Beijing Film Academy post-screening director exchange. The director said, I never dream, I only daydream.
Kaspar Hauser is a real figure in history. Born on April 30, 1812 (according to a letter he held at the time of his abandonment) to unknown parents, he was abandoned a few months after birth. He was adopted by a poor hired hand. In 1828, at the age of 16, Kaspar Hauser was abandoned on the market square in Nuremberg because his hired laborers could not support him. He was then adopted by a humanities middle school teacher in the city named George Dormer. In October of the following year, Kaspar Hauser was murdered for the first time, but not fatally. From December 1829, Kaspar Hauser was the ward of Baron Tuch, and was adopted successively by the merchant Johann von Bieberbach and then Baron Tuch. In November 1831, Baron Touch's guardianship ended and Lord Stanhope took over the guardianship. After that, Kasper Hauser was adopted by governess Julius Mayer. Caspar Hauser was murdered a second time on December 14, 1833, and died a few days later on December 17.
After the fate of Kaspar Hauser was revealed to the world, it has attracted the attention and research of many sociologists, anthropologists, historians and writers. There are different opinions about his life experience, and some people even speculate that Kaspar Hauser may have a relationship with the Duke of Baden, Karl Ludwig F. Riedlich's son is the same person. However, this inference could not be strongly confirmed. Feuerbach, a well-known lawyer from Ansbach, pointedly pointed out that the Kasper Hauser incident was an example of a crime against a person's spiritual life. Kaspar Hauser's name has become a common term in the field of social psychologists, synonymous with the phenomena caused by social isolation. For more than 100 years, a wide range of social debates have been formed around the mysterious life and phenomena of Kaspar Hauser. There are more than 10,000 articles and more than 1,000 monographs, including plays. However, Herzog's "Every Man for Himself, God Against All" is the first of a film based on the fate of Kaspar Hauser.
In the film, Herzog faithfully and artistically portrayed a social outsider who was abandoned by his family and society, and who was discriminated against, ridiculed and exploited. He expresses Kaspar Hauser's isolated loneliness with quiet and powerful images, showing Kaspar Hauser's conflict with the world and society after being thrown into society, strengthening Kasper Hauser ·Hauser's experience and the suffering nature of his fate expressed his deep sympathy for the fate of this lonely, humiliated and damaged little man. At the same time, the film mirrors the hypocrisy and unbridled egoism of an early capitalist society based on privilege and hierarchy. In the film, Herzog also protests against the practice of explaining Kaspar Hauser's non-standard thoughts and behaviors only from a "scientific" point of view, rather than looking for reasons from society itself. For this film, Herzog once explained: "Kaspar Hauser was rudely pushed into a world he had never seen before after becoming a teenager, which can be said to be the kind of human beings so far. The only known event of its kind in history. Casper was a man of total incomprehension, no language, no civilisation; Like an extraterrestrial visitor who came to earth from some other planet. When he was thrust into a hypocritical and secular world of citizens, he began a history of suffering, and began a process of slowly adding a man who was originally quite human. The story of strangulation. Until Kasper was murdered, people were desperately looking for something deformed in him. In fact, this deformed thing was the one who was bent on treating Kasper Hauser according to their standards. A bourgeois society that has been trained. They are all blind at this point." The title of the film, "Everyone for himself, God against everyone" is taken from a Brazilian film called "Macunaima" (1969, Director: Joaquin Pedro de Andrade). Herzog once explained the title of the film with the help of Kasper in the film: "When I look around me and look at the people around me, there really is such a feeling: God must Against them." Sadly, this scene was later removed from the edit.
Herzog is a director with distinctive artistry and originality. His films are peculiar in subject matter and bizarre in content, and most of them show people and events that are out of the norm of ordinary people, or in some kind of extreme environment far away from human civilization and culture. Things I have seen, or I don’t know yet, I don’t understand.” Therefore, most of his films choose distant, unfamiliar, inaccessible, and exotic places to shoot, such as: “Signs of Life” is in Greece. "Mirage" was shot in the Sahara Desert; "Aguirre, God's Wrath" and "Fitzcarraldo" were shot in the tropical jungle of the Amazon River in South America; "Green" Where Ants Dream was shot in Aboriginal Australia; Coppola Wilder was shot somewhere in Africa.
Herzog's films do not focus on telling compelling stories, but appeal to a certain philosophy of life. He once said: "The core of my film is research and seeking, as human beings, what are we?" , through the protagonist's efforts to find himself, from the perspective of anthropology and existentialism, he is constantly conducting his research on people, especially on people on the margins of society. The protagonists of Herzog's films are mostly people with abnormal or unhealthy body and mind - mentally deranged, dwarfs, disabled, outcasts of unknown origin, adventurers, visionaries, etc. In the film, he not only described the special fate of such morbid characters, but also used them as examples of social diseases, making Kafka-esque symbols and metaphors for the morbidities of the past and present society.
"Everyone is for himself, God against all" is the first film made by Herzog after he took the lead in which the story takes place in Germany and a mysterious German outcast as the protagonist. In order to make the film well, he prepared for a whole year, consciously making it a "real national film, not a film that shows narrow and closed localism." This film later became not only an important work of the "new local cinema" that emerged in the West German film circle in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but also contributed to the "rediscovery of Germany's own culture and tradition, and the re-strengthening of a self-confident local film". Literature and Art". The film also aroused the attention and high evaluation of the international film circle. French film critic Keith Tessier said of the film: "The difference between Werner Herzog's work and Truffaut's The Wolf Child is its critical and ironic look at society. The reason why Casper's sane man's comprehension makes a doctor's logic untenable is entirely because behind this logic lies a dizzying, worthless It’s nothing more than nothingness.” Ingmar Bergman, a famous Swedish film director, also wrote an article in the American “Newsweek” magazine in 1977, listing Herzog’s “Every Man for Himself, God Against All” as his " One of the ten best films I've seen in my life", calling it an "incredible" film whose philosophy is "deep, intelligent and wonderful". The famous American director Francis Coppola bought the distribution rights of this film after "Aguirre, God's Wrath". "Every Man for Himself, God Against All" further enhanced Herzog's prestige and status as a famous director of "New German Cinema". With deep respect for the well-known German film historian Lot H. Eisner, who has been living in Paris since Hitler came to power, Herzog wrote the following subtitle on the title of the film: To Lot Eisner, one of those brilliant minds who were forced to leave Germany.
Herzog is a director with a persistent pursuit of his own artistic style. Although his films did not sell well due to their strong philosophical nature, he always rejected the practice of equalizing art and business, stubbornly excluded all external interference and criticism, and unswervingly followed his own path. The artistic features and strong German national style of Herzog's films have been highly praised and highly appraised by Western film critics. The American "Newsweek" once regarded him as "one of the most noteworthy figures among young German directors" and "the most original director of the Federal Republic of Germany"; the famous French film critic Jill Jacob Known as the contemporary "new agate". Herzog's films have made the international film community have a strong interest and recognition for the truly nationalized "New German Cinema", which is exactly what Herzog has done for the "New German Cinema". contribute.
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