"Even Dwarfs Started Small"

I wish I had been alive during the late 60s – early 70s. Those were the years during which cinema was experiencing a rebirth that enlightened many a cinephile with new experiences, revealing such filmmakers as Scorsese, Kubrick, Spielberg, Resnais, Cassavetes, Roeg, Godard, Truffaut, and Herzog, whose film is the subject of this review. To have seen these films with the collective consciousness and mindset of the period's filmgoers must have been an intense, unique experience, something akin to the discovery of new colours or feelings.

“Even Dwarfs Started Small” is one such experience. It came out in 1970, a year that was full of new cinematic experiences, from John Cassavetes’ “Husbands” – a thinking man’s “The Hangover” before there was even such a thing – to Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s “Performance” – an acid-fueled dressing-down of traditional masculinity and male sexuality.

But when compared to other films that came out that year, “Even Dwarfs Started Small” is closer to Robert Altman’s “M. A. S. H.” in that both films are anarchistic counter-cultural satires in which the system’s disease is exposed when it is overrun by those who are supposed to make it work –medical officers in “M. A. S. H.” – or those who are supposed to benefit from it – asylum inmates in this film.

 As most people who have heard of the film know, the cast is comprised entirely of dwarfs. Every single person who appears on screen is a dwarf, from the asylum’s instructor to the female driver who stops by for directions. For all intents and purposes, the film appears to be set in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone is a dwarf and thus in disproportion to utilities and furniture.

Herzog shoots the cast closely, often using mid-shots. Over time, I started to forget that I was watching a film with an all-dwarf cast. Herzog does not exploit them for cheap laughs. He puts us uncomfortably close to their “otherness” but he doesn’t do it patronizingly. The rare use of their height for comedic purpose is not made at their expense, but with affection and humanity. Best exemplified in one of the film’s best scenes, in which Hombre and a woman are forcibly pushed into a bedroom to have sex. The woman gets on it without any problem but Hombre repeatedly fails to do it. He doesn’t think to climb on the chair and jump on the bed, but rather to make a footstool out of magazines. He never manages it, but the scene isn’t shot as slapstick. Herzog shoots in a fairly wide frame, forcing the viewer to focus on Hombre’s movements and actions. It is a study in disproportion, not a gag.

Through the anarchistic chaos created by the inmates, Herzog laughs at normality – one scene has them reading an erotic magazine and giggling at the women’s bodies – but doesn’t entirely condone their behavior. The dwarfs display apparently unsimulated cruelty to animals and to blind dwarf guards. Both cases of violence are filmed beautifully, particularly their attempts to evade or trick the blind guards by creeping past them without being seen, or interfering in their game of hockey. The latter two scenes are filmed in long, steady shots similar to the aforementioned bedroom scene. It is reminiscent of silent comedies such as “Safety Last!” in that regard, keeping the camera at a distance and letting the actors’ bodies interact with their environment. Even the cruel cockfight scene is shot with beauty, the camera swooping over the fighting birds almost like a divinity overseeing it. The outside world is temporarily forgotten as we get lost in the fight.

 The beauty of these scenes is not used to distract the audience from the cruelty of the characters’ actions, but rather to soften the blow. What the characters – and by extension the cast and crew – are doing to these animals is cruel, and no attempt is made to deny that. It is not entertaining, nor is it funny in the primary sense. It is merely what it is, shown as such, and the artistic pleasure derived from the way it is filmed and edited makes it more palatable to us but does not desensitize us from its nature.

If it weren’t for the use of German language and the opening credits, you would be forgiven for mistaking “Even Dwarfs Started Small” for a Luis Buñuel film. It bears many familiar thematic and visual hallmarks of his cinema, from the arid, desert setting in the Canary Islands reminiscent of “Las Hurdes: Land Without Bread” and “Simon Of The Desert” to its visual blasphemy worthy of “Viridiana”:  

-          The dwarfs parading a monkey tied up on a cross.

 

-          A pre-supper grace prayer that turns into a food fight.

 

-          The film’s final image is that of its protagonist, Hombre, laughing maniacally for over two minutes at a camel kneeling as if in prayer that eventually defecates, as traditional South American chanting and music plays on the soundtrack.

I am too much of a neophyte to detail what truly separates this film from a Buñuel film, but I think I can be quite safe in saying that Herzog seems to have more affection for his characters than Buñuel did. While Buñuel was not devoid of empathy and kindness – see “Los Olvidados” – he often treated his victims as badly as his villains. Herzog, while not shying away from his protagonists’ insanity and cruelty, puts the blame on the system, as was the popular thing to do back then. Even his hapless instructor – who ends up stuck in a parody of a Nazi salute, arguing with a tree trunk – is just another victim of the institution he runs.