My Best Fiend: Documentary. With Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski and Eva Mattes. Written and directed by Werner Herzog. In German and English. Now playing at Bay Area Theaters.

First a little history. From about the late 1920s on, the German film was moribund.  There was a matter of a sociopathic Austrian corporal who took over Germany and made it into a mirror of his ugliness and then ignited a worldwide conflagration that took upwards of fifty million lives.

After this war ended, Germans continued making movies, but no one outside the country paid attention.  Not until the late Sixties and early Seventies when a trio of young filmmakers startled moviegoers with their unique, fascinating visions. It was called the New German Cinema. Two of the filmmakers were Rainier Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders.

The third, and the most visionary, funniest and likely the best, was Werner Herzog. Herzog’s mission was to take audiences to places they had never seen; to the razor edge between life and death, sanity and madness; to the outskirts of reality itself. Even at the risk of his own life and those of the people who worked for him.

Among his best and most famous movies, are five he made starring a blond bony-faced angelic maniac named Klaus Kinski: Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Nosferatu, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde.  Some are great, some not so, but all of them are fascinating, not only because of their director’s unique, extravagant vision, but also because of the dynamic (“monumental” as the actor himself once violently insisted) presence of Klaus Kinski.

Kinski was about as crazy as you could get without being locked away. In his excellent, affectionate and very personal documentary, Herzog tells the story of his long tempestuous relationship and collaboration with this strange, compelling figure of world cinema. 

Herzog first shows us Kinski onstage in Germany, doing a one-man show as the return of Christ (not the Nice Christ taught in most Sunday schools.). Kinski appears to have taken the role rather seriously. Shortly after, hungover from the spectacular failure of his mission (somehow acolytes don’t like being repeatedly told to fuck themselves), he joined Herzog deep in the Peruvian jungle for their first film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God¸ one of the 1970s great masterpieces. Here his lifelong egocentricity and paranoia blossomed like a giant fungus.  The two men clashed repeatedly until Kinski threatened to storm off, whereupon Herzog sincerely threatened to shoot him dead and then kill himself.  Kinski’s reaction was, in the jungle three hundred miles from anywhere, to yell for the police. It wouldn’t be the last time Herzog got the idea to murder Kinski.

And yet Kinski, with his huge blue eyes and craggy bone structure was the perfect megalomaniac to play the crazed Aguirre the Great Conqueror of Nothing.  Herzog, drawn to him, like a moth to a flame, called on Kinski again and again.

Their relationship (which began when Herzog was thirteen and Kinski destroyed the apartment Herzog shared with his mother) was born of equal parts love and hate, need and desire.  Herzog loved Kinski for his powerful presence, the twisted blazing exuberance he brought to his roles.  But he also exhibited a side of angelic innocence that would flutter out of him like the butterfly we see him playing with at the end of the film.

Herzog also needed him as a mirror and extension of his own obsessions and passions.  Though Herzog seems the most genial and funny of men, both his actions and Kinski’s presence strongly indicates otherwise. When Herzog started filming Fitzcarraldo his epic comedy of an impresario who tries bringing Grand Opera to the remote South American jungle, he cast both Jason Robards as Fitzcarraldo and Mick Jagger. In My Best Fiend we see footage of Robards and Jagger together in a church steeple ringing the bell and shouting out to the people below.  Then, we see a clip of Kinski, alone in the same scene, after he replaced Robards and Jagger had also departed.  The contrast is like that between desert and jungle. Kinski is so powerful by himself that Herzog wrote Jagger’s part out of the script (Jagger is clearly indifferent, anyway).  And as fine an actor as Robards is, he plays Fitzcarraldo as a jovial rascally con man, while Kinski, alone, glows with the incandescent madness Herzog needed to make his incredible story believable. Kinski’s sunstruck presence floods out everything around him. 

This very madness lay within Herzog himself. After all, anyone who has an entire riverboat hauled up a steep jungle hill and down the other side, as Herzog did in making Fitzcarraldo, must be gripped by the same kind of obsession.

But if Herzog needed Kinski, Kinski was vastly needier. Like all egocentrics, he was forever insecure. The depths of his egocentricity repeatedly drove him over the border into psychoses.  Except for Herzog, no director worked with him more than once, not even Sergio Leone who used Kinski as a friction strip for Lee Van Cleef to strike a match on in For a Few Dollars More. No matter what the reason, whenever the spotlight slipped off of him, he exploded in spluttering rage. He was both profoundly childish and childlike.

And only Werner Herzog could put up with it more than once. He loved Kinski as well and helped him conjure up many of the spectacularly hilarious insults Kinski heaps on him in the autobiography written towards the end of his life.

In the end Kinski, seems to have alienated himself from everyone, even his daughter Nastassja, so thoroughly, he himself became the only director he could work with.  He ended his career by directing himself in a failed film version of Paganini four years before he died in 1991 not far from San Francisco.

My Best Fiend is Herzog’s tribute to Kinski as both actor and his personal muse.  Though its narrative structure is a little scrambled, it’s fascinating and compelling, as both biography and autobiography.  Crazy though he may be himself, the film is also a tribute to the largeness of Herzog’s heart and his own indisputable blazing talent.