jürgen fauth’s muckworld

New on idrinkyourmilkshake.com:

• Who else could have played Daniel Plainview? Kinski?
• H.W.? H.M. Tilford? J. J. Carter? Where do all those initals come from?
• Graphological analysis of Daniel Plainview’s handwriting
• What’s with the hammers during the blowout?
• How evil is Plainview? Did you see his tear?

It’s not difficult to argue that all Herzog/Kinski films are attempts at making and remaking the same movie — Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu and Woyzek less so — but that’s the beginning of the discussion rather than its conclusion. After all, most romantic comedies are remakes of the same movie, too. This final collaboration is no less vital than the other films. Kinski plays a Brazilian bandit who comes to the African West Coast as slave trader. Again, here’s the white man in a dangerously alien environment, again, here are Kinski’s borderless mania and passion. We’ve been familiar with Herzog’s grand shots at least since the Machu Picchu opening of Aguirre, and if anything, the extended takes of hundreds of extras in tribal gear are even more breathtaking, as much ethnography as they are drama. It’s also the first time we’ve seen Kinski lead an army of black amazons into battle, a sight that’s not easily forgotten. Take that, 300.

Cobra Verde is playing at the IFC Center right now, and here’s A.O. Scott:

Watching “Cobra Verde,” you feel at times that Mr. Herzog, like a figure out of Joseph Conrad, is in danger of losing his way, or even his mind. His eye, however, never deserts him, and the final third of this film contains sequences of horrifying sublimity and ethereal beauty, moments that have a clarity and power beyond the reach of reason.

Cobra Verde. Werner Herzog, 1987. ****

• Klaus Kinski: Ich Brauche Liebe
• My Best Fiend
• Kinski on YouTube

Not enough Kinski.

Per qualche dollaro in più. Sergio Leone, 1965. ***

[tags]sergio leone, klaus kinski, clint eastwood, film, 3 stars, italy, western, lee van cleef[/tags]

To me, Herzog’s Büchner adaptation smells of musty classrooms, but Klaus Kinski saves it with an incredible performance as the humiliated, schizophrenic private who can’t take it anymore. The murder at the climax is unbearably intense; the slow-motion take of Kinski with the knife might be one of the most gut-wrenchingly emotional single shots I have ever seen.

Woyzeck. Werner Herzog, 1979. ****

[tags]büchner, play, adaptation, theater, 4 stars, film, werner herzog, klaus kinski, eva mattes, german, murder[/tags]

I bought this book as a joke, an afterthought, just because I’d already spent twenty minutes in the dusty Prenzlauer Berg used book store where the salespeople were playing Warcraft in the corner. “Kinski’s always good for a laugh,” I figured, and forked over my three Euros. Little did I know that the joke would blossom into a full-fledged obsession. I’d grown up with an idea of Kinski based mainly on the German TV shows I saw during the 80s: Gottschalk, talk shows. Whenever Kinski was on (and he seemed to be on a lot), he could be counted on to rave and rant and make a public spectacle of himself.

We watched Woyzek in high school, and it freaked me out. Since, I’ve seen Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu, and countless of the two hundred B pictures, Edgar Wallace and Karl May adaptations he appears in, and Herzog’s mean-spirited My Best Fiend. Still, Kinski’s artistry seemed to consist of Kinski just being Kinski, a megalomaniac who could outcrazy everybody on screen because he was a madman offscreen, too.

No longer. I can’t say that I understand him after reading his outrageous, boundless autobiography, but at least it’s possible now to imagine what the world looked like from inside Kinski’s head. As he puts it, everything about him was too too: he felt too much, loved too intensely, reacted too quickly, fought too viciously; a raging, fucking, screaming beast of a man whose emotions were too close too the surface, whose appetites where too ravenous, who had no sense of proportion. Put him in a TV studio and ask him idiotic questions about his international success or the endless bad movies he appeared in, and he would show his disdain, question the intention of the hosts and refuse to answer. He talks too quickly and he pounces too early, but you can’t deny that he has a point.

Rewatch his films, and you can see it there, right on the surface: every twitch of his soul is written on an unbearably intense face, threatening, seductive, almost too alive. The agony, the joy, the madness–if our senses weren’t so dull compared to his, we would appear mad, too. It’s no surprise that before the backdrop of mid-20th century German mainstream culture, a creature as fearless as Klaus Kinski should seem completely nuts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Self-serving, untrustworthy, irresponsible. I had some doubts about this project the first time I saw it, but now I find it insufferable. What exactly makes Werner Herzog an objective authority on Herzog/Kinski? He revisits locations from their shoots, exploits lengthy clips from their collaborations, and slanders Germany’s greatest actor for an hour and a half, carefully defending himself against all accusations. Those endless pages of insults in Kinski’s autobiography, where he calls Herzog “a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep?” Herzog claims he actually helped Kinski come up with the abuse. Curiously enough, everybody Herzog interviews–Claudia Cardinale and Eva Mattes among them–only speaks of Kinski’s warmth and professionalism. Kinski clearly had a red-hot temper, but Herzog’s snivelling self-justifications, disguised as objective and authoritative account, add up to the character assassination of a dead genius. Klaus Kinski deserves better than this.

My Best Fiend. Werner Herzog, 1999. **

Here’s a scene from the set Fitzcarraldo. In the voice over, added fifteen years after the fact, Herzog claims: “The cause was trivial, and I didn’t bother to interfere because Kinski, compared with his previous outbreaks, seemed rather mild.” Really?

[tags]klaus kinski, werner herzog, documentary, character assassination, claudia cardinale, eva mattes, film, 2 stars, untrustworthy[/tags]

The secret behind such perennial stoner favorites as Dark Side of the Rainbow is that the brain will always look at odd juxtapositions and find patterns–it’s what the brain does. So when you watch a seemingly random double feature like Hacking Democracy and Aguirre, the two will seem to speak to each other as a matter of course. The quest for democratic elections can seem as quixotic as the search for El Dorado, a doomed raft of fools headed nowhere while the jungle teems with terrorists and cannibals. The ridiculous “Emperor of El Dorado” signs meaningless letters while a crippled Machiavelli schemes for control over the rotting simulacrum of civilization that continues to disintegrate as they drift downstream toward complete paralysis and entropy.

Then again, part of the brilliance of Aguirre is its metaphorical power, the ease with which it invites readings like these. From the linear first shot of the conquistadores decending through the Andes, the film is suffused with a dreamlike quality, and by the time Aguirre reaches its circular, monkey-infested finale, it has moved into a hallucinatory state that makes it feel entirely like a product of the collective unconscious. Even more so than that other Conrad-inspired epic of jungle madness, Apocalypse Now, Aguirre reveals history as an illusion.

In his autobiography, Klaus Kinski portrays Werner Herzog as an incompetent buffon, a bumbling, bloviating idiot who doesn’t know the first thing about filmmaking–and I’m just summarizing the gentler of several pages worth of abuse. According to Kinski, the task of saving Aguirre fell to him, Kinski. I’ve been entertaining the possibility that this may be true. Kinski’s genius is evident in every shot.

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes. Werner Herzog, 1972. *****

• Aguirre is currently playing at Film Forum
• Aguirre at Rotten Tomatotes
• Large chunks of Aguirre on YouTube
• Kinski Files Blog

[tags]klaus kinski, werner herzog, aguirre, 5 stars, film, german, south america, rafts, river, doom, tragedy, civilization, hallucinatory, apocalypse now[/tags]

Still getting my head around this making-of documentary on Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, which turned out to be both more and less disturbing than expected. Less, because the catastrophes that bedevilled Herzog’s production in the Peruvian jungle aren’t quite on the scale of Apocalypse Now (as chronicled in Hearts of Darkness), and because Kinski is making more and more sense to me. In Burden of Dreams, he appears as the sanest person around–and that in itself is mighty disturbing. The real maniac here is Herzog, even though the film barely includes anyone else’s point of view. In the end, Herzog gives a rousing speech about his responsibility to make movies (”If we don’t articulate our dreams, we might as well be cows in a field”)–but it’s not his own life he risked trying to pull a boat over a mountain, and others had to die. The Criterion DVD comes with Les Blank’s short film “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”

Burden of Dreams. Les Blank, 1982. ****

[tags]film, 4 stars, german, peru, werner herzog, klaus kinski, fitzcarraldo, dreams, documentary, filmmaking[/tags]