1824, Bavaria. A cowardly young man has lived in seclusion for years, without an education or contact with society, until one day his jailer releases him, abandoning him in the town square. When he is found, the young man clutches a letter bearing his name, Kaspar Hauser, and asks to be contacted by the cavalry captain to recruit him as a knight. After initial hesitation, Kaspar ends up working in a circus as a sideshow performer, until a doctor adopts him and introduces him to the study of music and the arts, to which he demonstrates a marked sensitivity.
Special Jury Award- 1975 Cannes Film Festival
"The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is Herzog's work that encompasses all his themes and movements. Through meaningful images, the passionate journey of a different man is narrated, one aware of the futility of all the structures and superstructures that humanity has invented for survival. Human destiny is to vanish into nothingness like Kaspar's face reflected in the water. First, everything was enclosed within the four walls of a prison, after which it was only a heavy fall into a world where deduction, not understanding, reigns, blind faith, moral rules, social hierarchies. Kaspar would still like to spread his name but knows that vandals will arrive to destroy the compositions of his garden. So death is the last hope. The beginning of the story of the caravan in the desert towards the Ideal City." (Fabio Fulfaro)
The screening is part of the Werner Herzog: Signs of Life retrospective, organized in collaboration with Mabuse Cineclub.
