KINSKI : DEVOURED BY DEMONS

PART 2 OF 2, FROM LAST WEEK

This piece previously appeared on salon.com in 2004. Please refer to last week’s Substack for the first half of this article.

After a laundry list of schlocky Italian films that nobody has ever heard of, Klaus Kinski returned to Werner Herzog in 1979, when they did a back-to-back shooting of "Nosferatu" and "Woyzeck."

"Nosferatu" is essentially Herzog's love letter to the silent film images of the great F.W. Murnau. Isabelle Adjani is made up to look like a silent horror film star, shock-wide blue eyes surrounded by black powder, on a paper-white face, her long, kinky black hair falling about her shoulders, crucifix pulsing against her white neck. Kinski shaved his head for the role of the ultimate Goth ghoul, which had a morbid effect on his already fragile state of mind:

"I feel exposed, vulnerable, defenseless. Not just physically (my bare head becomes as hypersensitive as an open wound) but chiefly in my emotions and my nerves. I feel as if I have no scalp, as if my protective envelope has been removed and my soul can't live without it. As if my soul had been flayed."

At this time, 1979, Minhoï was insisting on a divorce. She and 3-year old Nanhoï accompanied Kinski to Holland for the filming of "Nosferatu" so that he could see his son in the evenings. Kinski transformed into the loveless, shriveled bat incapable of dying, who sucks the life force out of the humans in his sphere, infecting them with his miserable disease.

"The absence of love is the most abject pain," Nosferatu whimpers, with tears in his sunken eyes.

Kinski recognizes that the true terror of Nosferatu lies in his weakness, his slavery to his perverse condition. Kinski's vampire whines and shuffles and writhes, sickly and listless, until his appetites get the better of him and drive him into sudden fits of violently predatory, carnal, pathetic bloodsucking. It's the gentle neighborhood junkie who nods at you politely for two months and suddenly, with thick greasy sweat and trembling hands, puts an ice pick to your neck and apologizes as he takes your wallet.

It is not difficult to imagine some part of Kinski over-identifying with this monster. The burden of the role fell to Minhoï and especially baby Nanhoï, Kinski's "redeemer," to whom Klaus clung for comfort from his own insanity during this shooting period, with a devouring, airless embrace. Kinski loved Minhoï and Nanhoï "too much," Nanhoï was quoted as saying, later. No human could stand in this gale force of desperate, consuming love and remain standing; it is a testimony to the prevailing serenity of Minhoï that Nanhoï didn't turn out to be a Dad's Ego Casualty like Christian Brando. (Nanhoï, now 27, has acted in a handful of films and, judging from the photographs on his minimal Web site, is now an apparently healthy, handsome European man, living a low-key life.)

There was no break: Shooting for "Woyzeck" began immediately. Minhoï and Nanhoï flew back to Paris, so there was, essentially, nobody around to save Klaus from himself.

"Woyzeck," in the famous play by Georg Büchner, is a powerless man driven by jealous rage to stab and kill his adulterous wife. Kinski always had a premonition that that script would destroy him, psychically. He turned the script down the first time it was presented to him -- the second time, he seemed to feel it was fated to him:

"I've totally forgotten that ten years ago I refused to play Woyzeck onstage because it's suicide, and I tossed the script into a garbage can. I don't know why I've said yes this time. It's all destiny, no doubt. It's not me who decides, it's my destiny that agrees or rejects for me. A greater power."

It was the fastest, most professional shoot of his career: 16 days. Most of the scenes were filmed in a single take, without a cut, including the climax.

Woyzeck is bullied, he is harassed, he is ridiculed. Finally, he is driven into such a state, the veins stand out in his head -- his head seems on the verge of exploding. His eyes are gone.

When Woyzeck stabs his wife, and looks up from his work, Kinski's face makes the most horrific expression I have ever seen on an actor -- frozen, gutted, insanely doomed to the darkest freefall of terror. It reminded me of Tatsuya Nakadai in Kurosawa's "Ran" when, banished from his castle by his own son, the king has a mental breakdown and is left to wander in the earthly equivalent of hell, muttering in the grasslands like a weeping ghost.

Nakadai had Kabuki makeup; pure grief alone transforms Kinski's skull into the shape of pain. Kinski did the scene in one monumental take. It cost him dearly.

You cry for Woyzeck because you see he is utterly lost -- profoundly, eternally ruined and devastated. Since the actor does not remotely spare himself -- he has sacrificed himself to the text -- it is clear that Kinski, too, is ruined. He has gone to that place of absolute, irredeemable wretchedness, and because of its abysmal depth, he is permanently savaged by his own emotional recklessness, bravado, ineluctable fate -- whatever it was. It is the most awful, heartbreaking scene I have ever witnessed on film -- you watch Kinski let go of the rope, the high end of which is happiness.

There is an emotional bend around which you cannot go if you want to continue to be reasonably sane. Sanity excludes intimacy with the feelings that motivate slaying, unless you are a morally retarded sociopath, which Klaus, for all his defects, was not. He surrendered himself to a state that was the opposite of Christ, his idol, and was unable afterward to fully retrieve himself. It was, just as Kinski had predicted, suicide. He should never have done it. It is widely held by those who knew him, and Kinski himself, that he never recovered from "Woyzeck."

But what was the ultimate result? If you are the viewer of this film, Kinski's portrayal shocks your feelings out of the vault of intellectualizing or passive observing. He forces you to feel with him, to align yourself with your buried emotions. He outs your sensitivity. Is this not something Christ-like? It is, for my money. Kinski is the pure cure for the 21st-century disease -- the numbness unto droning.

Two years later, when Jason Robards fell ill and was disallowed by his doctors from returning to Peru, Kinski filled in and rejoined Herzog in the jungle, for what many believe was the best film either of them ever had a hand in.

"Fitzcarraldo" (1982) has many similarities to "Aguirre"; once again, the Herzog crew is floating along the river in the Amazon jungle. Once again, Kinski is the wildly ambitious, unrealistic visionary who takes advantage of the fact that the "bare-assed" natives have a myth involving a white God arriving on a boat. Again, Kinski plays a man driven by weird personal passions -- this time, it's Italian opera. Kinski is almost playing against type: He's softer than we've ever seen him before. Affectionate, charming, civilized -- driven, but reasonable.

"That slope may look insignificant, but it's gonna be our destiny," says Fitzcarraldo, his eyes like spinning globes. It was a prophetic line -- the difficulties encountered by Herzog Filmproduktion on this film are legendary, and pulling a steamboat over the mountain was no less an ordeal for the film crew than it was for the characters. There were casualties. Animals. Indians. Numerous prehistoric trees with roots 15 feet across; trees that it should be punishable by maiming to cut down.

Knowing how hazardous and impossibly awful the whole project was, the film, despite its brilliance, is almost unwatchable. One gets the overwhelming, creepy sensation that Herzog thought these people and their lands were expendable, because of his flaming Will to Power.

But it's so undeniably, mind-blowingly awesome to see a steamboat creaking up a mountainside; such a soul-grabbing visual metaphor, that ultimately the hardships and perils of the shoot really only make the whole film more powerful. Disgusting, because it was all for the vanity of one German dirtbag of a filmmaker, but powerful.

Herzog claims that the Machiguengas and Campas Indians offered to kill Kinski for him; he thanked them but politely declined. The Indians, claims Herzog, weren't afraid of Kinski -- they were afraid of him, because he was so quiet. It is impossible not to hear the pride in Herzog's voice, telling this.

In "Fitzcarraldo," Kinski's instincts to be the Greatest Actor in the World are unimpeded, but his personal dysfunctions are beginning to show through the weave of his unassailable craft.

There is a ridiculous shot wherein Kinski, wearing a thin pair of linen pants pulled up nearly to his nipples, stretches in such a way that his entire johnson is fully visible in outline, hanging outrageously to one side of his crotch. This could not have been unintentional ---- this was Hello, ladies. Note the helmet of my manhood and fulsome testes and rejoice. This is the first hint of Kinski's weirdness leaking out into his roles -- it was to come out more and more.

Kinski's reputation for being impossible preceded him, at this point, and he didn't get many job offers, so had to act in abject crap like David Schmoeller's 1986 film "Crawlspace." This movie is so bad it is actually marketed as a horror double-feature alongside Schmoeller's other plodding shitsucker, "The Attic," starring the late Carrie Snodgress.

In "Crawlspace," Kinski, who plays a deranged Nazi landlord named Dr. Karl Gunther, coats a bullet with blood, loads it into a .44 Magnum and holds it to his head. Even in a half-assed movie, Kinski doesn't do anything halfway. "Now I kill because I'm addicted to killing. It's the only way I can feel alive."

Kinski said this, like his lines in "Nosferatu," with a tired whine: It is an admittance that he identifies with these characters. You hear, in his voice, that Kinski is infinitely sick of himself. This was his burden: He had to live with Klaus Kinski every day, a person that he and virtually everyone else in his life found intolerable.

"I am my own judge, jury, and executioner," Dr. Gunther shrieks, walking around in his basement in an SS uniform. "Heil Gunther!"

Kinski puts on a crazy smile and wobbling eyes when he says this line. It's a fuck you to the idiocy of the script, and it's so funny, it's actually scary. Back in Europe, Kinski reports walking by a store window and being stopped in his tracks by an old photograph of a wild-looking man playing the violin. Kinski ran into the store to ask about the photo and learned that it was a picture of Paganini. This was a great shock to Kinski's soul. "I know that I was Paganini," he wrote.

Kinski became obsessed by Paganini. He wrote a script, for himself to star in, and asked Herzog to direct it -- Herzog refused, saying the script was unusable. Kinski ended up directing the film, "Paganini," himself.

Since Kinski thought he was the reincarnation of Paganini, ostensibly, the film is a paean to himself.

Clearly, Kinski had no prevailing architectural vision for the piece -- it's mainly sections of Paganini's life that he relates to: standing in the footlights, sawing away at his violin with his teeth clenched in fury like he just bit the head off a chipmunk.

Paganini, another insatiable sex fiend, ruts horribly with "13-year-old" girls who let out blood-curdling screams like they're being impaled up to the neck: "AAAAhhhhh!!! Aauughh!! Fuck me again! Please! I'm begging you!You must! Aaaaauugh!!" The screaming sounds like rape or murder until you realize, from the subtitles, that they're supposed to be experiencing an uncontainable delirium of pleasure. It is positively brutal.

Young Nicholai Kinski, aka Nanhoï, also stars in the film, as the composer's beloved son. Paganini kisses, slobbers, clutches and moons over his son. Kinski seems to be barely controlling himself from eating Nikolai's head when they are embracing; as a director, he makes his son gaze at him wistfully and throw intense tantrums to demonstrate his excruciating love for his father -- the love that Kinski would have demanded in order to feel loved at all, since his emotional volume-knob was broken.

The female love interest was a beautiful 20-year-old named Deborah Kinski, who I read later was not Klaus' grandchild (thank God), but a new young lady who looked alarmingly like a younger version of Nastassja. This young woman, the extremely large-breasted Deborah Caprioglio, was 62-year-old Klaus' new wife. The marriage lasted two years.

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<please kill Mr. Kinski," members of the crew would beg Schmoeller during the shooting, because of Klaus's daily shit fits.

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

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Artwork: “Paranoia,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2021