MovieChat Forums > Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (1974) Discussion > Very loose with the facts

Very loose with the facts

posted 15 years ago by Damfino1895
6 replies | jump to latest

I was astonished when I watched this movie at the casting of Bruno S as Kaspar Hauser, he was simply far too old and made a farce of the movie for that simple reason. It also was far from the true story of KH. Very disappointing.

Life isn't a rehearsal, so make this one your best performance

[–] don-lope-de-aguirre 15 years ago

It's a movie movie and Herzog does not care for cinema verite - he isn't after realism and facts but a (in parts authentic and in parts stilized) "ectatic truth".

Take "Aguirre" or "Rescue Dawn" both dont stay true to the real story.

[–] berzelmayr 13 years ago

A short time after Herzog wrote the script, he realised that it would be very difficult to find an actor playing such an extreme role convincingly. He then saw Bruno S. in a tv-documentary about street-musicians in Berlin and by knowing Bruno's life-story (difficult childhood spending many years first in homes then in prisons) he decided to cast him as Kaspar Hauser because of Bruno's extra-ordinary mental conditions.

[–] Disardor 13 years ago

I'm surprised to see someone say this about a Herzog film. Anyone familiar with his work should know his films based on fact -- even his documentaries -- rarely stick to the exact details of the real stories upon which they're based; generally he uses the "real" story as a starting point and changes it in some way(s) to yield his so-called "ecstatic truth." This is probably his best film and Bruno S's performance is incredible in my opinion.

[–] Balok-2 13 years ago

Since the real Kaspar Hauser was revealed to be a fraud pretty much immediately (see the chapter discussing the case in Error and Eccentricity in Human Belief by Joseph Jastrow), the true story would not have made a particularly interesting movie, nor one that would have raised the philosophical questions that Herzog does.

[–] chuck-526 11 years ago

Thank you for the reference to the book "Error and Eccentricity in Human Belief", written by Joseph Jastrow and originally published as "Wit and Wisdom, Episodes in the Vagaries of Belief" in 1935. The book's inclusion of a chapter on the Kaspar Hauser story as a principal example of "credulity" seems to show the story was largely disbelieved -at least in educated circles- by at least eighty years ago.

The actual chapter on Kaspar Hauser goes further and presents quite a bit of evidence the story was disbelieved even at the time by a few, particularly those with judicial training, the well-educated, and those who had many months of prolonged contact with Kaspar Hauser himself. (It also reminds us a principal interest at the time was of Kaspar Hauser as a sort of "wild child", a lense into raw human nature before it was bent by "civilization" ...something that may not be so familiar to us today.)

As I read the book though, it does not say that "public opinion" (or the "conventional wisdom", or "buzz", or "majority belief", or whatever you call it:-) recognized the Kaspar Hauser story as a fraud at the time. In fact the story's persistence and its inclusion in the book show just the opposite, that "public opinion" did indeed accept and encourage and embellish the Kaspar Hauser story _at_the_time_.

The availability of a truth and its wide acceptance seem unfortunately to not be the same thing.

[–] chuck-526 11 years ago

...It also was far from the true story of KH...

Au contraire.

I understand "loose with the facts" to mean some of the specifics known from the record were changed (perhaps that's not the meaning that was intended?-). But in fact much of Herzog's script is direct quotes from various historical documents, books, and reports. And where a scene is made up, it's _entirely_ made up ("in the spirit of" of course:-), rather than just twisted. It seems to me the film is a pretty accurate representation of what the general public (not specialists nor the best informed) thought at the time (not later, not now).

Now we "know better". We strongly suspect many of the sources Herzog used are in fact forgeries or hearsay. We now know many other of his sources were directly contradicted by later writings by the same author. And in the light of what we know now about human development, we can see some gaping holes in the story.

There are a thousand different truths -- which one is _the_ truth? If there's a complaint against Herzog in this film, it's that he accepts the surface reports at face value and does _not_ try to figure out which truth is "better". What Herzog has actually done in the film is _not_ delve into the more modern (or perhaps more accurate) interpretations.

It seems fairly clear now that much of the Kaspar Hauser story was a fraud. And even at the time a few people had general (but apparently not specific) suspicions there was some sort of con going on. But that wasn't the case initially for the general public. To say that the case of Kaspar Hauser was known at the time it was happening to the majority of people to be a fraud simply isn't true.

The film presents what a relatively naive general public believed about the case at the time ...which is in fact exactly where the interest of the film lies. The film is as much about society as it is about Kaspar Hauser. A good way to understand the initial situation would be to ask "what cons worked best?". That's what Herzog's approach has done.