Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
lung aliment, once described to me as asthma, another time as emphysema and still another time as tuberculosis. Whatever the name of the illness, it is sufficiently debilitating. Phuc is...
...The pace of her work is reminiscent of Chaplin in Hard Times...
...For the Indochinese it appears that in addition to hard work and aggressiveness, success will come most easily to those who have banded together...
...Feelings between them were mutual...
...She takes English classes religiously and is already planning to go on to a fourth and higher paying job...
...Earlier, in San Francisco, as Yip was leaving the demonstration at City Hall, three American folk singers start a rendition of" We Shall Ovecome...
...As a result, many directors try to do absolutely nothing for at least a month after finishing a film, just to recuperate...
...The only episode in recent movie history more bizarre than this one is the story of how Herzog .got Kinski to play Woyzeck...
...The play has about it some of Buchner's own desperation at the time of its writing, when he was a political fugitive from Germany who was attempting to support himself through anatomical studies...
...In a living room that looks like a homemade shrine with a picture of Christ resting on top of the stereo, Phuc tells me how "humiliating" it is to have had to flee Viemam...
...After calling to reuse the part, he had to take the physical object itself, the pages with the words on them, outside and throw them away...
...Tam's mother kneels, in a characteristic VieUmmese position, staring ahead misty-eyed...
...he takes it as a personal failure...
...I 21 December 1979:725...
...But Duc still maintains his old allegiances...
...He has done this before, rushing off in 1976 to shoot the documentary Soufriere while still in the middle of editingHeart of Glass...
...Three days after the completion of shooting on Nosferatu, he began Woyzeck...
...He spends his days helping his wife babysit for the children of Vietnamese parents who have gone off to work...
...Kinski said that once he had read the play, he couldn't even bear to have it in the apartment with him...
...While Tam's views do not seem to be as carefully considered as Due's, the future is hers...
...One time he told my uncle to get him an application for working at the factory...
...Kinski felt that Herzog dealt with human beings in much the same way as monkeys...
...Duc, as small as his father but with shoulder length silky black hair and muscular build, works a forty-hour week as a welder...
...Tam works a forty-hour week at a sewing machine in a dress factory where no matter how fast she sews her garments, a forewoman will throw more at her...
...I II IT'S NOT TOO LATE to give Commonweal for Christmas...
...For all practical purposes the torch has been passed to twenty-one-year-old Duc and his seventeen-year-old sister Tam...
...Kinski had played the role of the crazed estate agent Renfield in Jesus Franco's 1970 Count Dracula, one of a series of lush British horror fdms starring Christopher Lee...
...When Herzog arrived to begin Woyzeck, however, he realized that Kinski was in a state...
...Kinski says that it took him months to recover from playing the role of Woyzeck...
...The lndochinese are up against a prejudice as old as Know-Nothingism...
...The rest of the song is about grass and trees...
...In spite of this experience--or, spookier still, because of it--Kinski has now made two more f'dms with Herzog, Nosferatu the Vampire and Woyzeck...
...The shooting schedule was also arranged in such a way that scenes at Dracula's mountain schloss needed for the early parts of Nosferatu would be f'flmed last, at a location near the village in Mor0via where Woyzeck was to be shot...
...It was on Aguirre that both Herzog and Kinski did their finest work, in the days when they were ready to kill one another...
...His film somehow neutralizes Kinski's dread of the character instead of exploiting, and revealing it...
...But I don't like these things...
...Sea form on page 730...
...Kinski's interpretation of Dracula inNosferatu is a unique and brilliant one...
...Already in southern California where one-fifth of the Vietnamese live, one can see the signs of prosperity with unity: in Los Angeles there is a Vietnamese deli, a Vietnamese take-out restaurant, a center for old people to learn English and YMCA's which cater to the young...
...Tam herself, in what seems the universal teenage response to popular music, knows the words by heart and sings along...
...At the airport there he posed as an official of a European zoo, and stole an entire consignment of spider monkeys, which he took back to the location so they could swarm over the raft in the final scene...
...He was gone only about twenty or thirty minutes, but when he returned, the village was deserted...
...An unfinished fragment written in 1836 by Georg Buchner, Woyzeck is a true story about how a soldier came to stab a prostitute by whom he had fathered a child...
...My interpreter stops to translate for Yip...
...As Duc drives to work he says, "I am worried about my father because he is sick in the lungs...
...II I I Screen II II II II I I I IIII THE BEST OF ENEMIES HERZOG & KINSKI T HERE ARE strangers among us, and Wemer Herzog is one of them...
...But apparently Kinski didn't know that Nosferatu is another name for Dracula...
...That way the entire crew ~of the first film--from the executive producer right down to the lighting engineer and costumer, and including such Herzog veterans as editor Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus and cameraman Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein--could move on to the second film over a weekend...
...He throws up sometimes and other times, like when he is sweeping, he has to stop...
...That's the extraordinary thing about the film...
...The entire film crew had departed in the dead of night...
...Just reading the play made him feel as if he needed to be exorcized...
...Whatever danger Herzog and Kinski may have been to each other in the past, they have now gotten over it...
...Both have to do with song...
...In fact, the fdm's legend is almost better than the film itself...
...After a month in the Peruvian and Brazilian jur.gles Commonweal: 724with Herzog, he felt as if he had been shanghaied rather than contracted to play a part in a movie...
...At three o'clock one morning last year, Kinski received a phone call at his Paris apartment from Herzog, with whom he's had no contact since Aguirre...
...Phuc is no longer the breadwinner--no longer his family's shepherd...
...In 1973, Herzog and Kinski made their first film together, Aguirre, the Wrath of God...
...He was only twenty-three...
...But Herzog, as I was saying, is obsessive...
...When he came to the last scene ofAguirre, which occurs as a party split off from Pizarro's 16th-century search for El Dorado emerges from the mouth of the Amazon River, Herzog decided that some kind of wild animal should be let loose on the raft with Aguirre, who is the expedition's only survivor...
...But neither Woyzeck nor Nosferatu is Herzog's best film...
...Klaus Kinski is another...
...He went ahead with the role of Woyzeck despite the anxiety it gave him, which he somehow managed to subdue for the duration of the shooting...
...In Kansas City, however, where two thousand Vietnamese live in relative isolation, such commercial and social services cannot exist...
...Occasionally there can be a bit of strain between father and son...
...We are listening to a tape of Vietnamese popular music...
...alld drives with five other Vietnamese to a plant that is forty minutes awaY...
...After wandering around the village awhile, Kinski finally found Herzog, the only other member of the production company still there...
...Once," says Duc, "my father got mad at me because I stayed out all night and he thinks that I smoke a reefer or drink beer...
...In Kansas City, under the watchful eyes of the picture of Jesus, I share Orange Nehis with Tam and her mother...
...Even if I get married," he adds, "I will stay at home with my parents because they are old...
...Shot under impossible conditions in the jungles and rain forests of South America, the film produced a relationship between the director and actor so acrimonious that there were repeated threats of murder which resulted, at one point, in actual violence...
...A friend of mine who saw an avant-garde production of it a few years ago at Joseph Papp's Public Theater said it was the most powerful drama he'd ever seen there, and described its incomplete state as one in which you could see "little chunks and bits of Michelangelo sculpture emergklg from the rough, unchiseled stone...
...Qui est I...
...Since Kinski and Herzog concur in these stories, they are J undoubtedly tree...
...I KEEP RECALLING two moments from my visits with these newest Americans...
...This time Kinski knew the material on which the film was to be based...
...As the title of a recent documentary on Herzog, I Am My Films, suggests, Herzog is obsessive about moviemaking...
...Because time equals money in such large amounts when a movie is in production, a director often has to work seven eighteen-hour days a week while he's shooting...
...You will play Nosferatu," commanded Herzog...
...He believes that the lyrics apply to the misfortune of his people...
...And Kinski did...
...Thoi sings about a boy who has gone to fight...
...Having pushed himself too far by doingNosferatu and Woyzeck back to back, Herzog couldn't rise to the occasion of the latter...
...Kinsld had only slightly longer between the two projects--two weeks-because the shooting schedule was arranged to allo'w time for the shaved head he has in Nosferatu to grow into the military crew cut he would need for Woyzeck...
...Herzog therefore left the production company treading water in the river while he made his way to Rio de Janeiro or some other major coastal city...
...The singer, Thoi Trang, performs a popular song about the war...
...asked Kinski drowsily when he picked up the phone...
...Herzog says Kinski iw the greatest actor the movies have ever had, and he may well be right...
...As the song ends there is more gunfire and then the mother learns about her son's death and the need to bury him...
...During the intervening century and...
...It is clear that unlike the preceding generation neither Duc nor Tam will allow themselves to be part of anybody's "Vietnamization" plan...
...My father gave it to me but I wouldn't fill it out...
...Already the author of a polemic, tWO plays and a novel, Buchner died shortly after beginning Woyzeck...
...I wonder whether the power of Buchner's fragment and Kinski's terrible, negative inspiration didn't leave Herzog stymied for once...
...Caligari and his monster...
...immigration policymakers have been slow to recognize this and the results are overcrowded camps in Southeast Asia as well as death in the South China Sea...
...At the joint press conference the two men held when Nosferatu was released, their relationship was clear, It's essentially the same relationship that existed betwee~rDr...
...I just like to put the stereo on in the car and eat hamburgers and fries and just talk with my friends...
...I talk to him a bit about "the big picture" but he dismisses my world view with a shrug...
...The first of three parts) COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...But my father wants to work very much...
...With accompaniment from the whiney flutes and violins that seem ever present in popular eastern music, Thoi tells how a mother is worried that her boy will not come home...
...The ballad begins with several seconds of rapid gnnfire and then Ms...
...The middle-aged Indochinese bike fixer smiles and nods...
...He knew it all too well, having turned down in panic a chance to play the title role in Woyzeck on the stage some years before...
...Taking physical bold of Kinski and looking him in the face, Herzog ordered, "You will let the pig loose again...
...They have nothing but praise for each other...
...Yes, I will," replied Kinski, who only realized months later, when he remembered having seen F. W. Murnau's 1922 film of Nosferatu, who the character was he had agreed to play...
...After he had completed his final scene, a night scene which was the last to be filmed, Kinski returned to the inn to bathe and get himself under control once more...
...a half, the play has become something of a myth...
...Yet you never would have guessed them from looking at Woyzeck...
...It is Duc who gets up at 5:00 A.M...
...It's not extraordinary...
...I don't remember whether it was Kinski who threatened to kill Herzog or vice versfi, but it doesn't matter...
Vol. 106 • December 1979 • No. 23
