Even Dwarfs Started Small

dir. Werner Herzog · 1971

Snapshot

A reform institution in a desolate volcanic landscape. The warden has gone inside to handle a disciplinary matter, leaving one inmate, Hombre, locked in his office as a kind of hostage while the remaining residents run loose on the grounds. What follows is not escape but escalating destruction: cockfights, a blinded camel stumbling in circles, a driverless car orbiting a courtyard without cease, the desecration of a flowering shrub, the mock crucifixion of a small monkey. At the end, Hombre stands alone in the dust, laughing — a paroxysm that goes on for minutes until it becomes unbearable to watch and then somehow continues further. Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen is Werner Herzog's most nakedly anarchic film and one of the most genuinely strange objects in postwar European cinema. Every character — the rebels, the warden, the hostage — is a little person. The casting is not allegory in any simple sense; it is, rather, a formal decision that makes the familiar strange and the strange unbearable, hollowing out any stable position from which to watch.

Industry & Production

The film is a West German production, made under Herzog's own banner, Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, which he had established in 1963 at the age of twenty-one. This structure — self-produced, independent of the established studio apparatus — was typical of the New German Cinema generation and gave Herzog the autonomy to pursue material no conventional producer would touch. Shooting took place almost entirely on Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, chosen for its lunar volcanic terrain: black lava fields, white-plastered walls, an absence of softening vegetation. The production was made on minimal resources; no reliable budget figure has been published, and the economics of this phase of Herzog's career were essentially hand-to-mouth. The entire cast was drawn from performers of restricted stature, recruited across Europe with considerable difficulty. Helmut Döring plays Hombre, the de facto leader of the insurrection; other principal roles were filled by Paul Glauer, Gisela Hertwig, Hertel Minkner, Gerhard Märtz, Brigitte Siebert, and Marianne Saar. None were established film actors. Herzog has described the casting process as exhausting and the shoot itself as physically hazardous — a set of conditions he treated as productive pressure rather than obstacle. The film premiered at the twentieth Berlin International Film Festival in 1970, where it received the Silver Bear Special Jury Prize, and received its wider release in 1971.

Technology

The film was shot in black-and-white 35mm, a choice that by 1970 carried a deliberate aesthetic statement: color was by then the industry default, and monochrome signaled a certain seriousness or austerity, a refusal of sensory comfort. The volcanic terrain of Lanzarote photographs with exceptional contrast in black and white — the dark basalt flows, the chalk-white institution walls, the bleached sky — producing an image that oscillates between documentary harshness and expressionist abstraction. The cinematographic equipment was lightweight for its era, permitting the hand-held mobility the film requires. No production technology beyond the standard 35mm sync-sound configuration is documented as distinctive to this shoot.

Technique

Cinematography

Thomas Mauch, who would go on to photograph Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and several subsequent Herzog features, served as director of photography. Mauch's work here is observational in temperament but surrealist in effect. The camera often holds at a slight remove, watching with an almost clinical patience as events accumulate and deteriorate; it does not editorialize through rapid cutting or expressive angles but allows duration to do the unsettling work. Wide shots of the volcanic landscape place the institution and its inhabitants in a hostile, indifferent environment: nothing in the terrain encourages or redeems. Close observation of faces — particularly in the extended final sequence of Döring's laughter — is allowed to run well past the point of legibility, past comedy, into something closer to anguish or hysteria. The hand-held passages, especially during the more chaotic crowd sequences, are loose and responsive without becoming frenetic; they convey instability rather than excitement.

Editing

Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Herzog's primary editor across many of his films of this period and into the 1970s, cut the film. Her approach matches the material's rhythmic logic: scenes run long, jokes (if that is the word) are held until they curdle, and the structure refuses conventional narrative acceleration. The film has no proper climax in the dramatic sense — it accumulates and then stops. The final laughing sequence is the most conspicuous editorial decision: to simply let Döring laugh for an extended, increasingly unendurable take, with no cutaway relief, forces the audience into an experience they cannot intellectualize their way out of. The editorial tempo throughout suggests a world in which time is not organized by purpose or consequence but simply passes, marked by the repetitive orbit of the unmanned car.

Mise-en-scène / Staging

The institution is a physical maze of whitewashed corridors, bare courtyards, and sparse cells — an architecture of control rendered absurd by the failure of control. The volcanic landscape surrounding it functions as a visual argument: this is a terrain without memory, without the accumulated marks of human habitation, and within it the human institution appears arbitrary and temporary. Herzog stages the film's principal grotesque set pieces — the cockfighting, the deliberate blinding of a pig, the circular car, the crucified monkey, the systematic destruction of a prized potted plant — with a straight-faced, almost ceremonial patience that refuses easy signals about how to receive them. The humor, when it is legible as humor, is pitch-black and does not invite laughter so much as a kind of queasy recognition. The staging of authority — the warden addressing his captive from a position of structural superiority while himself trapped in a room, speaking to someone on the other side of a locked door — renders every hierarchy in the film contingent and ridiculous.

Sound

The film eschews a conventional score. The soundtrack is almost entirely diegetic: animal noises, footsteps, the ceaseless mechanical sound of the orbiting car's engine, the sounds of things being broken. This is a world without music in the redemptive or organizing sense; sound here is environmental, accidental, frequently unpleasant. The sustained auditory presence of the circling car is one of the film's most effective techniques — a loop of mechanical repetition that becomes a kind of drone, the film's unconscious rhythm. Silence is used sparingly and with force, most notably in moments that in a conventional film would be underscored for emphasis.

Performance

Herzog has spoken at length about working with non-professional or unconventional performers by creating real conditions of physical and psychological pressure rather than simulating them. With this cast — none of whom had substantial film experience — he reportedly relied on endurance, repetition, and provocation rather than on actorly technique. Döring's performance as Hombre is the film's center of gravity: not a heroic rebel but a small, intense, enigmatic figure whose motivations are never psychologically explained. The other performers operate at the level of behavioral truth rather than character interiority; they run, they laugh, they destroy things, they watch. Herzog has described, in various interviews, the extreme conditions of the shoot — the heat, the physical difficulty of working in the volcanic terrain — and has noted that at one point he jumped into a cactus bed as a demonstration of commitment intended to persuade the cast to accept difficult demands. This anecdote, often repeated, is consistent with Herzog's general method of treating filmmaking as a form of ordeal.

Narrative & Dramatic Mode

The film refuses story in the conventional sense. It has a situation — an institution, a rebellious population, a hostage, escalating disorder — but no arc, no revelation, no resolution. The mode is closer to accumulation: events pile up, each feeding the next in no causal sequence that feels governed by logic. The insurrection does not build toward a goal; it dissipates energy through increasingly purposeless and ritualistic destruction. This places the film in a lineage of anti-narrative European cinema — closer to Beckett than to Brecht, closer to entropy than to dialectic. If there is dramatic tension, it lies in the sustained suspension of the question: when will the center collapse entirely? The answer turns out to be: it already has, and the film merely continues until the characters run out of things to break.

Genre & Cycle

Even Dwarfs Started Small inhabits no established genre comfortably. It has been described as black comedy, grotesque, allegory, and surrealist film. The comedy label is accurate insofar as the film provokes a laughter that is immediately destabilized by discomfort; the grotesque label captures the visual and situational register more precisely. It belongs loosely to a cycle of European art cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s that treated social institutions — the asylum, the school, the reformatory — as sites for political and existential analysis: a cycle that includes works by Miloš Forman, Marco Ferreri, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The casting decision places it in proximity to Tod Browning's Freaks (1932), a precursor in the use of physically atypical performers to interrogate normalcy, though Herzog's register is entirely different. The film is also clearly part of a post-1968 European cinema of disenchantment — films that dramatize the failure of revolutionary energy to produce transformation.

Authorship & Method

Herzog's authorship of this film is total in the sense typical of the New German Cinema's auteur ethos: he wrote, produced, and directed, working from an original screenplay with no literary source. The collaboration with Thomas Mauch was central to establishing the visual grammar that would persist into Aguirre. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus's editorial sensibility — her willingness to hold and to let images outlast their welcome — is equally constitutive of the film's effect. No composer is credited in the conventional sense; the sound design is functional rather than expressive in the traditional way, underscoring Herzog's interest in the natural world's sonic texture as a dramatic element in itself. The production context — self-financed, independently distributed — reflects a working method in which institutional constraints are treated as the enemy of authenticity.

Movement / National Cinema

The film is a foundational document of the New German Cinema (Neues Deutsches Kino), the movement catalyzed by the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto, in which a generation of filmmakers declared the death of the conventional German feature film and their intention to build a new national cinema on radically different premises. Herzog, Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, and Alexander Kluge were its principal figures, though they shared little beyond the rejection of the prevailing commercial cinema and a commitment to directorial authority. The movement drew heavily on the French New Wave's lessons — the legitimacy of personal filmmaking, location shooting, minimal production apparatus — while processing a specifically German postwar situation: the weight of the Nazi past, the new prosperity of the Federal Republic, and the political upheaval of the late 1960s. Even Dwarfs Started Small occupies an eccentric position within this movement: it lacks the social-realist tendencies of some New German Cinema and refuses the political explicitness of others, opting instead for allegory so oblique as to approach pure abstraction.

Era / Period

The film is datable with precision to the aftermath of 1968. The student revolts, the failure of the left to achieve transformation, and the spectacle of institutional power reasserting itself after apparent crisis shaped the cultural atmosphere in which the film was made. An insurrection that destroys a plant collection and sends a car in circles is a precise image of revolutionary energy without direction or object; the warden who is imprisoned but remains in control is a precise image of authority that survives its own destabilization. Whether Herzog intends this political reading as primary or incidental to a more existential vision of human absurdity is a question the film deliberately refuses to answer. The volcanic Lanzarote landscape — ancient, inhuman, indifferent — pushes the reading toward the existential: whatever these small figures are doing, the world that contains them predates and will outlast their institution and their insurrection alike.

Themes

The film's persistent obsessions include: the grotesque inadequacy of institutional authority; the entropy that sets in when constraint is removed; the impossibility of purposeful rebellion; the humiliation of the body and the spectacle of suffering turned to something indistinguishable from comedy; the relationship between the marginal and the mainstream — between the dwarf and the norm, the inmate and the warden, the subject and the structure. There is also a consistent interest in the animal: live chickens, pigs, a camel, a monkey, insects — creatures whose presence destabilizes the boundary between human behavior and the merely animal, and who frequently serve as the film's most disturbing objects of attention. The blinding of the pig, the crucifixion of the monkey, the cockfighting all suggest a cruelty that is not aberrant but structural, a violence that the institution both suppresses and embodies.

Reception, Canon & Influence

Backward influences. The most frequently cited precursor is Tod Browning's Freaks, from which the film inherits the provocation of casting physically atypical performers while radically departing from its melodramatic framework. The Buñuelian grotesque — in particular the anarchic destruction sequences and the deadpan staging of blasphemy — is legible throughout: The Exterminating Angel (1962) is a suggestive comparison point, a film in which a social gathering becomes inexplicably trapped and social ritual degrades into chaos. The theater of cruelty, as theorized by Antonin Artaud, has been invoked by some commentators, though Herzog has rarely aligned himself directly with Artaud in public statements. Samuel Beckett's structural influence — entropy as dramatic principle, language stripped of purposive meaning, endurance as the fundamental act — is pervasive even if undeclared.

Critical reception. The Silver Bear at Berlin 1970 established the film's seriousness within the European art cinema world. Critical responses, particularly in German-speaking territories and in France, recognized the film as a significant if deeply uncomfortable work; English-language critical attention came more slowly, partly because of limited distribution. The film has historically divided viewers between those who regard it as a genuine masterpiece of radical filmmaking and those who find its extremity pointlessly provocative. The charge of exploiting its cast — of treating little people as inherently grotesque spectacle — has been raised and debated. Herzog's own position, articulated across decades of interviews, is that the casting creates a world in which normalcy is radically defamiliarized and questions of who is marginal and who is central are genuinely suspended; critics of the film have not always found this argument persuasive.

Forward influence and legacy. The film's most direct legacy is within Herzog's own body of work: the themes of impossible authority, landscape as existential condition, and the endurance-as-performance approach to direction recur through Aguirre, Stroszek (1977), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and the documentaries. More broadly, the film has been a touchstone within art cinema for filmmakers drawn to the grotesque and to institutional allegory. It is studied in film programs as a paradigm case of the radical auteur film, of the limits of performance ethics, and of the relationship between the political and the absurd. The unanswered question it poses — what is the difference between a rebellion and a tantrum, between a critique of power and a demonstration of destruction for its own sake — has proved generative precisely because it refuses resolution.