The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

A man who spent his first seventeen years in a cellar without seeing a human face is left one day in a square in Nuremberg. He cannot speak or walk and knows nothing about the world. The town treats him first as a curiosity and then as an educational project. Werner Herzog directed, basing the account on the letters found with the real Kaspar Hauser. The casting decision is as remarkable as the film. Herzog cast Bruno Schleinstein, credited as Bruno S., a street musician with no acting experience who had spent much of his life in and out of institutions. He was 41 during filming and played an adolescent; he stayed in costume throughout and slept on the floor of his hotel room. It won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival along with the FIPRESCI and Ecumenical Jury prizes. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 92 percent. The critic Walter Chaw described it as a strange, brave performance housed in an anti-linear film stuffed with obscure images and silent passages. Herzog builds his character not as a victim struggling to adapt to civilisation but as another kind of consciousness arriving from nature, for whom society's rules stay arbitrary. Who it is for: viewers who like Herzog and cinema at the edge of reason. Who it is not for: anyone wanting narrative momentum. The film is deliberately slow and much of it is wordless.