Had no idea who Herzog & Kinski were, but since collective chaos, a Bangalore based forum for all those any way interested in film-making, was screening a few of their movies, and it seemed curious enough, I ended up checking out what they were all about.
Not an outright difference but, yes the crowd is a little different here; the clothes they are wearing are, a little more towards grungy than towards normal. The hall is good enough to seat 80 odd people, a roughly 12 square feet stretch that could be a make-do stage, I guess.
I had done a quick background check on who these guys were, what was not to be missed etc. But my prime source of information regarding these guys was none other than collective chaos’ links, so the only thing I know and am wowed by is that Herzog has made some strong statements like;
"You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates"
"Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film"
"It is my firm belief, and I say this as a dictum, that all these tools now at our disposal, these things part of of this explosive evolution of means of communication, mean we are now heading for an era of solitude. Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal— be it fax, phone, email, Internet or whatever— human solitude will increase in direct proportion"
…and the fact that Herzog & Kinski seem to have made a lot of movies together despite Kinski’s non-cooperativeness and due to Hrzog’s surprising persistence.
So on the first day I am able to catch only the last on the list, “My Best Fiend”. A documentary by Herzog, on Kinski. Although it didn’t fit in with my ideas of conventional documentaries by BBC or discovery. This seemed to me more like a personal, emotional journey back in time in order to relive the memories of this close association that you form, something that one does mentally a lot of time, but here Herzog used the tool that he knew best, o preserve it, to enliven those memories and trap it in a film. It is a very delightful personal indulgence; he actually travels to the god-forsaken inner recesses of the forests, to the house where they lived together. Through the film Herzog talks of Kinski, his eccentricities, his ravings, his egomania, and a lot of incidents just highlighting his madness or all bordering on his egomania. Their relationship was apparently a very confusing and stormy one, although their were clips shown of them in which they have those relaxed moments, but all of them seem to be in front of the press, and Herzog tries to affirm this twice or thrice in the movie but he doesn’t seem to have much to support it. There is one shot in which he stands in front of a photograph of them with the photographer and says, “see, we had our relaxed moments too”, when the photographer adds in,” and, Yeah at the next second he was screaming and shouting “.
There are a lot of interesting stories throughout the film, clips of Kinski’s ravings, his tantrums on the set, interesting incidents narrated in interview with different people, of Indians who offered to kill him. Also, anecdotes by the actor who almost had his skull fractured by Kinski, and by his co-actress in Woyzeck.
Day 2: There are a lot of people around me, I don’t how but I find myself being a part of one of those pointless discussions. Net result, I learn nothing, and have been successful in offending a very respectable member of some art patronizing organization, and the third one gets the satisfaction of having said all she wanted and nobody even heard her. Lights fade out for the first one, and I here her making a conclusive statement marking the end of discussion, which again I don’t think any of us heard.
... and now why i dont worship Kinski
“Aguirre” and “Cobra de Verde” is all I could catch, hate having missed Woyzeck, I loved the story and whatever clips he had shown yesterday seemed interesting. Aguirre, has an intentional crudeness to it, in the opening shot itself you can see it, it is a 2-3 minute long continuous simple shot of following a line of explorers down a mountain. In Aguirre, you don’t even see Herzog resorting to any lightning techniques or sounds or color filtering. I guess that is what appeals to the fan of Herzog, but one definite eyesore to me was Kinski. I don’t know, had I taken an unreasonable dislike to him, but every shot that he is there, I can almost sense the discontinuity, as if somebody just screamed, “and cut” and there he went……….. nope, nope I go over all his shots in my head and nowhere do I find him acting well enough. I couldn’t help but wonder over Herzog’s obsession over him, the character is no where of a acting genius that he seems to be making him out to be, or the reason that he stuck to him despite all the possible threats he posed to the crew’s dissatisfaction, the continuity and the smooth progress of a movie. I guess what is the most unique part of Herzog’s movie-making was actually doing it the way they did it, I don’t know how else would you explain that he tried to haul the hugest boat over a mountain cause the subjects in his movie had done the same, and weathering the most hostile jungles for the sake of a movie.
In the very opening of My Best Fiend, Herzog stamps the fact onto audience that Kinski was an outright genius of an actor, he describes his never-ending speech practices, he discusses a scene, which particularly stuck, in his memory. There are fans who claim him to be the greatest actor, I guess I don’t even have to explain where Kinski stands, he commands idolization and the respect as an actor of countless, and I find myself at loss as to why could I not sense the apparent brilliance, or “haunt in his looks” or dazzle of his acting. I guess I might just go over Woyzeck and Nosferatu , maybe portraying a different character might help me see it, or maybe never.
That is what is the trouble with the artistic stuff, some hail it some snub it. Sometimes a whole generation goes around mocking it and the next one comes and embraces it, places it on a pedestal and overdoes the idolization in order to make up for the previous lack of it.
I guess that goes also for the immediate adulation a work of art receives here a little above what its merit calls for, because of it broke the convention, by bringing in a subject that should have been talked of long back.
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