Kaspar Hauser: from one prison to another

Abstract

This study has the objective of analysing the film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, by Werner Herzog, produced in Germany in 1974. For a film critic, the director proposes to the audience a question about the possibility of civilizing somebody that has had contact with a certain culture after the adequate time. It is defended in this work that this is not the problematic with which Herzog is concerned: one understands that the director effectively carries through a reflection of a sociological character, aiming to demonstrate that the journey the protagonist (and men generally) makes takes him from one prison to another. The first (a physical, spatial and material prison), limits the steps to be taken and the geometric figures to be drawn with corporal movements; the second one (a symbolic arrest based in conditions of verisimilitude), limits the options about values that can be done and the axiological principles that one is forced to share. The first prison, visible in the photogram’s sequence that reaches the eye of the audience, is a construction of a series of metaphors destined to be determined by the effect of sense that the prison one really talks about is that produced by the society that entangles its members, obligating them to participate of a common doxa they have no other option than to comply with and accept.