To see Kinski in a Herzog film is to see a man used not as an actor, but as an instrument through which to force the film. The subject of " My Best Fiend" (1999), Herzog's savage documentary about the man he loved and reviled. A man of towering rages and terrifying rampages, which at one point allegedly had him at gunpoint with Herzog. An actor in 135 films yes, but Kinski told me he had seen only two or three of them. Consider also the case of Klaus Kinski, the star of Herzog's films " Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972), " Fitzcarraldo" (1982), " Nosferatu the Vampyre" (1979), "Cobra Verde" (1987) and "Woyzeck" (1979). Not an actor, but the right person for the role.īale is a professional actor, yes, but hired for what he can embody, as much as for what he can do. And there is Jouko Ahola, a Finnish weight-lifter, twice named the world's strongest man, who Herzog uses as the hero of " Invincible" (2001), about a Polish strong man, Jewish, who poses as an Aryan ideal in Hitler's Berlin. Bale's performance in a way resembles the dedication of Timothy Treadwell, the man who though he could walk unprotected among bears in Herzog's " Grizzly Man," a 2005 documentary based on video footage Treadwell took before finding himself mistaken. But Herzog has explained that he made up some of the incidents in the documentary, and the feature is in a way a documentary about the ordeal of making itself Bale looks like a scarecrow the real Dengler was down to 85 pounds. In the second, he is played by Christian Bale. In the first Dengler, who enlisted in the Navy, plays himself, retracing a torturous escape through the jungle from a VietCong prison camp. Herzog made two films about a German named Dieter Dengler, the documentary " Little Dieter Needs to Fly" (1977) and the fiction film " Rescue Dawn" (2006). These people are not the captives of their attributes but freed by them to enter realms that are barred from us. In "Land of Silence and Darkness" (1971) and "Even Dwarfs Started Small" (1970), he tried to imagine the inner lives of the blind and deaf, and dwarfs. In "Heart of Glass (1976), challenged to depict a village deprived of its livelihood, he hypnotized the entire cast. It is the mystery that attracts him.Īll through the work of this great director, born in 1942, maker of at least 54 films, you can find extraordinary individuals who embody the qualities Herzog wants to evoke. The last thing Herzog is interested in is "solving" this lonely man's mystery. These images are unrelated to Kaspar except in the way they reflect and illuminate his struggle. "Kaspar Hauser" tells its story not as a narrative about its hero, but as a mosaic of striking behavior and images: A line of penitents struggling up a hillside, a desert caravan led by a blind man, a stork capturing a worm. He cares not for accuracy but for effect, for a transcendent ecstasy. In Herzog the line between fact and fiction is a shifting one. Kaspar speaks as a man to whom every day is a mystery: "What are women good for?" "My coming to this world was a terribly hard fall." And think of the concept being expressed when he says, "It dreamed to me. Adopted by the town and a friendly couple, he learns to read and write and even play the piano (in life Bruno also plays accordion and glockenspiel). In the movie, as apparently in reality, an unknown captor kept him locked up in a cellar for about the first 20 years of his life. Kaspar Hauser was a real historical figure who in 1828 appeared in a town square early one morning clutching the Bible and an anonymous letter. On his commentary track, Herzog describes him as "the unknown soldier of the cinema." On the commentary track Herzog says he was vilified in Germany for taking advantage of an unfortunate, but if you study Bruno sympathetically you may see that, by his lights, he is taking advantage of Herzog. He can possibly play no role other than himself, but that is what Herzog needs him for. In "Kaspar Hauser," he looks anywhere he wants to, sometimes even craftily sideways at the camera, and then it feels not like he's looking at the audience but through us. Bruno is however very strange, bull-headed, with the simplicity and stubbornness of a child.
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