Here's some stuff I wrote about Werner Herzog. Enjoy.
There is something strange about the documentary work of Werner Herzog—something that strains credulity. But, I should make it clear that these vague misgivings don’t come from a disbelief in the real world’s ability to supply stories of immensely weird and fantastic struggles, the likes of which Herzog chooses for movies such as Little Dieter Needs to Fly, or Grizzly Man. Instead, this skepticism comes from the imposing presence of a director that never allows himself a modicum of distance from his subject. In these films, one gets the sense that, at any moment, Herzog’s so called “ecstatic truths” risk withering away to reveal naught but a visionary string-puller.
I have to admit, however, that this tension between the revelatory virtuoso and the consummate liar that Herzog embodies is one of, if not the, thing that draws me to his work. It defines the obsessive madness and uncompromising quest for the sublime that characterizes both the Herzogian hero and the director’s own approach to filmmaking. But Herzog’s films are also about failure, they show us the fever dreams of illusions that his characters turn to rather than confronting the brutal horror of the truth. One gets the feeling that My Best Fiend is less about these kinds of failures and more an object lesson in Herzog’s own failure to confront the truth of his chosen subject—the death of his creative collaborator and (despite the film’s unfortunate pun) friend, Klaus Kinski.
To call the director of Fitzcaraldo controlling would be an understatement. Herzog maintains a maniacal insistence on authenticity in his fictional films and he demands that the events in these films be verifiably, visually real. Therefore, if his script calls for a hulking river ship to be manually hauled over a remote jungle mountain, then by god, Herzog will really drag a ship over some mountain deep in the Amazonian rainforest. The effect, we are told, is unvarnished truth. But what happens, in a case such as My Best Fiend, when the maestro of actuality isn’t there (at least in his godlike capacity as director) to capture and control the raw “reality” of his subject? Based on his assertion that “the only thing that matters is what you see on the screen” and his lauded visual truthfulness, we might expect a cinema vérité style documentary that comes to terms with the impossibility of direct depiction of its subject, but painstakingly and unaffectedly examines the people and places that influenced or were influenced by the subject. But this is not what we see. In fact, contrary as it might seem to the aesthetics that seem to inform his fictional films, what we see in My Best Fiend is of relatively little importance. This is because when Herzog makes a documentary, Herzog starts talking.
In My Best Fiend, Herzog’s voice, whether it is the sometimes-ersatz intellectualism of his off-screen narration, or the matter of fact exposition of his on-camera commentary, is the dominant feature. It tells about Kinski the wild man or Kinski the coward; we hear about Kinski as a sensitive romantic or the hypnotic powers of his insanity—but we only hear about these things. Sure, to illustrate the tempestuous rages and wild egocentrism of Klaus Kinski, Herzog includes a few archival tidbits of his bug-eyed star indulging in the kind of prima donna fits that I think we imagine most major film actors throwing simply for the sake of being handed the wrong brand of bottled water. But Herzog’s images are never on par with his assertions of Kinski as a nearly satanic wild man or as his antithesis in an almost primordial creative struggle. Most of the original visual material for the film has the feel of the negligible details that a liar uses to embellish his fabrication in the belief they will make it more convincing.
In this film, it is a though Herzog loses faith in both the haunting strangenes of reality and in the ability of cinema when it comes to rendering his mythic understanding of his relationship with his muse. That is the shame of My Best Fiend. Rather than eulogize a man he clearly loves and morn the loss of a creative partner with whom he most fully realized his gifts as a film maker, Herzog exploits Kinski as a prop in the making of his own legendary persona. I suppose it is still a testament to Kinski’s bearing and skills as an actor that his personality is able to function as a symbol for a kind of elemental strife-- one that Herzog wants us to believe he confronts in the process of artistic creation-- but it all seems somehow unfair to Kinski, the man.
Despite, my ethical qualms, My Best Fiend, is fascinating as a retrospective of the work of Herzog and Kinski, as a less than innocent interrogation of the moral obligation of the documentary, and as a testament to the power of the filmmaker. It is worth seeing, but will be more rewarding if you watch it from a distance that Herzog doesn’t allow himself.
