Even Dwarfs Started Small

“Even Dwarfs Started Small is one of the most genuinely disturbing films I have ever seen.
“The whole cast of the film consists of twenty-seven dwarfs, and they act out a sort of obscene parody of human life. On an island (Lanzarote, actually), the inmates of a house of correction have staged a revolt against the school. There are doubtless political parallels to be drawn, but the significance of the film cannot be limited to politics....
“In the obscene cavortings of these twenty-seven dwarfs one is horrified, not by their differences from us, but by their similarities... a literal microcosm: all of human life, however distressingly, is there, writ small... it is smack in the middle of a certain tradition of Northern art... like Bosch and Grunewald, it bears witness to a view of human life that we ignore at our peril.”

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