Adaptation and Accuracy

THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER

THIS IS ENGLAND

The issues we've discussed about historical accuracy, the filmmaker's role as adapter, and whether the combination of history and art creates propaganda remind me of two movies I saw recently. In The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (trailer), Werner Herzog tells the true story of a young man who appeared in 1828 in the town square of Nuremberg, Germany, without the ability to speak and barely able to walk. After learning to speak, Kaspar related how he had lived his entire life in a small, windowless cell, tied to the floor and brought food while he slept; until he was suddenly released in 1828, he had never seen another human being or anything outside the cell, and had never heard speech. Why he was imprisoned, by whom, why he was released, and his ultimate fate remain much debated mysteries to this day.

As a film, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is stunning. Kaspar is played by Bruno S., a Berlin street performer with no acting experience, who touchingly conveys Kaspar's mixed sense of fear and wonderment at the world he's never seen before. (No doubt this was partly thanks to the fact that Bruno's own early life in some respects paralleled Kaspar's, having been savagely abused by his prostitute mother at a very young age and grown up in a series of orphanages and mental institutions.) Herzog underscores the unsettling and, well, enigmatic nature of the events depicted with scenes of haunting, dreamlike imagery seemingly unrelated to the story. His eye for strange, beautiful visuals is on full display; the cinematography is characterized by stillness, natural beauty, and expert composition.

Herzog's always been interested in people outside of normal human society and experience, so it's easy to see why he wanted to tell Kaspar Hauser's story. Although in most regards the film stays close to historical events and even directly quotes Kaspar's own words several times, it is at least as much an expression of Herzog's creative desire to explore themes that interest him as it is a straightforward depiction of the actual events. A clue to his intent may be found in the film's title in German, Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, "Each for himself and God against all"; Kaspar is depicted as radically cut off from everyone around him and often feeling threatened and confused by what he sees. Having never interacted with other people or seen any of the world prior to his release from captivity, he's developed his own ways of seeing and thinking about things (a good example of that here). This clearly interests Herzog very much, as he underscores it with a wholly invented scene of Kaspar interacting with a logician. In another unhistorical scene (seen in the trailer), Kaspar is put on display in a carnival freakshow. Though these scenes add to the film as a piece of art by illustrating the themes of social and mental isolation and the socialized, even unnatural, character of normal human understanding and experience, they make the film's role as a depiction of a real man's life somewhat murky by infusing that depiction with the artistic vision and interests of a filmmaker living over a hundred years later. I don't think that detracts from the film as a piece of art (and a great one at that), but it introduces a tension based on that contradiction, one that can be alleviated but never fully resolved.

The approach to factual accuracy taken in This Is England (trailer) contrasts with that taken in Che and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Screenwriter and director Shane Meadows tells the story of Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), a twelve-year-old working-class kid in the economically struggling '80s English Midlands who recently lost his father in the Falklands War. He's befriended by a group of skinheads, but trouble arises with the appearance of Combo (Stephen Graham), representing the new nationalistic, white-supremacist element in skinhead subculture in conflict with the apolitical, racially inclusive old-school skinheads represented by Shaun's friends. The group is forced to pick sides, and Shaun falls in with Combo, who assumes the role of father figure missing in the boy's life. The film is both moving and intense, depicting the warmth of Shaun's new friendships and the anxiety, animosity, and eventual terror that Combo brings. All the performances are excellent, especially first-time actor Turgoose who perfectly conveys Shaun's adolescent uncertainty and longing beneath his tough-kid exterior. If nothing else, I learned a lot about skinheads, namely that they originally had nothing to do with racism and in fact were influenced early on by Caribbean music and culture (the Jamaican rude boys). This movie is powerful in every possible way.

What makes This Is England relevant to this topic is the fact that Meadows based it on his own childhood, with Shaun acting as his stand-in. However, he never makes the claim, even implicitly, that there is any one-to-one relation between the film and the events of his own life. In this way it avoids the dilemma in which Che and, to a lesser extent, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser find themselves. Meadows is freer than Soderbergh or Herzog to include only those elements of fact that assist the film as a piece of art, without the nagging questions of whether to compromise the art by adhering to fact or compromise fact by adhering to art. As I mentioned in the second paragraph of my previous post, perhaps changing names and events, thereby definitively divorcing art from fact, is the way to avoid these contraditions. As someone who likes history-based movies I don't really like that solution, but it may be the only one that resolves the dilemmas of historical accuracy, the propagandistic aspects of art, and artists' responsibility to things other than art itself.