The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser

The winner of the Grand Jury Award at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, this haunting and, at times, disconcertingly whimsical film helped to propel the self-styled visionary New German filmmaker, Werner Herzog, to international prominence.

Herzog's slow and meditative films are fairly unique in contemporary narrative cinema. Landscapes and music are at least as important as the human characters in his work. His protagonists tend to be obsessive dreamers compelled to action by the power of their visions--with consequences that are sometimes transcendental, sometimes disastrous. At their most excessive, Herzog's films can be regressive, reactionary, self-indulgent a...