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Despite its title, this film isn't really about Kaspar Hauser. Like the underground prison into which he is thrown for years, kaspar is a black hole into which his story is sucked. The film is really about two connected themes, both reflecting German anxieties about its past. kaspar's treatment exposes the Enlightenment society that destroys him, just as his seemingly primitive characteristics (grunting etc.) undermine its insistence on artificiality, manners and wit.Secondly, a film set in Nuremberg, with a hero twice wrenched from his home and incarcerated, and who has his diary burnt, is clearly 'explaining' a more notorious past, that of the Nazis, showing how Germany would rather couch uncomfortable history in vague mythology.A comparison between this tricksy, paranoid, exhausting film, and Herzog's restrained enigmatic version of the same story would be instructive. The latter is a masterpiece.
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