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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
While Kinski is, as usual, altogether perfect in his absolute being of Paganini, the film is grotesque, aimless, embarrassing, art-house softcore. The production company brought a lawsuit against Kinski, on the grounds that the film was "close to porn."
After "Paganini," Kinski shot his final collaboration with Herzog, "Cobra Verde" (1987), adapted from Bruce Chatwin's novel "Viceroy of Ouida." Herzog commented that the collaboration was particularly difficult since Kinski was still convinced that he was Paganini.
"Cobra Verde," a Brazilian bandit, is sent by a wealthy sugar-cane industrialist (whose three daughters he has impregnated) to Elmina, West Africa, to attempt to revivify the slave trade. Kinski gets to show just how bonkers he really is in these scenes, poncing about in bare feet, baring his teeth, and screeching like a boar. You believe his savagery -- he goes into beet-red, apoplectic fugue states, particularly during a scene in which he is training African women to fight -- you can feel Kinski trying to impregnate the crowd with the murderous lather he's in.
"Cobra Verde" is sweeping, epic, savage and beautiful -- an incredible story, stunningly filmed. When Herzog has 500 topless, painted Amazons running in spear battle like a swarm of wasps, or when hundreds of Africans line a quarter mile of coastline to signal with white flags, it's impossible not to compare him to Kurosawa.
For me, the most awful scene in "Cobra Verde" is a scene when "the nuns' choir" performs, and Kinski's bad craziness seeps to the fore. The choir is a magical troupe of naked young African women with beads around their necks, singing the most purely joyful, delicious, sassy songs. The featured singer is exquisite, a little Josephine Baker, smiling, flirting, rolling her eyes. It is a moment where the viewer is purely hypnotized by the delight onscreen ... and here comes Kinski. He stomps right into the circle where the girls are singing, violating their little sacred performance zone. His arms folded, he thrusts out his crotch toward the singer. He sidles over to another singer and fondles her breast. The girl is clearly shocked, and frightened. But they keep singing. Kinski swaggers into the front of the scene, directly in front of the singer, blocking her from the camera. His jealousy of these beautiful little girls is nauseating and gives one the sick feeling that Kinski would stand on a baby if it were more full-center in the frame than he was.
Herzog says he refused to ever work with Kinski again, after this film. "He brought with him into my film an unpleasant climate, something offensive, something that was alien to me."
Directors loved to slash Kinski after he was dead. What did they expect from a man whose enormous emotions were his living? Not to mention their living? Reasonable, super-professional, kiss-ass behavior? Did they not understand that conventional behavior and unconventionally acute feelings do not coexist?
The talentless David "Crawlspace" Schmoeller got his last licks in with a short film entitled "Please Kill Mr. Kinski." In it, Schmoeller cleverly recounts his difficulties with the late actor and suggests that he saved Kinski's life by not letting the producer kill him for the insurance money.
"Please ...
I was hoping Schmoeller had captured a real ass-out Klaus-tantrum on the DVD; it merely contains footage of an interview with a mildly irate Kinski on why he dislikes directors in general: "These guys want to tell you how to die. I say, Oh, have you died? No? Well, Go die, and come back and tell me how it was!") Actually, Kinski, for all his awful behavior, is the sole redeeming element of Schmoeller's otherwise worthless, puerile, prurient film. Schmoeller should crawl to put calla lilies on Kinski's grave daily for lifting him from what would otherwise have been a "film career" confined to a couple of dusty video-transfers on his mom's bookshelf.
Herzog had the advantage when Klaus died first -- he was able to have the last word in their lifelong argument with the documentary "My Best Fiend." Herzog derides Kinski for pretending to be a "natural man" when his main concerns (according to Herzog) were his Yves Saint Laurent camouflage fatigues and petty, screaming gripes about the temperature of his coffee in the morning. Herzog saw their different feelings toward the jungle as evidence of the gulf between them: Kinski felt the jungle in all of its elements was "erotic," whereas Herzog stated that the nature of the jungle was "obscenity, vile and base ... fornication and asphyxiation ... misery ... the birds don't sing, they just screech in pain ... there is some sort of harmony: the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder."
What was the truth? They were both ridiculous, flaming egomaniacs of only slightly different stripes -- Kinski's ugliness was flailing, external; a flash fire that burned itself, and himself, out. Herzog's rage was of the passive-aggressive, festering sort, and therefore more dangerous. Herzog boasts of having actually attempted to firebomb Kinski's house: "This was only prevented by the vigilance of [Kinski's] Alsatian shepherd."
Herzog was an inverted sociopath; Kinski threw loud vocal fits, repressing nothing. Who was more sick? Werner Herzog was the visual version of Kinski's extremity. Kinski exploited hearts; Herzog exploited landscapes and native peoples.
During one interview, in one of the few moments between shoots when Herzog and Kinski were enjoying each other's company, Kinski very sweetly and sincerely calls Herzog a genius. Herzog points to his star. "I can see through him like I can see through water in the sink, and I know what is in there .... [I know] how to evoke it and bring it to life." It is lovely to see them mutually acknowledge their importance to each other, even if only once.
Three years after shooting "Cobra Verde," in 1991, Kinski died in his sleep of a massive heart attack at age 65.
At the end of "Paganini," the consumption-riddled virtuoso fiddles himself to death, burning his life out with his frenzied, demonic playing, coughing blood onto his violin as his son weeps in terror.
"When he died I had a moment of grief that lasted about five minutes. It was very intense, then never again. Not because I forced myself, but I think it was because he caused us too much pain," Nastassja Kinski remarked in an interview.
"He had spent himself. He burnt himself away like a comet," Herzog said.
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"
-- Jack Kerouac
