The Fifth Gospel of Kaspar Hauser (2013)
Director: Alberto Gracia
Country: Spain
Runtime: 61 min
Here is a new episode of the adventures of the enfant sauvage Kaspar Hauser together with his inseparable and loved wooden horse. On this occasion Kaspar, an untenable subject, possesses the personality of five archetypical figures: a sadomasochist dwarf, a seductive maiden, a cynic and despotic fellow, a romantic sailor and a pathetic batman that, in this movie is played by the director himself. This is a portrait of an antihero dressed in robe and slippers, a compulsive smoker, a true image of the maladjustments that so well depict the state of a disappointed humanity, one that is given to thinking, one that belongs to this world, but, yet, it never does so.
The Fifth Gospel of Gaspar Hauser is a preposterous system of categories.
I decided one day that this movie had to be a gospel, nothing less. The world, under that set of questions, is nothing but complicity and correspondence instead of will and representation; it goes without that rigorous will that maims the outside (or the inside) in order to indulge the senses. It is an impossible narrative, a “tragicomedy” for the 21st century. Is a gospel an act desperate to introduce ethics into an aesthetic that escapes us and that is impossible? Conducted that way, the dialectics of reflexive discourse lead to experiencing religious acceptance, to say “yes” to life, to no more intimate secrets, but to accept, instead, the gossip that spreads to the infinite, and that contradicts itself at the same time. Here, the Christian promise is projected as a question: if behind Grace’s veil there is nothing, why, in the first place, you wanted to undress Beauty? Language cannot speak about language. Revelation is not accessible through language, it is pure immanence, is to think the outside, and to rethink reflexive discourse from the standpoint of silence. A fly buzzes inside a glass. The glass is in silence, but the whole breaths beyond that glass.
I suspect that all possible tragedies can be distilled into one: the passage of time. Is this a utopia of fiction? Can optimism begin here? Can it begin in the current circumstances, after all sad speeches have been delivered, and the long culture of martyrdom and lamentation gets finally brought to an end? Since Romanticism is impossible to escape, Gaspar suggests a journey from the Romantic utopia of change, of perpetual movement, to the utopia of fiction. If Batman is going to save us, are we going to get fucked?
Does it make sense to make a movie when there is nothing New to say? I suspect that all types of creations and recreations are a kind of flight, a kind of stroll with the impossible child of our childhood; that one we have never ceased to be. And truth is the search for the Truth with an uppercase “t”, and, therefore, the creation Process of this gospel is an act of faith, an act of idiocy and of cheerful stubbornness.
O Quinto Evanxeo de Gaspar Hauser is a Nobody’s movie, a Nobody that lives surrounded by the darkness of knowing himself impossible, while enjoying, at the same time, the freedoms that lock him in a small size cell. Should this remind us of that Gaspar Hauser’s pre-linguistic phase, as much as, those avatars of social media and our narcissism 2.0? As an object of study, will we find, in the concept of the auto-readymade, the challenging solution to the paradox of the self-referencing subject?
As Gaspar says: “What keeps men together is not nature or the feeling of reclusion within the boundaries of language, but the vision of language itself, any language, any signifying methods that men use”.
Director: Denis Côté
