, the difficulty, the horror, the justice and injustice, the comedy, the extraordinary beauty of it – and that artists (according to this idea) should have something to say about that meaning, and that they take the attempts involved in art seriously because they understand they are involved in a tradition that is greater than they are.
An auteur, that is, would be someone whose morality – in the sense I’ve just limned – pervades their work. In some sense, the morality is the work. This, I think, is what Ellison means when he says that “craft is an aspect of morality”: it’s a way of stating what the artist takes to be the truth about the world. It isn't about mastery, but about the attempt; it's not about greatness but about belief.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser begins with a sequence – when Kaspar is imprisoned before his release – that is remarkable for its palpability and for the fantastic physicality of the performance of Bruno S. (as he's credited in the film). He sits slumped over, tied by a strap to a ring bolt in the stone, with only a toy horse to play with. He grunts, scratches himself, is as malleable as a dummy when he’s touched. This tactility, as I noted earlier, extends throughout the entire film. In some sense, the enigma of the title is about what it would mean to exist in the world without preconception.
Nothing, for Kaspar, comes prepackaged with an explanation. He has been prepared for nothing, has had no parents to instruct him, no childhood friends to learn from, no rules of society imposed on him. When he experiences things, he does so as they actually occur to him. Hearing music, for example, he says, wonderfully, "It feels strong in my heart." This is exactly right, but it would not occur to most of us to articulate it this way. For Kaspar, the question is never "What have I been told a thing is?" The question is always: "What is the thing?"
This is not simply a conceit – a biopic fascination with an intriguing character – it’s a moral exploration of experience. And it’s embodied in the craft of the movie.
Herzog, as he does in his other narrative films as well as his documentaries, again and again asks us to sit and look at an image. This might be the establishing shots of the town of Nuremburg, or it might be a shot of Kaspar regarding his reflection in the undulating water in a rain barrel. It might simply be an image of Kaspar working out a song on a piano. In these moments, Herzog assumes that we are patient, and contemplative; perhaps it's better to say that he forces us, if we are to watch his film, to be patient and contemplative. He is forcing us, that is, to ask of what we are seeing: “What is this?” Not what we have been told it is, but what it is, really.
In a similar way, Herzog assumes an intelligent viewer (or forces us to be intelligent viewers) by refusing to put on screen anything insignificant. Not for him are the small moments other directors use to grease the wheels of our understanding: inserts that show us what someone is holding, small expository moments to make the connections between scenes clear. His approach can make the proceedings more difficult to comprehend but that’s exactly the point. The film represents a relentless attempt on Herzog’s part never to capitulate, never to take the easy path, in the struggle to understand what it – and the "it" here is at once too broad and too personal to admit of easy categorization; call it "life" or "existence" or even "the joy and pain of being human" – means.
This is, finally, not a one-off. Auteurship, according to this idea I'm forwarding, is a continuing endeavor. In the same way that it implies participation in (or even against) a tradition, it implies a commitment that exists past the creation of a single work. In this sense The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is of a piece with Herzog's other films, both successes and failures, from the austere experimentalism of something like Fata Morgana through his monumental '70s collaborations with Klaus Kinski, to his underrated Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call and his more recent documentaries about everything from the experience of a death row prisoner in America to cave paintings in France.
Each of them struggles to explore and extend the questions that Herzog seems to feel are necessary, inevitable, unavoidable, foundational. And the elements of this struggle – the craft of his filmmaking – are irrevocably tied to its morality.
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