At one point during the filming of Fitzcarraldo, the indigenous Indians who were working alongside the late Klaus Kinski offered to relieve his director, Werner Herzog, of the presence of this most temperamental of actors. The natives' idea was simple: they would kill him. Herzog declined the offer-but later regretted his decision more than once. Herzog's latest film, My Best Fiend, which has just completed a short British tour, charts the relationship between himself and Kinski through the five films they made together. It is full of such bizarre moments.
The Indians' amazement and anger at Kinski was not without grounds. During the making of Fitzcarraldo, one of the crew, cutting down a tree in the rain forest, was bitten in the foot by a particularly poisonous snake. Death normally follows from the bite of such a snake in less than five minutes. As the nearest doctor was more than 20 minutes away, the cutter calmly restarted his chainsaw and cut off his own foot. Naturally he became the centre of attention of the whole team working on the film. This was too much for Kinski's egomania. Feeling left out, the actor flew into a rage because his morning coffee had been lukewarm. Such rages, often lasting several hours, if not days, formed the staple material for Kinski's interactions with others, not excluding Herzog himself, who at one point was only able to bring him under control by telling him that he would shoot him, and then himself, if he did not see reason. But however infantile Kinski's tantrums, however stressful they made Kinski to work with, they clearly exerted a fascination over Herzog. Perhaps this is because, as Herzog says in My Best Fiend, he is a normal, well-balanced person who found that an otherwise unrevealed side of his character was brought to the surface by Kinski.
For Herzog, being with Kinski was like living in the jungle. And it was in the jungle that they filmed together not only Fitzcarraldo, but also Aguirre, Wrath of God, Herzog's homage to the hopeless self-assertion of the conquistador. Kinski's own view of the jungle as erotic was, says Herzog, merely a pose. Except on one occasion, the actor refused to set foot in it-not really surprising for a man who was in the habit of washing in alcohol after shaking hands.
There was in Kinski-there is in Herzog-an intolerance with the boredom of everyday existence: its dreary round of sleeping, washing, dressing, eating and shitting. Hence Herzog's attraction to those obsessed, violent characters who would stake all on the craziest of goals: Fitzcarraldo's dream of building an opera house in the jungle; or Aguirre's fantasy of founding a dynasty with his daughter. Kinski liked to interpret most characters on this model. My Best Fiend opens with footage of Kinski appearing before an audience as Jesus Christ: at the time, in the 1970s, Kinski was in a religious phase. The film shows him threatening to smash members of the audience in the face. He seemed to believe such behaviour was true to the spirit of Christ's life. His widow begs to differ: she has taken out an injunction in Germany to stop the sale of a CD-recording of such antics.
But if Herzog is attracted by the kind of fabulous aggression which Kinski often embodied, and which some of the characters in his films represent, he also has a gentle side. It is a virtue of My Best Fiend to reveal the ways in which Kinski, despite all the fireworks, also possessed a tender -even soppy-side. The Herzog-Kinski friendship was clearly what Nietzsche called a "star friendship": one that feeds from the similarities of two personalities which ultimately destroy it. It is this tension in Herzog, between attraction to violence and to softness, which makes him so fascinating as a director: his films play themselves out in the gap between a kind of maniacal self-assertion and disregard for others, on the one hand; and a deep empathy for those who suffer, on the other.
From his documentary about the deaf and blind, The Land of Silence and Darkness, through his film of the life of Kasper Hauser, the feral child who appeared in Nuremberg in the early 19th century, to his interpretation of B?chner's Woyzeck, about the sufferings of the tormented soldier, Herzog shows a sense of pity with those who are lost. In a different way this is what he wants to say about characters like Aguirre, too. They are also searching for something which can redeem the emptiness of existence. For Herzog, the only reality is heaven or hell; those who fail to see that their lives are stretched between these extremes are not really living at all. This point is made in Herzog's 1979 remake of Murnau's silent classic Nosferatu. Kinski's portrayal of the Count, unlike that of Max Schreck in the 1922 version, manages to convert the Dracula figure from a man whose life is merely a living death into one whose existential and spiritual predicament show him to be weirdly alive.
It has been said of Herzog that he wishes to create a new mythology for the modern world. In his work there is certainly a desire to remind us of the weird things human beings get up to; he wants to re-enchant a world which seems increasingly flat and stale. The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner tells of the carver who is possessed with the idea of ski-jumping further than anyone else; How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck is about the development of the liturgy of cattle auctioneers, a kind of language which, like that of religion, is only comprehensible to insiders and gives meaning to their life; Heart of Glass is about a man whose every action and thought is determined by the blood-red colour of a certain type of glass, the recipe for which has been lost.
Herzog has an eye for the lengths people will go to give life meaning. Two of the three films mentioned above are documentaries. But that is a category which Herzog rejects. For him, the documentary is as much a fabrication as the feature film-or the feature film is as much a reflection of reality as the documentary. This idea, for Herzog, does not have its roots in the rhetoric of post-modernism, but in a much more enduring understanding of existence summed up by Samuel Johnson's comment that the humanist is interested in what individuals value and why they value it. This is what Herzog is interested in. Every one of his film aims at uncovering his characters with that goal in mind.
