Herzog: Mein Liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski (My Best Fiend - Klaus Kinski) (1999)

It’s hard to think of a working relationship in cinema as sublime as that between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski. Together, they made five of the greatest films of both their careers – Aguirre, Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Woyzeck, Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night and Cobra Verde – while pursuing a love-hate courtship that was most productive when it achieved what Herzog describes as “the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.” My Best Fiend is a film about that bond, but it’s even more a film about Kinski himself, a premedicated, demonic-psychotic speaker of tongues whose destructive fits and manic convulsions led Herzog to place him in the company of Villon, Dostoyevsky’s Idiot and Paganini, and to even briefly consider murdering him for a particularly trying second during the filming of Fitzcarraldo. For such explosive, personal subject matter, then, it’s perhaps surprising that it’s one of Herzog’s most formally modest and understated documentaries, and perhaps the closest he comes to something approaching a traditional talking heads mode, recounting his own anecdotes about Kinski to camera and then interviewing other contemporaries in turn. Of course, Herzog himself is an extraordinarily charismatic presence, even when he’s as diminutive as he is here – it’s hard to think of a film where his wonderful storytelling and eye for detail are so nakedly on display – but the real drama of the film comes from the way in which Herzog’s words play out against the film’s backdrops, which take us through a succession of spaces that he shared with Kinski, from the Berlin apartment where they met at the age of thirteen, to the African landscapes where they concluded their collaboration with Cobra Verde. However, for the most part, their relationship is recounted and mediated through the epic Peruvian backdrops to Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, which not only convey something of the monumental scale of both their love and their hate for their each other, but are shot as if just recovering their – comparative – calm and serenity after Kinski ploughed through them some thirty years previously. Even more so than in Les Blank’s Burden Of Dreams, which is excerpted here, you feel that Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo were both sublime events that simply exceeded the films they produced, and even the films about the films, perhaps explaining why it’s absolutely impossible to discern whether Kinski is in character during the various out-takes, just as the excerpts from the films feel like so much documentary footage of Kinski, whose “innermost qualities” Herzog could only bring to life “in front of a camera.” By the end, Herzog himself feels like just another facet of Kinski’s madness, even or especially when he arrogates the most critical distance from what finally feels like one of the last genuinely larger-than-life personalities, “a genius who had fallen from heaven” and never quite realised or recognised that he’d landed on Earth.