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At the beginning of this film, our eyes are treated to lovely scenes of a small rowboat with a young male (perhaps the director?) dressed in a mid-19th century costume crossing a pond, the reflection on water of a young woman's face (probably Herzog's wife), medieval walls and a tower, and an older woman washing clothes on the shore staring back ... filmed on location in Dinkelsbuhl, a small town in Bavaria (just south of the better-known Rothenburg). Our ears meanwhile are treated to Mozart's music from "The Magic Flute" and the entrancing "Dies Bildnis" aria sung by Fritz Wunderlich. The words are these:
"Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön
Wie noch kein Auge je geseh'n!
Ich fühl' es, wie dies Götterbild
Mein Herz mit neuer Regung füllt,
Mein Herz mit neuer Regung füllt."
"This image is enchantingly beautiful
As no eye has ever seen!
I feel it, as this divine image
My heart with new stirring fills,
My heart with new stirring fills."
And here we enter as charming and true a presentation of the heart of Romanticism as any in cinema. Western civilization was transformed by the new vision embodied in works such as "The Magic Flute," Beethoven's 9th Symphony and the "Heiliger Dankegesang" ("Holy Song of Thanks") of his 15th String Quartet, and Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther," the paintings of Casper David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge, the poetry of Novalis, and of course the works of Rousseau, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and many more ....
The tale is based on recorded events which began one morning in 1828 in a Nuremberg square as an unkempt adolescent is discovered, evidently unable to speak or understand language, and holding a mysterious letter. Some scenes are invented in the film, but much was recorded as the youth was eventually adopted by a doctor and taken to nearby Ansbach where he became a cause célèbre famous throughout Europe. He was seen by some as the embodiment of the noble savage ideal, of the natural innocence and goodness with which we enter this beautiful, strange, dangerous world only to be abused, corrupted, deranged, encrusted by obsolete but still powerful conventions, where hostile and petty minds are all too omnipresent ... unless through imagination and art we can recover the innate innocence and goodness to transform ourselves and this world, and so on ...
Indulge in this sensibility if only as an exercise of imagination, nostalgia and empathy, a journey to a lost world which nonetheless still lurks in (maybe) all of us and still trying to get out -- we who are more level-headed, rational, cold-hearted, jaded. Let yourself experience Fernweh, the yearning, ache, almost painful, for distant, exotic places, the imagining of which inflames the soul and spurs Sehnsucht, the ache, the longing for that which is just beyond the edge of imagination and conceptualization, insatiable perhaps and otherworldly ... and so on ...
Kasper's grave is still there, well cared for, in Ansbach, as is the memorial at the spot where he was stabbed, and a museum still displays his writings and clothes he wore. Bruno S., a sometime street musician and psychiatric clinic client, though no longer an adolescent for this film, was the perfect one to play the role. See and hear him make music and sing in his old age via the NY Times: a December 24, 2008 multimedia report titled "From Berlin's Hole of Forgottenness, a Spell of Songs."
At the film's end, the "Magic Flute" aria concludes:
"Dies' etwas kann ich zwar nicht nennen,
Doch fühl' ichs hier wie Feuer brennen.
Soll die Empfindung Liebe sein?
Ja, ja, die Liebe ist's allein.
Die Liebe ist's allein"
"I cannot name this something,
Though I feel it here like fire burning,
Could this infection be love?
Yes! Yes! Love it is alone!
Love it is alone!"
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Canadian Customer
Fake information on this DVD! VERY DISAPPOINTING...
Reviewed in Canada on June 23, 2017