Werner Herzog is always himself, but Bucking Fastard sees Herzog Herzoging harder than he has in years. At this point, the New German Cinema pioneer is best known as a documentarian — more specifically, as a deep, gravelly voice narrating said documentaries in his much-beloved, much-imitated German accent. But before he was a meme, Herzog was an upstart. And his latest film takes him all the way back to his roots.
In 1970, Herzog released Even Dwarfs Started Small, his second feature film. Shot in black-and-white in the Canary Islands, it’s a bizarre, cryptic movie about a group of little people who basically start a riot and run wild on the muddy grounds of a remote institution of some kind. We know that it was influenced by Herzog’s documentary work of the period, but beyond that, its meaning is wholly personal to the director — just like Bucking Fastard, which is dedicated to the similarly intuitive David Lynch.
