Even Dwarfs Started Small · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the car. Somewhere in the middle of the film a driverless vehicle begins to circle the institution's courtyard, engine running, wheel locked, going nowhere with great mechanical patience. Nobody stops it. Nobody can. Its sound becomes the floor under everything else — a drone you stop noticing and then can't unhear — and by the time the credits arrive it is still turning. That orbit is the whole film in miniature. It is motion that has come unhooked from purpose. In any other movie a car is a tool: someone gets in, drives somewhere, a situation changes. Here it simply spins, and the spinning is the point.

Deleuze gave us a clean way to say what has gone wrong, or right. In ordinary cinema — what he called the movement-image — a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; the action resolves the situation, and editing chains perception to deed. Even Dwarfs Started Small belongs to the cinema that follows the collapse of that circuit, what Deleuze named the crisis of the action-image. The inmates rebel, yes, but the rebellion transforms nothing. They do not escape, do not negotiate, do not win or lose. They run loose and the energy dissipates sideways into ritual: cockfights, a blinded animal stumbling in circles, a potted flower methodically wrecked, a small monkey hauled up in mock crucifixion. Each act discloses no goal. The warden, meanwhile, conducts his authority through a locked door, addressing a captive he cannot see — every hierarchy in the film rendered contingent, ridiculous, structurally jammed. There is a situation. There is no act that answers it.

What fills the vacuum is appetite. This is where Deleuze's impulse-image earns its keep — and it is no accident the lens fits, because Herzog is one of the directors Deleuze actually reaches for when he describes this region of cinema. The impulse-image is the image of compulsion: drives erupting beneath the social surface, a world reduced to grabbing, breaking, consuming, degrading. Deleuze pairs it with two terms that map onto Herzog's Lanzarote with almost embarrassing precision. The institution — its whitewashed corridors and bare cells, its architecture of control — is what he calls the derived milieu, the ordinary determined setting. And the volcanic terrain around it, black lava without memory or vegetation, indifferent to every human drama staged on it, is the originary world: the savage, formless ground that the milieu only thinly covers. The whole drama of the impulse-image is the milieu being torn open to reveal the originary world underneath. Mauch's camera does exactly that, holding its wide shots until the basalt swallows the institution and the people on it look arbitrary, temporary, like something the lava will outlast.

Watch what the rebels reach for and you see the impulse-image's grammar. They do not seize symbols of power; they seize part-objects — Deleuze's fetishes — torn fragments charged with compulsive force. Food. The flowering shrub. The animal bodies. These are not props in an argument about freedom. They are things to be devoured or destroyed because the drive has nowhere else to go. And the motion of the film as a whole follows what he calls the line of slope: an entropic downward slide toward exhaustion, the insurrection spending itself rather than building. Mainka-Jellinghaus cuts to that logic exactly. Scenes run long, the black jokes are held until they curdle, nothing accelerates toward a climax. The film accumulates and then simply stops.

And then there is the laughter. Döring's Hombre, alone in the dust at the end, begins to laugh, and the take refuses to cut. It runs past comedy, past legibility, into something like anguish, and keeps going until watching it becomes an ordeal. This is no longer an action or even an expression you can read. It is what Deleuze called a pure optical and sound situation — an opsign — an image that hands you nothing to do but look and endure. The car's drone earlier did the same thing to your ear. Both are time made audible and visible as itself, mechanical repetition standing in for the future that the action-image used to deliver. Herzog's editorial nerve here — to deny you the cutaway, the relief, the exit — is the whole modernist wager. He forces you to sit inside duration you cannot intellectualize your way out of.

The lineage is exact and worth naming. From Rossellini's volcanic Stromboli and the ruins of Germany Year Zero, Herzog takes landscape-as-condition, terrain that overwhelms agency, shot with diegetic sound and a non-professional body. From Buñuel's Exterminating Angel he takes the captive group whose ritual degrades under a deadpan camera that refuses to editorialize. From Browning's Freaks he takes the self-contained world of atypical bodies — but strips away the melodrama, the containment, the moral. What he adds is the refusal of redemption. Rossellini's island offers grace; Herzog's lava offers nothing.

That refusal is the achievement. Herzog took the post-war discovery — that cinema could abandon the resolving act and simply watch a situation rot — and pushed it past politics, past allegory, into pure anarchic anthropology. He built a film with no outside. Watch the car again. It is still turning.