Author: Jim McLennan

Dir: Werner Herzog
Star: Klaus Kinski, Jose Lewgoy, King Ampaw, Salvatore Basile

In most of the other films, the character Kinski plays is out there: clearly orbiting a different star in terms of sanity. That’s perhaps less the case here, once the film hits its stride, at least. He plays the titular bandit, real name Francisco Manoel da Silva. He’s hired as a slave overseer on a Brazillian sugar-cane plantation, but incurs the wrath of the owner after impregnating three (!) of his daughters. To get rid of the outlaw, the owner ships Mr. Verde off to Dahomey to acquire more slaves, in the belief that it’s a suicide mission. Certainly, the ruined fort which he takes over on arrival does not bode well, or the story told by the sole survivor of the previous garrison.

However, once Francisco settles in there, it turns out he’s far from the most differently-sane person – not least the king, who is definitely a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, taking advice from his invisible friend. da Silva finds success there, delivering the slaves, but after discovering the king’s insanity first-hand, teams up with the son who wants to take over from his father, even though he has not exactly fallen far from the tree. The Cobra recruits an army of women warriors and helps with the coup, only to find his new life shattered when Brazil abolishes slavery. Proceedings end, in typical Herzog/Kinski fashion, with a broken hero trying to drag a boat back into the water, and rolling around in the surf, howling hysterically.

To misquote a proverb, in the land of the bat-shit crazy, Klaus Kinski is king, and that’s the case here. His character fits the Dahomey society like a glove, whether it’s helping his slaves in their work – they adopt a remarkably casual approach to the shrieking madman in their midst – or training a battalion of topless female soldiers in the finer points of spear-chucking. It has to be said, there are probably more bouncing breasts in this than the entire cinematic output of Fred Olen Ray – or, more appropriately, of National Geographic news-reels.

But, in terms of performances, I liked this one better than some of his more renowned work: I’d probably put it above Nosferatu, for instance (which, as noted above, is an undeniable chore), almost entirely on the strength of Kinski’s facial expressions. These communicate as much in a single look, as many less talented actors struggle to put over with an entire Tarantino of verbiage, and it’s just captivating: there have been occasional “looks” in the preceding films, but here, they’re in full effect. and you could probably put together a great montage of clips from this alone, of Kinski staring at the insanity unfolding around him.

In wonderfully Herzog-esque style, the mad King Bossa Ahadee of Dahomey, is played by a real African monarch, the wonderfully-named His Honor the Omanhene Nana Agyefi Kwame II of Nsein – it’s a village in Ghana, and based on the performance here, is entirely aptly named. He’s so convincingly out of his gourd, that it’s a shame it appears to have been his only screen credit, though I suppose the market for lunatic monarchs of colour is probably a somewhat limited one. Still, if you manage to make Klaus Kinski look sane and normal with your acting debut, you’re clearly doing something right in terms of your performance.

This would be Kinski’s last collaboration with Herzog – he’d die four years after its release, having made only two films, both nearly unwatchable (Nosferatu in Venice and Paganini). It seems to have gone about as well as the preceding four, going by Klaus’s comments.

I wish Herzog would catch the plague, more than ever. He was even more helpless, more stupid and at the same time more persistent against me, than he was in the last four films, I shot with him. Although he urgently needed my help, and pretended, he would kiss my ass for that, he did the opposite behind my back. The people from Ghana are friendly and peaceful. Herzog knew, how to use them for his purpose. I knew his criminal and enslaving methods since Peru, where he always went for the most helpless and where I eventually called him Adolf Hitler. In Ghana he excelled himself.

Yep, Kinski just Godwin’s Law’d himself.

Dir: Werner Herzog
Star: Klaus Kinski, Paul Hittscher, Huerequeque Enrique Bohórquez, Claudia Cardinale

As an appetizer, we watched Les Blank’s documentary, Burden of Dreams, which chronicles the early stages of filming, from the initial attempts with Jason Robards as Fitzcarraldo and Mick Jagger (!) as his sidekick, through the initial camp, burned to the ground by disgruntled locals, and on through the reshoot after Robards came down with amoebic dysentery and Jagger went off to tour. Not that this exactly went swimmingly, as the shoot continued to present problems: the bulldozer used to clear the way needed parts flown in from Miami, there were delays due to attacks from another tribe up-river, and this is probably one of the few films with whores officially on the payroll [Charlie Sheen movies don’t count].

What that film brings out are perhaps the similarities between Herzog the director and Fitzcarraldo the subject, both consumed with an idea that many would conceive as ludicrous, and determined to plough on with it, whatever the cost. You can visibly see Herzog disintegrate over the course of filming, though it’s disappointing that the documentary stops before the director succeeds in pulling off the ‘money shot’ of seeing a 300-ton boat pulled up a forty-degree hill. It’s almost as if Blank is more interested in failure than success, though it’s still worth seeing, purely for Herzog going off on a rant about the jungle:

Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away… The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they – they sing. They just screech in pain… It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever… goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here… We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery.

Crack open those Joy Division LPs, folks. What the documentary does soft-pedal, is the stormy relationship between Kinski and Herzog. While perhaps not as bad as during Aguirre, Herzog subsequently said that the natives who were part of the cast, offered at one point to kill Kinski, so disturbed were they by his anger. Werner, however, had learned that letting Klaus’s fury burn itself out was more productive than trying to engage his star. Some of this tactic can been in the footage below, from My Best Fiend, which shows what happens when Kinski goes off. All Blank shows, is Kinski growling about the ‘fucking stinking’ camp, so one wonders why Blank chose to relegate to an out-take, this outburst…

That said, Kinski probably smiles more here than he did in almost any other of the 200+ movies in which he appeared, which is an unnerving sight. He plays opera lover and former railway engineer Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, known locally as Fitzcarraldo, who wants to bring Enrico Caruso to the jungle. To raise money, he spots an opening in the rubber business: a tract of land left unexploited because of the rapids which prevent a boat from going upstream far enough to reachi it. Fitzcarraldo sees that it might be possible to take a nearby river to a point where only a relatively short stretch of hilly country separates it from the river he wants to reach. Haul your boat over that hill, and you can then use it to harvest its rubber.

As noted, it hard to say what’s madder: Fitzcarraldo’s plan, or Herzog’s plan to re-enact it without miniatures, CGI or blue-screen, instead opting to drag a full-scale boat over a 100% actual hill [while inspired by a true story, the real boat was both one-tenth the size, and dismantled into pieces]. On the way, he loses most of his crew, who are unnerved by the local tribesmen, but gets another crew in the shape of said tribesmen, after countering the tribal drumming with his gramophone and opera records. [The resulting audio mash-up is like Caruso jamming with Adan & the Ants.] Fortunately, they have a myth about a white god and his ship, and Fitzcarraldo convinces them that dragging his boat over the hill is part of that. Unfortunately, it’s only part of that…

You often hear of life imitating art, but it’s these parallels between the movie and the making of the movie that give this such resonance: rarely have the two been so close. Both Fitzcarraldo (as played by Kinski) and Herzog (as portrayed by Herzog) are dreamers, obsessed with the grandest of meaningless gestures. They are both prepared to go to any lengths, and make any sacrifice, to achieve their goal, even when simpler means of achieving the same ends would suffice. You can only admire the tenacity, at the same time as you shake your head at the folly – then there’s a scene, where Fitzcarraldo and crew are up a tree, looking at the scope of what they have to do, and you appreciate exactly why Herzog went the extra 1,500 miles or so.

Outside of Kinski, there aren’t much in the way of performances – nobody is given much to do, except trail around the jungle in Fitzcarraldo’s wake. These aren’t so much supporting characters as superfluous ones, but it doesn’t matter much. This is the kind of film that should be in the dictionary beside the word “auteur,” because it’s clear that this was made by a man driven by a vision, rather than, as we so often see these days, the lure of a paycheck.

Dir: Werner Herzog
Star: Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Ruy Guerra, Del Negro

Werner Herzog almost didn’t get out of this one alive – and that wasn’t even anything to do with Kinski. While location scouting, a change in itinerary meant he was taken off the passenger list of a plane at the last minute: it crashed in the jungle, killing almost all those on board [the sole survivor was the subject of his later documentary, Wings of Hope]. He didn’t take the hint, and persevered with what must have been an absolute nightmare of a shoot. The opening shots, of the Spanish conquistadors struggling their way down a mountain and through the jungle give some hint of what it must have been like, even with a small crew, dealing with a jungle where water levels could change by 15 feet overnight, flooding intended locations. Even for the early seventies, a budget of less than $400,000 was still remarkable.

This was the first Herzog/Kinski collaboration – they’d known each other since Klaus had been another tenant in the boarding house where Werner lived as a teenager, and the actor had made a lasting impression. Herzog said of the Aguirre role, “The moment I finished [the screenplay], I knew it was only Kinski,” and from virtually the first shot, of Kinski glowering insanely from under the brow of his armour, show precisely why the choice was an impeccable one. Impeccable, if not easy: in the DVD commentary, Herzog tells of Kinski firing his rifle into the extras’ hut, after their late-night noise disturbed him. There was another incident, where Kiinski threatened to leave the production, only staying after Herzog threatened to shoot them both, though the urban legend about the actor being directed at gunpoint seems untrue.

The film was originally shot in English, as the only common language of the cast and crew. However, that soundtrack proved unusable, and so was replaced by a German-language one in post-production. The voice of Aguirre is not Kinski: he demanded too much money for the additional work, and Herzog went with another actor. I also note the more than slight resemblance between Cecilia Lopez, the actress playing Aguirre’s daughter, and Klaus’s daughter, Nastassja, who would have been ten or 11 at the time this was made. The incestuous undertones between the two are pretty clear, and also reflect some of the claims – for which he was sued – about his relationship with Nastassja.

Herzog did want a more restrained portrayal of Aguirre than Kinski, and to get what he wanted, would provoke the actor into a rage, wait for it to blow itself out, and then shoot the scenes, with his lead now in the quiet, calm place desired. This reaches its apex in the single shot which sums up, not only Aguirre’s insanity, but perhaps the nature of the Herzog/Kinski collaboration. Near the end, the raft is inhabited mostly by corpses, Aguirre and hundreds of monkeys. The leader grabs a monkey as he staggers around hie “empire”, now reduced to ruins, and proclaims himself the wrath of God, before tossing the monkey to one side with a gesture that is the most beautiful embodiment of insanity you will ever see. Note the monkey shitting itself at 0:23. Can’t blame it: I’d do the same if Kinski had me by the rib-cage.

It’s interesting to note how little Aguirre is present at the center in the early stages. He’s there, on the fringes, simply waiting his chance, as the advance party of the expedition, under Don Pedro de Ursúa (Guerra), struggles down the river, disintegrating with an irresistible relentlessness. When the moment is finally right, he strikes, taking control of the group and driving it onward. From that point on, everyone is doomed, and it appears that, with the exception of Aguirre, everyone knows it and are simply playing out the inevitable. It’s Shakespearean tragedy, with a man destroyed by his own weaknesses – if Hamlet or Macbeth had been a total loony at the start of the play.

As things degenerate, the only consistent point in the landscape is Aguirre, whose insanity gradually become the norm rather than the exception: “Little mother, two by two, wafts the wind in my hair,” muses one soldier as he hangs Don Pedro. Shortly thereafter, Pedro’s wife wanders off into the jungle, wearing a gown more befitting a royal ball. The survivors see a ship, stuck in the top of a tree, but deny its existence as a mirage. They may or may not be right there, but they are certainly wrong with respect to the undeniably real arrows which strike them out of the jungle.

It’s deliberately paced, things decaying at the speed of the jungle reclaiming an abandoned outpost – there’s no hurry, because it’s not going anywhere. There’s not even any need to dot every i: a rescue party sent to help a raft stuck on the far side of the river simply vanishes into the jungle, their fate undocumented but still absolutely certain. Aguirre, as portrayed by Kinski, is similar: he’s not “evil” in any real sense, and condemning him for his behaviour has about as much point as telling the jungle off. They are both forces of nature, and will do exactly what they want. You’d better not get in the way.