Title: THE FIFTH GOSPEL OF KASPAR HAUSER
Running time: 61 min.
Colour: Black and white
Recording format: 16mm
Original language: Galician
Country of production: Spain
Production: Zeitun Films
Year of production: 2013
Title: THE FIFTH GOSPEL OF KASPAR HAUSER
Running time: 61 min.
Colour: Black and white
Recording format: 16mm
Original language: Galician
Country of production: Spain
Production: Zeitun Films
Year of production: 2013
With Josecho, Sara García, Oliver Laxe, Nando Vázquez, Alberto Gracia, Pedro Soler and Quique Amil
Director and Scriptwriter: Alberto Gracia
Cinematographer: Mauro Herce
Sound Recorder: Miguel Bretal
Sound Designer and Mixing: Alberto Gracia and Enrico Fiocco
Editors: Alberto Gracia and Diana Toucedo
Producers: Oliver Laxe · Felipe Lage Coro
Rotterdam International Film Festival. FIPRESCI Award
Festival Cinemateca Uruguaya (Uruguay)
Cinema Latino Festival – Tübingen (Germany)
Festival Lima Independente (Perú)
Ars Independent Film Festival (Poland)
Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia (Chile)
Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival (Greece)
Viennale (Austria)
SEFF Festival de Cine Europeo de Sevilla (Spain)
Cineuropa Santiago de Compostela (Spain)
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.
The Fifth Gospel of 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”.