Werner Herzog has spent his whole life a maverick — he’s not the type of filmmaker who plays the “one for me, one for them” game, satiating studio executives in between forgotten passion projects. Herzog just doesn’t give a hoot. Rather than working his way up the industry ladder, he simply stole a camera from the Munich Film School, made some oddball shorts and documentaries, and then released an audaciously lunatic feature film in 1970 called Even Dwarfs Started Small.
Foreshadowing the spirit of anarchic glee that would take the world by storm through Jackass and its derivatives three decades later, Even Dwarfs Started Small is a delirious orgy of mayhem-cum-art film. With a threadbare narrative (a hoarde of little people go wild in the wake of a jailbreak from an abusive institution), Herzog sets the stage for one of his most spontaneous and startling masterpieces. He merely allows the film to revel in the increasingly mad escapades it portrays until the final frame. Best of all, Herzog doesn’t force the audience to approach Even Dwarfs with a critical eye, never imposing the pretense of a deeper meaning or a moral imperative behind the work. You can read what you want into the monkey crucifism, or the plight of the deposed dwarf despot– or you can just sit back and enjoy the carnage.
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Do you know Burden of Dreams of Les Blank? A documentary about Werner Herzog shooting his Fitzcarraldo.