Herzog/Kinski ctd.

Most reviews of Herzog/Kinski films tend to focus on the explosive relationship between the two men. The irresistable force meets the immovable object: the frenzied outbursts of Kinski confront the monomaniacal resolve of Herzog. Indeed, it is impossible not to be sucked into this underlying drama: the conflicts, the threats, the murderous plots; in short, the blood-spattered narrative that makes its influence felt in every film the two made together. Essential viewing for anyone interested in this is Herzog’s great documentary Meine Liebster Feind, also included in the DVD boxset. Much has been written about Kinski’s madness. To take a representative example: there was the time when, annoyed by the loud carousing of the extras on the set of Aguirre, Kinski took his Winchester and fired several shots into their tent, shooting off the tip of the middle finger of one of the actors. Herzog himself, although by his own account ‘clinically sane’, was not to be outdone by the antics of Kinski: during the same shoot, he threatened to murder his leading man if he attempted to break his contract – knowing Kinski was notorious for doing just that. On the commentary track, Herzog is at pains to set the record straight on this incident, rubbishing Kinski’s own account of the confrontation: he was, he claims, not wielding his rifle at the time; he merely informed Kinski, clearly and calmly, that if he attempted to leave, he would take eight bullets to the back of his head before he got round the next bend in the river; the ninth would be for Herzog himself. Herzog’s laconic conclusion: ‘I didn’t have to say any more: he knew I was deadly serious’.

Focusing on such stories tends to divert attention away from the films themselves; but at the same time, one cannot fully appreciate the film as a whole without knowing about its production history. This is certainly the case with films like Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, in which the boundaries between art and life dissolve: the hardships undergone by the sixteenth-century conquistadors in Aguirre seem to be a pale imitation of the ordeal faced by the director, crew and actors themselves. This is real guerrilla filmmaking: when one of the rafts gets caught in a potentially fatal current, Herzog uses it as a plot device; when the director needs to elicit a performance of quiet intensity out of Kinski, he deliberately provokes him into a two-hour tantrum before shooting, in order to catch him in the right mood. As for Fitzcarraldo: well, it’s difficult not to see the main character’s insane endeavour – to hoist a ship over a mountain in an effort to bring an opera-house to the Peruvian jungle – as a metaphor for Herzog’s own driven-ness, his commitment to art above all else. Such a reading is appropriate: the sense of joy the viewer feels when the impossible is achieved, when the ship slides precariously into the unreachable river, is beautifully deflated when the ship drifts over the rapids and back to square one. Nothing concrete has been achieved: all that remains is the glory of the act itself, the irrational. unaccountable, sublime act, a testament to the human spirit.

Next up: Woyzeck: the best of the Herzog/Kinski films?

Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski

I recently bought a Herzog/Kinski DVD boxset that includes all five of the films they made together (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo, Woyzeck and Cobra Verde), as well as the excellent documentary Mein Liebster Feind made by Herzog in 1999 after Kinski’s death. It is without doubt the best DVD purchase I’ve ever made, and I urge the reader to go out and buy as soon as is humanly possible.

I had previously only seen one of these films (Aguirre) and it was on the strength of this that I bought the boxset. I still believe Aguirre to be the very best of the films the two made together, and I have watched it several times since I got the DVD. This is unusual for me: I rarely watch a film multiple times in close succession, but there is something about Aguirre that always draws me back in. It could be the score, a haunting composition that sounds like the intro to a Boards of Canada track; it could be the controlled intensity of Kinski’s performance; it could be the cinematography; it could be the sublime strangeness that seems to permeate every scene. There is something about the way Herzog frames those beautiful Peruvian landscapes that makes them both and wonderful and terrible, brightly divine and darkly satanic. The director remarks in the commentary that he wanted the landscape to have an indefinable human quality: I suppose this is the pathetic fallacy. And it is true that in Aguirre (which is often compared to Apocalypse now), the relationship between man and nature is problematical: it is not that savage nature corrupts human rationality, nor is it the case that one man’s insane lust for power and wealth devastates an antediluvian way of life. Rather, the essential strangeness of the Amazonian setting seems to prefigure Aguirre’s descent into madness: how else to react when confronted with this incomprehensible world?

I suppose it is possible that the film could be labelled ‘Orientalist’ (shouldn’t that be ‘Occidentalist’?); but I don’t think this is the case. Of course, there is that underlying theme of confrontation with the nameless Other, but the drama is not one of conflict with the indigenous peoples, but with the indefinable forces that drive us all. Aguirre is not driven to madness by the inhospitable landscape, nor by the threat wielded by the unseen ‘savages’, nor even by his own excessive greed. No, his madness is the necessary outcome of an internal conflict, a conflict that has to do with colonialism, of course, but also with the primal psychodrama that makes us all. Why else does he resolve to marry his daughter and found a ‘pure dynasty’ at the end of the film, if not in service of an essential narcissism, or a desire to purge the sins of the Father? The hallucinatory scene of a boat stranded in the treetops (the adunaton cliché) is a sign that everything is permitted, that all superego prohibitions are null and void. When the symbolic order refuses to configure itself according to one’s desires, the ego cedes to animal desires.


More to come on Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, and of course, the greatness of Herzog and Kinski.